Serena Williams in discussions to return at Queen's in doubles in June

Serena Williams is in discussions about a potential return to competitive tennis at Queen's Club next month.

Four years after the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion waved goodbye to the sport in New York, Williams is considering playing doubles at the WTA 500 event in London in two weeks' time.

Nothing has yet been finalised, but the 44-year-old has been free to return to the sport since 22 February, having completed six months back in the drug testing pool.

The American great would need a wildcard, but there are two available for the grass court event which begins on Monday, 8 June.

Wimbledon - where Williams has won seven singles and seven doubles titles - begins three weeks later.

The Served podcast, hosted by former men's world number one Andy Roddick, claimed Williams would play with 19-year-old Canadian Victoria Mboko at Queen's.

BBC Sport has not yet been able to confirm this.

Williams is one of the greatest players of all time. Her 23 Grand Slam singles titles are the most by a woman in the Open era and second-highest of all-time behind Margaret Court.

She also won 14 major women's doubles titles with sister Venus - who is still playing on the WTA Tour - and the pair won three Olympic golds in the discipline.

There are two doubles wildcards available for the tournament at Queen’s, and one is reserved for a team which includes a former world number one, a Grand Slam champion of the past 10 years or a current top-30 player.

WIlliams has never liked the word retirement, preferring instead to say she was "evolving away" from tennis in 2022.

She lost to Australia’s Ajla Tomljanovic in the third round of the 2022 US Open, in what the world thought would be her final match.

Williams had reached the semi-finals of the Australian Open earlier that year, and won her last Grand Slam singles title in Melbourne in 2017 at the age of 35.

Her potential return comes amid months of speculation and several interviews about her weight loss.

Last year, Williams told the Today Show in the US about losing 31lb (14kg) over the previous eight months.

She said had to look at her extra weight as "an opponent". Despite "training five hours a day" and "running, walking, biking, stair climbing," she told the show she had no other choice but to "try something different".

Williams would not say which weight loss drug she was taking, although she had just become a spokesperson for Ro, a company which sells GLP-1 brands like Wegovy and Zepbound (known as Mounjaro in the UK) through its weight-loss programme. Her husband, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, is also an investor.

Williams said she was now seeing the benefit of her hard work at the gym, was training for a half-marathon and "running farther than I ever had".

In a follow-up interview on the Today Show in January she said she was "going to see what happens" over a return.

Elder sister Venus has played intermittently on the WTA Tour over the past few years and reached the quarter-finals of the US Open women's doubles last year.

She is 15 months older than Serena and has already played seven tournaments this year.

Venus' last singles win came in Washington last July, a month after her 45th birthday.

Martina Navratilova is the oldest woman to win a singles match at a Grand Slam in the Open era - at the age of 47 in 2004.

She also played in the US Open doubles semi-finals in 2005 and won the US Open mixed doubles title a year later - just a month shy of her 50th birthday.

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