In Turin, ATP president Andrea Gaudenzi set out his strategic plan to the press. His long interview does not convey the image of an ATP that is merely tweaking a few details, but that of an organisation that has chosen a very clear direction. In his account, tennis becomes a “premium product” boxed into the framework of “One Vision”: a modernising lexicon behind which a tour increasingly built around the top players and new capital takes shape, while the middle class and the tournaments that support it see their space shrinking. An ATP that, symbolically as well, looks more and more like a “PIF-ATP”.
Does the Middle Class Go to Heaven?
Andrea Gaudenzi, a former world No. 18, presents himself as the voice of the average player.
“There are many points in your question. I will try to answer them one by one. The first concerns the 250 tournaments, which are obviously in contradiction with the expansion of the Masters. If you expand the Masters, you cannot at the same time increase the 250s: you have to make a choice. Throughout my career I always saw myself as a middle-of-the-road player. I was not among those who were going deep at the Masters or the Slams. For most of the time I was ranked between No. 20 and No. 50 in the world, sometimes lower. […] Even when I was around No. 50 or 55 in the rankings, I could only get into the main draw of two Masters tournaments. I could get into the Slams, yes, but among the Masters at the time only Indian Wells and Miami had the current format. As a world No. 50, in practice, you could not get into Monte Carlo, Rome, Madrid and the other “premium” events. […]
That is why I consider it essential to expand the draw to 96 players: in this way the top 100 have the chance to play the main draw not only at the Slams but also at most of the Masters – at least seven out of nine (the exceptions remain Paris, Monte Carlo and the future Masters in Saudi Arabia). […] Coming back to the number of 250s: that will not be a problem, because our plan provides for dedicated weeks for each category. We will have four Slams, ten Masters, sixteen 500s (which means eight weeks with two tournaments running in parallel) and ten weeks of 250s. In total, 32 weeks of top-tier tournaments. This structure covers all segments of the top 100. The best players will mainly play Slams, Masters and a few 500s. Those in the middle of the rankings will play more 500s and 250s, and the players further down will have space between 250s and Challengers. It is a natural pyramid. If you are at the top, you should not ‘drop down a category’. A player like Sinner or Alcaraz has no reason to play the 250s: their level is higher, and the focus has to be on Slams and Masters. In no other sport can a Formula 1 driver take part in a Formula 2 race: you protect the value of the top level.”
The key passage is the premise: the 250s are “in contradiction” with the expansion of the Masters and “you have to make a choice”. The choice is stated with great clarity: to strengthen the twelve-day Masters and squeeze the space available for the 250s, that is, the category on which the competitive and economic survival of much of the middle band of the rankings depends.
In sporting terms this means reducing the weeks in which a player ranked between No. 70 and No. 120 can find draws that match his level, with realistic opportunities for points and prize money. The label of a “natural pyramid” suggests an inevitable order; in reality what we are looking at is a political decision about how opportunities are distributed. The calendar is tailored around the constant presence of the top players at the big events, while those below are forced to chase spaces that are narrower and further away from the centre.
In theory, the plan was born to correct the disadvantages that at the time a middle-ranked player perceived in not having access to the Masters. In practice, the very category that ought to benefit risks finding itself in an even more competitive territory, with fewer useful weeks and a growing dependence on the few events left outside the “premium” tier.
The second pillar of Gaudenzi’s discourse is “One Vision”, which is presented as a project of shared governance.
“Broadly speaking, I am going back to talking about One Vision, the plan I presented in 2020 when I started. Inevitably, there are some critical issues in our system, due to history and to the fact that we have four independent Slams, as well as the ATP, WTA and ITF. The Slams – and I want to stress this strongly – are the best tournaments in our sport. They are an extraordinary asset. […] However, from the players’ point of view, the Slams lack direct representation. In the ATP, 50 per cent of governance is made up of players. Every decision goes through the players’ board, which is elected by the Players Council, made up of 10 players representing the wider group. It is a very democratic system. […]
The objective of One Vision is precisely this: to bring everyone to the same table – players, men and women, Slams, Masters, 500s and 250s – because we are talking to the same audience, the fans, who follow the whole season. I have said it several times: today it is like writing a book where each chapter is written by a different author and sold in a different bookshop. It is not the optimal way to tell the story of our sport.”
“One Vision” and the question of representation. The issue is not so much the existence of a long-term plan, but the way in which the weight of the players is described. When Gaudenzi speaks of “50 per cent” and of a “very democratic system”, he does not mention a detail that changes the picture: the ATP Board is made up of nine votes, four cast by the players, four by the tournaments, plus that of the president.
Put in basic arithmetic, the players start from 4 votes out of 9. On their own they cannot form a majority on any of the crucial decisions, from calendars to prize money to the management of rights. To get a proposal through they still have to persuade at least the president or one of the tournament representatives to side with them, that is, someone who is not by nature an expression of their interests.
To call “very democratic” a system in which one of the two sides does not even have the theoretical possibility of reaching a majority on its own is a very optimistic choice of language. The picture that emerges is different from that of a round table: “One Vision” appears as a mechanism for centralising decision-making and commercial power, in which the decisive lever remains in the hands of those who run the product as a whole, not of those who play it.
