Futures Tour: A charade of mediocre athletes play-acting as tennis pros – Economic Times

By David Waldstein

A German of Chilean descent, an American with Russian parentage, a Pole and a Dutchman were arguing in English on a red clay tennis court on the outskirts of Prague.

As much as that may sound like the setup to a joke, it was just a moment in time on the International Tennis Federations Futures Tour, the lowest level of professional mens tennis, where thousands toil in relative obscurity with little hope of ever joining the sports elite.

The four men had disputed several previous calls in a contentious doubles match, and the German player, Laslo Urrutia Fuentes, fumed when Sander Groen, his Dutch opponent, fired an overhead slam directly at him as he stood defenceless at the net.

Urrutia called Groen arrogant and cocky, and the argument raged for several minutes, with Groen cartoonishly aping Urrutias movements. Another day on the tour, Urrutia said with a shrug a few hours later.

The scene was made even more absurd because Groen is 49, a curious age for a player on a tour named Futures. The tour was established to help young players navigate their way from the juniors to the top level of the professional ranks, the ATP Tour. Theoretically, players should know by their mid-20s whether they can make it as pros. But many just seem to keep playing.

With professional tournaments aplenty in roughly 75 countries, and no age restrictions, thousands of players enter hundreds of tournaments each year, despite the offer of very little prize money. Such conditions create fertile grounds for stagnation, frustration, petulant behaviour and match fixing.

Its a complete free-for-all at the lower levels of tennis, Kris Dent, the ITFs senior executive director of professional tennis, said in an interview this summer.

At best, the Futures Tour is a proving ground for elite prospects, a costly but potentially rewarding journey to fame. At worst, it is a cynical charade of mediocre athletes playacting as tennis pros, vulnerable to corruption.

That is why the ITF has decided to radically restructure the tour, beginning in 2019. It hopes to re-categorise about 90 percent of the players into a more streamlined amateur structure, leaving players like Urrutia with some hope that they can soldier on, at least until the Darwinism of the rankings system spits them out.

According to a recent ITF study, there were 14,000 nominally professional tennis players entering tournaments around the globe in 2013. But 6,000 of them, including many juniors, did not earn even $1. Given the costs of travel, coaching, conditioning, medical care and equipment, only 336 men and 253 women broke even; forget making a profit.

Thats quite astonishing for a sport that has almost $300 million in prize money, Dent said. These smaller tournaments have no TV, no sponsorships and no one paying any money to go see them, and they never will.

The plan is to funnel the top 750 men and 750 women into the Challenger Tour, where the total prize money at each tournament would equal $25,000 or more. Those would be the true professionals.

The remainder would play on the new Transition Tour, which would be restructured to favour promising young players through a new ranking system and to make it less costly. The ITF would continue to assess and possibly tweak the system to establish a major league and a minor league with a clear link between them.

The balancing act for the ITF is to continue to promote the sport globally so that there are still avenues to the top in places like Africa, Southeast Asia and South America.

It is not up to me to determine who makes it and who doesnt, Dent said. But we want a distinct majors and minors with a clear pathway to the top, a realistic transition from the juniors to the ATP and WTA tours. There is a large group that are semiprofessional, and I dont expect them to stay on the transition tour.

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Futures Tour: A charade of mediocre athletes play-acting as tennis pros - Economic Times