The Davis Cup crisis and the worrying future of tennis

The Davis Cup is probably the best known and most prestigious annual trophy in sports. It has legend, mystique, epic and a history of champions that surpasses that of all four Grand Slams combined. And it’s in crisis.

This is true not only because of the latest news that Kosmos, the Chinese company associated with Gerard Piqué and which took over the tournament starting in 2019, decided to cancel the contract it signed with the International Tennis Federation once the 2023 edition of the competition ended. Obviously, the detail related to the loss of profits is no less: the agreement with the Asians involved an investment of 3 billion dollars for 25 years. No matter how much compensation its lawyers get, the ITF will go back several lockers until it is located, once, in the Via Crucis to obtain sponsors that generate the necessary income to seduce, let us pray, the main exponents of this sport who, by the way, have had more absences than cup presences in the last long decade.

To make matters worse, men’s tennis is going through a very complex transition to resolve: the Era of the Big Three is over (Federer, Djokovic and Nadal won more than sixty major titles between them since the beginning of the 21st century) and it is highly unlikely, if necessary, that we will not have a succession but something like an atomized inheritance between several players as insinuating as they are unstable. In other words: if millions were to be spent on seducing a handful of figures that would ensure attractiveness and audiences in the next Davis, it wouldn’t be easy to establish with certainty who to target.

Interestingly, Davis is a competition that, even in the face of the most high-sounding absences, knows how to enjoy the charm of a show so full of tensions and mysteries that it even seems to dispense with desertions: players and the public end up giving in to the emotion of those who are competing for the trophy and exciting series abound. However, to sustain this mystique, it seems that the festival should recover a very sensitive detail that was lost since Piqué and his partners sold the format with several series in a single or few locations. The question of location is intrinsic to Davis, which involves playing at home with a majority of its own audience, choosing a city, area and even brand of balls. I can attest that charm also involves the challenge of winning as a visitor. This is what Argentina did in 2016, when it traveled through Poland, Italy, Scotland and Croatia on the way to its only title in the competition.

The new formats, which will surely be reformulated based on this sports/financial shock, also involved the end of the best-of-five set matches, a distinctive aspect of the tournament’s history and whose reintegration is difficult to contemplate as it would further complicate the presence of the best players.

Some people once suggested discontinuing it as an annual tournament and doing it every two years. Perhaps we will hear about it again soon enough. It would be to shorten the link between Davis and the Olympic Games a little more. The relationship between tennis and the IOC has had some curious ups and downs. For example, that this sport debuted at the Games four years before the first Cup. It was in 1896 and only boys played. The link was maintained until 1924, when it was the first time that the Olympic program was played as it currently is, with singles and doubles of both genres and mixed doubles. Interestingly, the relationship broke down due to a difference in criteria regarding the presence of professional players, a taboo that tennis only overcame in the late 1960s: for a long time there were tennis players who, with a certain degree of cynicism, paid to play as amateurs.

Anyway, from Seoul 88 until today, winning an Olympic medal represents something as much or more valuable for tennis players than a great tournament in which they win a lot of points and a lot of money. Another point in common with the Davis: glory, prestige and even the flag above money. Many of the greatest tennis players in history, those whose wrists didn’t shake when it came to a match point in the Wimbledon final, succumbed to the mystery of the cup or the rings.

It is unquestionable that, just as the Olympic event is an inescapable commitment for most of the cracks, Davis Cup is finding it increasingly difficult to find not the main figures but enough space in the calendar to put together a reasonable competition scheme. So much so that the 2022 finals coincided with the first week of the World Cup: How to seduce audiences by superimposing the decisive series played in Malaga on a whopping 31 first-phase matches played in Qatar?

Above all, I can’t imagine tennis without the Davis Cup. Not even the Davis Cup as we have known it until now.