The men’s and women’s professional tennis tours have appointed separate financial advisers to help thrash out a merger of their commercial arms that would be backed by a capital injection from the former owner of Formula One racing.
Sky News has learnt that the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), whose star players include Novak Djokovic and the US Open champion, Daniil Medvedev, has hired Rothschild to advise it on the potential tie-up.
The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), which saw Britain’s Emma Raducanu emerge this year to win the US Open, has drafted in Allen & Company – a US-based firm best-known in financial circles for its star-studded annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
The bankers have been hired to help the ATP and WTA to evaluate the terms of a proposal to create ONE Tennis, a new commercial venture developed by the governing bodies alongside CVC Capital Partners, the private equity investor.
Sky News revealed in June that the parties were in discussions about establishing the new entity, with talks understood to have intensified since then.
Under the plans, CVC would invest about $600m into ONE Tennis, which would oversee a combined men’s and women’s global tennis calendar and seek to improve the sport’s commercial strategy.
Tennis’s governance is more fragmented than some other global sports because its four Grand Slam tournaments are all organised independently, with the International Tennis Federation also playing a significant role.
In recent weeks, women’s tennis in particular has come under scrutiny over its handling of the apparent disappearance of Peng Shuai, a former doubles player who alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by a senior Chinese government official.
Last week, the WTA announced that it was suspending all competitions in China, including in Hong Kong, as…
Source : skynews
