IPTL: A farce of premier proportions?

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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.