Professional tennis is on the verge of major changes

Currently, consideration is being given to creating a new tennis “premium tour”, consisting of a minimum of fourteen tournaments – four Grand Slam championships and ten Masters 1000 competitions. One of them could be a new tournament in Saudi Arabia.

The reality of the most serious changes in professional tennis since the early 1990s was reported by the publication The Athletic. We are talking about creating a kind of “premium tour”, which is a partnership between four Grand Slam championships and at least ten other major tournaments. The relevance of this information was confirmed by five anonymous sources involved in the creation of a new tournament cycle, which is a tennis analogue of Formula 1. Among the reasons that prompted them to take this step are the difficulty of understanding the current system for fans, a shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars in potential revenue and a difficult calendar that exhausts athletes, provokes injuries and shortens careers. These factors have made tennis a sport that could be threatened by developments similar to those occurring in golf over the past two years.

Let us recall that there the LIV Golf competition system, supported by Saudi Arabia, bought most of the leading athletes from the PGA Tour system. This has led to a costly legal battle and a potential merger of the two tours, the details of which are still being worked out. Preventing such a development is a priority for the seven governing bodies that exist in tennis – the International Tennis Federation (ITF), the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and the four Grand Slam tournaments. Currently, The Athletic reports, they are considering the possibility of forming a new, simplified season and are developing a series of elite tennis tournaments combined into one cycle.

A journalist from the publication disseminated similar information on social networks. Sports Illustrated John Wertheim.

According to him, the state investment fund of Saudi Arabia, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), with assets of about $700 billion, may join in the formation of a new round.

True, specific terms for the creation of a new system of tennis competitions are not indicated.

The strategic decision of the leadership of Saudi Arabia to invest as much as possible in sports assets has been known for a long time. In addition to golf, PIF, for example, is carrying out serious expansion in football, where, in particular, it owns the English Premier League club Newcastle United. Saudi football clubs have the opportunity to invite such stars as Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Neymar, etc. to their championship. Saudi Arabia has also become the venue for the largest boxing and MMA fights. And in Formula 1, PIF owns a 17% stake in the Aston Martin team.

As for tennis, according to Alexey Selivanenko, a member of the ITF board of directors, the expression “revolutionary transformations”, which is used in The Athletic’s material, does not at all mean revolution in the sense that is meant by people unfamiliar with the management system of this sport.

“The idea of ​​Grand Slam partnerships is not new. Looking up the minutes of the meetings of the boards of directors of the ITF, ATP and WTA, it is easy to find that they were talking about it twenty and thirty years ago. However, tennis is valuable for its single tournament pyramid, a system that has proven its stability over half a century of the Open Era. This system cannot exist without tournaments of other categories, so it is unlikely that it will be possible to completely separate small competitions from larger ones. So now we are essentially talking about its next streamlining and rebranding,” says Mr. Selivanenko.

In his opinion, the current information background is due to the fact that a new, albeit very large, investor is entering tennis. It is obvious that in the foreseeable future the number of tennis competitions of various levels will increase in Saudi Arabia. In addition, the chances are high that sooner or later this country will actually receive the right to host not only a permanent major tennis tournament, the level of which will correspond to the Masters 1000 competition, but also, possibly, the final ATP or WTA championship.

One of the main issues that complicates the process of the emergence of a new “master” is the decision-making mechanism.

Firstly, the time frame for holding such a tournament is limited. With the current calendar, this could be the first week of January, the second week of the grass season, or something else – subject to significant changes to the existing tournament schedule. Secondly, in professional tours there is an internal procedure according to which the right to host a tournament of the highest category must first be granted to current members, that is, the organizers of lower category competitions. And the organizers of several existing tournaments, including those held in Doha (Qatar) and Dubai (UAE) – countries that are direct competitors of Saudi Arabia not only in tennis matters – will certainly express their interest in receiving a new “masters”.

Evgeniy Fedyakov