There is also another element that remains on the margins of the story. The Slams, described above all as places where players lack formal representation, are also the tournaments that redistribute the most downwards: they have 128-player draws, large qualifying events and prize money which, already from the early rounds and the qualifying competition, has a decisive impact on the finances of those living in the second and third tier of the rankings. The Masters 1000s, even in their extended version, tend instead to concentrate value and visibility in the final rounds and on a small, select group of protagonists. It is a form of material representation which in Gaudenzi’s discourse is practically never mentioned.
When Gaudenzi speaks of a “natural pyramid” and of the expansion of the Masters, the picture remains incomplete if we do not look at who, in concrete terms, is being entrusted with the new upper floors of that pyramid.
From 2028 the ATP calendar will have a tenth Masters 1000, in Saudi Arabia. It will not replace one of the nine existing tournaments, but will sit alongside them. It will be organised by SURJ Sports Investment, a sports investment company linked to the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, headed by the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The new Saudi Masters will not just be one more tournament: it will enter as a shareholder in ATP Media, the Tour’s media arm which manages the production and distribution of images, alongside the ATP and the other Masters 1000s in the ownership of the main infrastructure that carries the tennis product around the world.
The PIF is not a generic institutional investor. It is the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, that is, an investment vehicle owned by the Saudi state and serving its political and economic strategy. In a system without an elected parliament and without real democratic checks and balances, this means that its choices are, in effect, a direct projection of the country’s political leadership.
The domestic context is well known. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy in which space for freedom of expression and association remains very limited. In the same years in which the government announced the end of the ban on women driving, activists who had fought for that right were arrested and detained for extended periods. In 2018 the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul; the reconstructions by the main Western intelligence agencies concluded that the operation to capture or kill him was authorised at the highest levels of Saudi power.
In this scenario, the sovereign fund becomes an owner-stakeholder within the ATP ecosystem: it lends its name to the rankings, is behind the new Masters 1000 which becomes part of ATP Media’s ownership, and sits at the centre of the Tour’s commercial narrative. In parallel, an increasing share of the top-level calendar has passed under the control of large private holding companies: among them the platform that has acquired Madrid and Miami, backed by capital worth billions of euros and also involving Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, another state that uses its public fund to consolidate its presence in global sport.
The result is that a growing part of the Masters 1000 circuit lives in the orbit of sovereign funds or financial conglomerates. These are actors who think in long-term horizons, in global rights packages and in relations with governments, far more than in the ideal calendar of a world No. 85 or in the survival of one extra 250. In theory the big tournaments ought to be the terrain on which the top players have the greatest bargaining power; in practice, the calendar tends to be locked in by multi-year agreements between tours, investors and institutions, leaving very limited room for anyone who tries to challenge its structure.
Dictating the calendar (and the laws) to a sovereign state
The most delicate passage in the interview concerns the future of the Turin Finals, the new Italian sports law and the way in which Gaudenzi uses the Saudi example as a benchmark and as leverage.
On the new Italian law and the Turin Finals:
“We have a contract with the FITP, we have an excellent relationship and we want to continue with them. If new developments emerge from the government and they are no longer in a position to comply with the contract, then there could be problems. My view on the government coming in is this: it is fine if you want to be involved in sport to help with facilities. Tennis requires enormous investment in venues that are used only a few weeks a year. In Saudi Arabia there will be an investment of 2 billion for the creation of the new Masters, so if there is no intervention from the government this is not sustainable. In Australia, the intervention of the government of Victoria was decisive in building three covered stadiums and today the Melbourne venue is outstanding. We do not want to take the event abroad, we are very happy here, but if the FITP is unable to comply with the clauses [that is, it would have to hand control directly to the government – ed.] then we will have to sit down at the table.”
Here the tone changes compared with the passages in which Gaudenzi speaks as a former player. The register is no longer that of a professional discussing scheduling with fellow professionals, but that of an interlocutor addressing the government of a G7 country on the basis of a new fact of power: there is a sovereign wealth fund, now an owner-stakeholder in part of the ATP ecosystem, ready to allocate “2 billion” to a Masters 1000 on its own soil.
The central issue is not so much that the ATP is asking the Italian state for financial commitment. Major sporting events almost everywhere depend on a combination of public and private resources. What is new is that in Gaudenzi’s line of reasoning it is not only a question of whether public money arrives, but also of how it is allocated and who is to be the preferred interlocutor. The message is: if the new law were to change the balance between FITP and Sport e Salute to the point of calling into question the contract as it stands, “there could be problems”.
In other words, the ATP president is not simply saying “public support is needed to keep the event”. He goes as far as entering into the institutional configuration of Italy: not only how much to spend, but through which body and with what division of power between a federation and a public company. No one in Italy is telling the ATP “you will no longer receive public money”; the question is who manages it, with what responsibilities and under what democratic oversight.
In this context, the figure of “2 billion” ceases to be a mere economic datum and becomes a yardstick used to weigh the choices of a sovereign state: on one side a sovereign fund that invests in its own Masters and already has an ownership role in the Tour’s structures; on the other a G7 country called upon to decide how to use tax revenues collected from its citizens, who then pay again to watch that product through subscriptions to the platforms that distribute it.
The issue is not only the future of the Turin Finals, but the type of relationship that is being built between global sporting circuits, sovereign funds and Western democracies. In Gaudenzi’s words, the ATP appears less and less like a body serving the players and more and more like an actor bringing the priorities of its new shareholders into national decision-making, with the president in the position of a proconsul translating those priorities into the apparently neutral language of “sustainability” and “necessary investment”.
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