Tennis could face breakaway by its elite players
Biggest names on court offer a lot of commercial value and the billionaires are circling,
For all the undoubted glamour, this is a hugely complicated business
In Chicago yesterday, the lights picked out Frances Tiafoe and Grigor Dimitrov, the first players to take the stage on the Laver Cup’s trademark black court. The 17,000 fans at the United Center screamed in excitement. It was all a long way from quarterfinal day at the official tour event in Metz, which opened with a low-key victory for Radu Albot, the world No107 from Moldova, over Lithuania’s Ricardas Berankis.
Here is the concern for the established order. Too many entry-level tournaments are lossmaking irrelevances.
Yet the leading players – think of new US Open champion Naomi Osaka, who has signed a recordbreaking £7.5million contract with Adidas – have never offered more commercial value.
You can see why a new wave of exhibitions and boutique events are fighting for room in an already overstuffed calendar. And why a group of shark-toothed billionaires are circling. One of them could end up as tennis’s answer to Kerry Packer.
We can start with the 10th-richest man in the world. Oracle owner Larry Ellison already hosts the annual Indian Wells event, and has since been linked with the new Davis Cup model proposed by Barcelona footballer Gerard Pique.
Meanwhile, Pique has the backing of Hiroshi Mikitani, the Japanese businessman behind e-commerce giant Rakuten. Then there is Gary Millner, the South African commodities trader who set up Tie Break Tens. And the Laver Cup relies on support from Carlos Brito, the Brazilian brewery magnate.
Tennis tries its best to create a viable career path for perhaps 300 talented men and women. Ultimately, though, there are only a handful of players who sell tickets. So, could some sort of elite breakaway be the ultimate destination?
The primacy of the slams is not in doubt. Wimbledon, the US Open and, to a lesser extent, the French Open have been the pillars of the sport since the late 19th century, with the Australian Open finally gaining entry to this exalted group around 100 years later.
The nine Masters 1000s events, too, are successful businesses. Indeed, a well-sourced report in the French sports daily L’equipe two weeks ago suggested that they could split from the rest of the Association of Tennis Professionals tour to create a new circuit.
So, how close are we to a takeover or a significant schism? Speak to those who work with Kosmos – the Pique/mikitani investment group – and you get the sense that it wants to run the whole sport. Yet everything comes down to money. Despite an initial promise of a $3billion (£2.3billion) investment into the Davis Cup over 25 years, Kosmos is now understood to have come up with a more realistic figure of $41 million (£31.35 million) per annum, raised on a rolling basis two years ahead so that it has to produce only $82 million in guarantees.
Even then, many are sceptical as to whether Kosmos can hang on for the five to seven years which will probably be required to start making a significant profit. And the risks are high, especially as the players who have dominated 21st-century tennis are close to the end of their distinguished careers.
For all the undoubted glamour of top-level tennis, this is a hugely complicated business to take over. In the end, all these potential impresarios will probably settle for hobnobbing with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal rather than trying to buy the whole sport out.