Practically a Super League. Then they will tell us that this is not the case – and with a nice turn of phrase -, yet it seems a bit like taking from the poor to give to the rich.
After all, sport is now showbusiness, baby: you can’t do anything about it anymore (as long as the system holds up, at least). And the news is that the plan that Tennis Australia had hatched just over a year ago – a super circuit with 4 Slams, the Masters 1000 and the ATP Finals – has gone out the door and returned through the ATP window.
On the other hand, top players ask to earn more and more by playing less; so their association got underway: space from 2027 to the new 1000 in Riyadh (in February), but immediately a generous offer to the organizers of the 500 and 250 to resell their license and disappear from the calendar. In practice like when you offer a severance package to someone you want to fire. Result: Basel said no, but others might accept, and all to gain – in a year full of top 12-day events (plus the 4 Majors lasting two weeks) – even a dry month of rest, with even more phantasmagoric prize money provided one is able to enter the exclusive club. Because this is the point: those outside the Top 100 risk seeing crumbs.
Unfair, you might think. But then we are the growing audience of such gigantism: what are we complaining about? There is the super Champions League of football, the Club World Cup and the 48-team Nations Cup; there will be the future NBA Europe of basketball to which the Euroleague has already aligned itself in the bulimia of matches; will sail the America’s Cup as a private club of 5 billionaires with superyachts.
In practice like tennis and beyond, and above all like Formula 1, the symbol of everything that is entertainment: 24 GPs where there were 16, plus the Sprints, rich prizes and cotillons, and with someone who seems to already be cheating in view of the new regulations. Because if it has to be Circus then so be it, nothing will happen anyway: you can’t give up their big dollars.
In the meantime, however, there is one certainty: if Robin Hood were alive today, he would at least be depressed.
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