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Iga Swiatek has doubled down on her criticism of the relentless tennis calendar and the mandatory tournaments top players are required to enter. The world No. 4 has arrived at Wimbledon off the back of reaching her first grass-court final in Bad Homburg and will start her campaign against Polina Kudermetova on Tuesday.

Ahead of her quest to win a maiden Wimbledon crowd, Swiatek was asked about the players' biggest mental challenges, and she took aim at the "super intense" schedule.

The five-time Grand Slam champion said: "Well, that's a difficult topic because obviously everybody has different issues or see problems in different things.

"But for me, I think the scheduling is super intense. It's too intense. There's no point for us to play, like, over 20 tournaments in a year. Sometimes we need to sacrifice playing for your country because we need to keep up with playing these WTA 500s, for example, because we're going to get a zero in the ranking."

Swiatek also claimed that fans would prefer it if players competed in fewer events, adding: "I think these kinds of obligations and the rules about mandatory tournaments just put pressure on us. For me, the scheduling is pretty intense.

"I think people would still watch tennis, maybe even more, if we played less tournaments, but the quality, for example, would be better or we would be more consistent because of that."

"So yeah, this is for sure challenging. But tennis is a difficult sport overall. Like, every week you start kind of from the beginning. Yeah, like every week can tell you if you're a great player or you sucked this week, you know?

"You always have to have in the back of your mind that tennis is not your whole life. You've got to give some perspective and also be proud of sometimes even when you don't win, because only one person out of the whole tournament wins."

It's not the first time Swiatek has taken issue with the 11-month professional tennis circuit.

After losing to Mirra Andreeva in Dubai earlier this year, she said: "I feel like the calendar is not helping. We need to switch continents, we need to switch surfaces, we need to switch the balls. It's not easy. I'm not surprised."

And at last year's Cincinnati Open, the 24-year-old feared "people were going to hate her" for speaking out, but she warned: "I think we have too many tournaments in the season. It's not going to end well and it makes tennis less fun for us."

But Swiatek is trying to control the controllables at Wimbledon after jetting straight in from Bad Homburg, where she lost to Jessica Pegula in Saturday's final.

Less than 24 hours later, sitting in Wimbledon's media theatre, the world No. 4 said: "I arrived yesterday at 9pm. I'm staying close. It hasn't been, like, hectic. I play on Tuesday, so today is my day off. I'm not practising at all. It's all pretty chill. Just happy to do my media on my day off!"

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