IPTL: A farce of premier proportions?

Andy Murray (L) with Mahesh Bhupathi and Rohan Bopanna (R)

It might as well be the era of ‘premier leagues’ in the minds of all Indians who have even the slightest intention of carving a niche in the sports world. The initiation and the subsequent rise of the IPL have perpetuated a never-ending chain of league-based sporting events by Indian proponents, the latest of which is the IPTL (International Premier Tennis League).

A concept propounded by Indian doubles specialist Mahesh Bhupathi, the IPTL is touted to be a revolutionary development for the sport in an otherwise enthusiastic-yet-underdeveloped market in Asia. So far it has attracted and generated a lot of interest among many of the top-ranked tennis players – both past and present – who have committed to play in the tournament to be held in the off-season period between November and December across the four franchise cities.

But as things stand now, the IPTL seems to have more cons than pros. Here’s a look at the biggest potential problems that surround the tournament:

Addition to the tennis calendar would exacerbate player fatigue even further

Let’s start with the whole IPTL scheduling issue that would surely curtail the recovery and recuperating time of the players in an already jam-packed season. It’s almost ludicrous to even suggest a further increase in the players’ workload, but that’s precisely what the IPTL promises to do. The fact that some of the star players – most prominently Rafael Nadal – lined up to play in the tournament already have severe fitness issues makes their earlier calls to make the tennis calendar more compact seem hollow.

For players who have niggling problems with their fitness, the IPTL would in all likelihood tantamount to being a source of hindrance rather than a source of overall qualitative enhancement to the sport, specially considering that the Australian Open would be just weeks away during the course of the event.

The tournament entails a highly inconvenient travel schedule

Even if the issue of fitness and physical injuries are ignored for the time being, the aspect of having home-and-away based games shuttling between Mumbai, Dubai, Singapore and Bangkok still seems to be a problem in terms of travel fatigue. More so for the top-ranked players who not only balance their international commitments for an entire full season, but also their national level commitments of playing the Davis Cup and Fed Cup.

To draw comparison between the originator of the concept – the IPL – there are so many instances where cricketers have been unable to even out both the formats of the sport and have gone on to become really poor jugglers, struggling to strike the right balance between the two.

Cricket however is a team sport and teams do manage to find the wherewithal to come up with substitutes wherever they are needed. But tennis is far different from the team sport, holding a unique place of pride amongst individually contested sporting domains. Taking a chance on such an event – despite its attraction – is thus nothing short of a gamble, with no one but the player standing to lose the most.

The IPTL logo

The quirky, uneven format of the tournament would inspire plenty of confusion

When you consider the fact that the icon players or marquee players – the top-tiered players who have decided to enter the tournament – are required to play just three matches instead of the entire eight matches, the resulting distribution of the tournament structure would be quite uneven and skewed.

The marquee players are those who have been top-ranked players in the past or have won Majors, while the rest of the field is distributed amongst current top-20, top-50 and top-100 players, and former singles and doubles players, divided into six groups – two groups separate for the doubles and former players.

Andy Murray has already gone on record saying that he would play matches in only one city. “If I go to play in it,” Murray said of the IPTL last year, “what I agreed to is playing three nights in one place, so I’m not travelling around across the whole of Asia in the space of a week. If I can go somewhere for one week and set up a camp where it’s warm and there are good training conditions, if I’m playing against the best players in the world, that’s the only thing that is missing from Miami.”

The result? The strength of each team will fluctuate wildly from one venue to another, which in turn will make the tournament as a whole highly confusing and hard to follow.

The time cap on matches will be difficult to adjust to

The tournament proposes to have a time cap on the match duration, restricting each tie to three hours. A tie would consist of five sets – men’s singles, women’s singles, doubles, mixed doubles and legends, with each set consisting of 10 games (tie-breaks to decide the set after 5-5) and no-ad scoring.

There’s no way that the players are going to find it easy to accommodate these requirements and to fit the five sets into the stipulated time margin. The regulations don’t specify at all as to how the match results will be decided in case a match goes beyond three hours. Also, this new match format would be totally alien for the fans, and it’s unclear how they’ll take to it (in the past, ‘different’ formats in events like World Team Tennis haven’t really taken off with the fans in a big way).

The money problem

The one problem that trumps all of the above is, however, the question of money – where is it coming from? Who are the investors and how will the profits be shared or divided or allocated? So far the organizers haven’t really given a clear-cut picture about the identity of the four mystery owners who bid for the players in yesterday’s draft. As much as $24 million has been raised, but no one knows who has pooled in that amount and why.

With such an important detail still being left ambiguous, the question persists about how exactly the tournament is supposed to function even as talks about salary caps of $10 million dollars for players are making waves without any indications about whether money has been actually invested. It’s all very well for rich tycoons to promise to pay obscene amounts of money for star players, but that money has to be produced in hard cash for it to have any meaning.

Mahesh Bhupathi has promised to deliver 40 percent of the salaries into the respective bank accounts within a month of the auction, but there doubts all over the world about whether he will actually succeed in doing so.

Until he does that, we should be wary of anointing the IPTL as the saviour of tennis in Asia.