In one match in New York the chair umpire asked the crowd to be quiet more times than Naomi Osaka has ever heard an umpire do it. Not because of fans. Because of one box where a group of influencers was running a photo shoot while the match was on.

It happened twice. First on 31 August, in the first round against Anastasia Zakharova, when French umpire Kader Nouni stopped the match with a line now circulating everywhere: "Guys, please, in the box behind me, please, thank you, sit down, please." The television broadcast showed guests walking around with ring lights in hand - in the middle of a match at the continent's biggest tennis tournament. Then the same thing repeated in the next round, against Kateřina Siniaková.

Osaka addressed it at the press conference, and what she said was not an outburst but something sharper - a basic rule of conduct: "If you're coming to a sports event, you have to respect it. It's basic decency to learn something about the sport and its etiquette." She added that the noise reached her despite her focus, and that it had probably bothered her opponent too.

What makes the story more interesting than ordinary moralising is that Osaka is not asking for anyone to be thrown out. On the contrary: "I think it can be good for people to popularise tennis with their audience, but it needs to be managed much better, especially in early-round situations." In other words - the problem is not the people with cameras, it is that nobody told them where the line is.

The organisers responded with a diplomatically translated version of the same thing. Brendan McIntyre, communications director of the US Open, said they must ensure the fan experience "does not interfere with what happens on court and with the match", adding that they are thrilled tennis is growing in popularity. That is a sentence that forbids nothing while still admitting something has broken.

The question underneath all of this

Influencers are already part of every large event - musical, sporting, cultural. They are part of the economics of those events and organisers invite them because they bring an audience the organisers do not otherwise have. The problem is that the invitation usually arrives without a single line about how to behave in the arena. Sport has an etiquette that outlasts any platform, and nobody has bothered to rewrite it as a guide for someone entering a box for the first time.

Would people react the same here? Balkan arenas have their own acoustics of behaviour, and there the line between atmosphere and obstruction blurred long ago. The difference is that in New York the umpire can stop the match, and the stoppage then becomes news. Here that stoppage usually does not happen, so there is no news either.