Somewhere in the credentialing workflow, a food vendor's staff list came in with two lifestyle influencers on it, and badges came out. That is the USTA's account of how Meg Radice and Audrey Jongens got into the US Open, according to spokesperson Brendan McIntyre, who said they "were improperly submitted for credentials on a staff list provided by a food vendor" [7][8]. It is also the part of the story that has nothing to do with the number everyone quoted.
The number is real. Jeanmarie Daly, the USTA's media operations director, said last month the tournament was "almost doubling" the creators it approved [3], and close to 100 turned up against 54 last year [4], an increase of 46 and roughly 1.85 times the prior figure [5]. What that count measures is the channel the USTA runs. McIntyre's account puts both the revoked pair and the people in the suite outside it: the USTA says the influencers who disrupted the Osaka match were not credentialed by the organization [6]. That distinction rests on the organizer's own statement, and nothing else in the record tests it.
Teams tend to assume the risk in a creator program is picking the wrong creators. The record shows something different. Revocation was triggered when Radice and Jongens posted images of their badges to Instagram [7], which is to say by the creators' own publishing rather than by anyone watching the stands. The live intervention came from the chair umpire, who paused play and repeatedly asked for quiet [1]. Other creators, meanwhile, were asking tournament staffers to take full-flash photos of them while Osaka and Zakharova were playing [2], so the staff nearest the problem were participating in it.
The rule that used to do this work is gone. Until a 2024 change, attendees had to stay in their seats until players switched ends; now they can get up whenever they like, and there are designated spaces near the courts where people move freely, which tournament director Stacey Allaster called "an important addition to the fan experience at the US Open" [11][12]. Fan-experience decisions and creator-access decisions were made about the same physical space by people optimizing different things. What arrived after the videos spread was signage asking spectators to "please refrain from using flash photography or other lighting" [10], alongside the etiquette reminders reporter Jessica Schiffer says brands sent their creators [9] -- a sign and a reminder, neither one an enforceable rule.
The money moving through this runs well past the scale of a request. The Verge puts US creator ad spend at $37 billion in 2025, projected to reach $44 billion by the end of this year [13], which is $7 billion more, about 19 percent [14].
The sort worth running on your own guest list has two axes: whether a person's access came through your program or a partner's list, and whether anyone on site can pull that access during the session rather than the next morning. Three of those four boxes are manageable. The fourth, partner-list access with next-morning revocation, is where the USTA's own account places Radice and Jongens, and it never shows up in the credential number an organizer reports.
