Pay to play
By Dominic Bliss
Published: June 19 2008 14:33 | Last updated: June 19 2008 14:33
Forget the prize money. For the world’s top tennis players the real cash comes courtesy of sponsors. Take
Roger Federer. The Swiss player has earned £20m in prize money over the
course of his 11-year professional career, much of it thanks to his 12
Grand Slam titles. But the lion’s share of his salary – an estimated
£16m a year – comes from his many sponsors.In 2006, he signed a
contract with Rolex, believed to be worth as much as £7m over 10 years,
and he renewed his racket deal with Wilson for a reported £1m a year –
possibly the most lucrative racket sponsorship in the history of the
sport. In 2007, he was chosen alongside golfer Tiger Woods and
footballer Thierry Henry as one of the smooth faces for Gillette’s
razor advertising campaigns. The 26-year-old also has lucrative
deals with Swiss International Air Lines, Mercedes-Benz, Nike, NetJets
private jets, insurance company Nationale Suisse, Jura coffee machines
and a Swiss dairy called Emmi. Snapping at his heels is Russian
player Maria Sharapova. Her career prize money is substantially less
than Federer’s – £6.1m since she went pro in 2001 – but her catwalk
looks have had the sponsors salivating. Estimates are that she earns
more than £12m a year from deals with companies manufacturing
everything from cameras, cars, toothpaste and sports drinks to watches,
fruit juices, fragrances and mobile phones. Everyone, it seems, wants
to be associated with the 21-year-old blonde, and that is why she is
(according to Sports Illustrated magazine) the highest-earning
sportswoman on the planet.Tennis has always enjoyed healthy
sponsorship, partly because it has such enormous global reach – this
year, the men’s and women’s tours are hosting nearly 130 main tour
tournaments in about 40 countries – but also because fans and amateur
players (the people sponsors are selling to) generally hail from
well-off backgrounds. Couple this with the fact that executives in
blue-chip companies love watching and playing the sport, and you
realise why there is so much money sloshing about.Lawrence Frankopan is senior client manager at IMG, a sports management company. He works with world number four Svetlana Kuznetsova, world junior number two Bernard Tomic, British number five Naomi Cavaday and occasionally Sharapova. Signing
his most talented players with racket and sports clothing companies is
the straightforward part. Thanks to IMG’s strong links to the tennis
world, many players enjoy relationships with the likes of Head, Wilson,
Nike and Adidas from as young as 13 years old. But the real trick is to
get them sponsored by non-tennis companies.Backed up by IMG’s
sales team, and with a bit of “cold calling, schmoozing and
networking”, Frankopan tries to marry his players to prestigious
companies whose marketing strategies they suit. Kuznetsova is
sponsored by Guinot (beauty products) and First Group (property
development), for example, and in return for cash she wears patches on
her clothing, turns up for appearance days, signs autographs, helps
with corporate hospitality and allows her image to be used in
advertising.Although Kuznetsova has been ranked as high as
number two in the world, success on the tour is no guarantee of income
from sponsors. Other factors come into play, explains Frankopan. “You
have to be a champion, that’s a sine qua non,” he says. “But it also
helps if you have charisma and looks, if you are geographically
accessible and if you are fluent in English.”Sania Mirza,
India’s number one woman player, is a good example. Although she is
currently ranked only 33 in the world, back home in India she has the
celebrity status of a Bollywood film star. Her image appears on
television channels, in magazines and on billboards all over the Asian
sub-continent. When the car manufacturer Hyundai signed her up to
endorse their Getz model, production was doubled in anticipation of
extra sales.The sponsor’s dream is when a player combines Grand
Slam success with a dynamic on-court charisma that potential customers
can relate to closely.Take Andre Agassi, for example. Although
his contemporary Pete Sampras won six more Grand Slams than he did, it
was Agassi whom all the sponsors were clamouring for most.Then
look at Nikolay Davydenko. He has been in the world top 10 for the past
three years and has won 12 titles, yet because he lacks charisma and
his English is poor the sponsors simply are not interested.Besides
having their product or logo displayed on court and on TV, sponsors
also benefit from being associated in the minds of the public with a
particular player. Thomas Bischof, international tour manager
at Head, explains why they value British number one Andy Murray as an
ambassador for their rackets, despite his rather surly image within the
UK.“There are not too many characters on the tour at the
moment,” he says. “To get a character like Andy has to be the goal of a
brand. Okay, he cannot be everybody’s darling, but he can move people
and he’s emotional and dynamic. He has a big impact in the UK on
juniors and he will have a big impact globally on juniors. That’s what
we need. Of course, it would be much easier if he was really liked in
the UK as well. But for us we need to think of the global picture.”Once
you reach players ranked outside the top 10 or 20, the sponsorship
earnings graph starts to dip sharply. There are occasional anomalies,
such as Mirza, and former champions with waning careers or long-term
injuries who are still signed up to healthy contracts. But in general,
outside the world top 100 there is no interest whatsoever from
non-tennis sponsors. Lowly ranked players rely on financial aid
from their national federations and they can normally count on what are
known as “domestic contracts”, where racket or clothing companies give
them a quota of free product to use on the tour. But they would be very
lucky to receive any cash.
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