ATP and WTA to discuss possible merger
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The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) are negotiating a merger. An important meeting on this subject is to be held at the end of September in London. It is reported by The Telegraph. According to the British publication, the likely merger of the two structures should prevent the transfer of control over professional tennis to Saudi investors. The ATP and WTA fear a repeat of what happened in golf. There, as a result of injections from the Saudi state investment fund Public Investment Fund (PIF), a situation arose in which a lot of top players changed their “registration”, and the “old” golf structures came under the control of Saudi capital.
At the end of September, a meeting of the leaders of the ATP and WTA will be held in London, at which the possibility of a merger of the two most influential structures in the world of tennis will be discussed. This is reported by the British edition of The Telegraph. According to him, the merger talks were a response to the likely “seizure” of control over professional tennis by Saudi investors (The Telegraph does not specify which event prompted the ATP and WTA bosses to organize merger talks). It is assumed that the unification of the efforts of the two organizations will provide an opportunity to increase financial capabilities, which, in turn, will make it possible to resist all third-party claims.
The ATP and WTA, according to The Telegraph, fear that tennis will repeat the fate of golf, the professional part of which has recently really come under Saudi control.
The scheme used by the Saudi Public Investment Fund-controlled LIV Golf was simple. Top athletes were lured into tournaments supported by LIV Golf with big money (for example, one of the most successful golfers in the world, Dustin Johnson, received $ 150 million for participating in tournaments held under the auspices of LIV Golf). As a result, the world’s largest golf structure PGA (Professional Golfers Association) was forced to merge with LIV. Formally, this was presented as a takeover, in which the PGA “ate” LIV. But how It revealed in a US Senate hearing in July, de facto control of the golf industry passed to the PIF.
“In the current situation, it would be enough just to continue to take five strong players a year to ourselves – and then the LIV would get us,” Jimmy Dunn, a member of the PGA board of directors, said at the Senate hearings. He also said that the PGA began to face financial difficulties, as the lawsuit (the PGA tried in the courts to prohibit a competitor from poaching players) with LIV required serious legal costs. According to him, since 2022, the parties have spent a total of more than $100 million on lawyers. But for LIV Golf, which is backed by PIF resources (the fund controls about $600 billion in assets), these are insignificant expenses, for PGA they are close to the maximum allowable. “They have no money limits, no time limits, their whole point of existence is to take our players,” said Mr. Dunn.
As Aleksey Selivanenko, a member of the board of directors of the International Tennis Federation (ITF), told Kommersant, “The union of the ATP and WTA is not a new subject“. Note that earlier with the idea of merging tournaments spokefor example, one of the greatest tennis players in history, Roger Federer.
“I think that at the moment it still makes sense to talk rather than about the immediate legal and operational unification of tournaments, but about the development of processes that have already begun, the formation of a unified system for the sale of media rights and the unification of the tournament calendar,” said Mr. Selivanenko.— With regard to PIF, the tennis establishment is trying to develop a common line with the goal of such a relationship, so that such investments do not bring any kind of division into professional tennis, but are used most effectively and bring maximum benefit to all interested parties.
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