Roger Federer’s Laver Cup Is Tapping Into Luxury’s Long-Standing Love Affair With Tennis
When Rafael Nadal announced his imminent retirement from tennis earlier this month, an extraordinary fact was woven, almost perfunctorily, into many of the news reports: that the 22 Grand Slam winner had, over the course of his two-decade career, amassed earnings of around $560 million. If that figure isn’t enough to hike the eyebrows, consider this: Just $135 million of that came from his 92 pro-tournament titles, according to the ATP Tour. The balance came from off-court appearances and endorsements for the likes of Nike, Richard Mille, Emporio Armani, and Louis Vuitton.
Tennis’s lucrative relationship with the luxury sector—one which began in 1978, when Rolex became the official timekeeper of Wimbledon—has gone quite literally meteoric. Indeed, last summer, Carlos Alcaraz lifted the Wimbledon trophy aloft wearing a Cosmograph Daytona with a dial hewn from a hunk of space rock.
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And the plot is thickening—fast. A significant narrative milestone came in February, when the ATP Tour agreed a “multiyear strategic partnership” with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Another was Zheng Qinwen becoming the first Chinese player to win an Olympic Games tennis singles gold medal in Paris in August, leading to fevered speculation as to what commercial opportunities this could create for the sport in an economy, the world’s second largest, with a famously robust appetite for luxury.
By our reckoning, future scholars of tennis’s vertiginous rise in prestige—with investment by luxury brands both the cause and the effect—may well cite, as another major catalytic moment, one from a few years earlier. In August 2016, at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, Team8, a boutique sports and entertainment company founded by Roger Federer and his agent and business partner Tony Godsick, revealed plans for an invitational, globe-touring men’s team event. Reminiscent of golf’s Ryder Cup and named after Australian 11-time Grand Slam winner Rod Laver, it would pitch six representatives of Europe against six representatives from the rest of the world. The captains? Irresistibly—perhaps inevitably—Swede Björn Borg and New Yorker John McEnroe, protagonists in arguably the most legendary rivalry in the sport’s history.
Eight years on, the latest edition of the Laver Cup in Berlin attracted 60,000 fans from 82 countries to the city’s Uber Arena and was broadcast to 218 territories globally, in part due to the caliber of players. Recognized as part of the ATP Tour for the last five years, the event attracted six of the current top 10 male players in the world and nine of the top 20. It amassed more than 30 million social media interactions, including video views. In addition to Robb Report, Rolex (an official founding partner), Moët & Chandon, and Mercedes were among the sponsors, while Anna Wintour, NBA legends Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash, and former top tennis stars, including Steffi Graf, Angie Kerber, Ana Ivanovic, and Boris Becker, were among the guests.
For McEnroe, speaking to Robb Report during the Berlin edition, tennis is intrinsically equipped to attract such glamorous company. “I’m biased, but to me it brings together the absolute best you can imagine in all sports—athleticism as well as mental fortitude,” he says. “You’re using all parts of your brain and your body and you’re doing it by yourself. To me, tennis is one of the most difficult sports of all to master, and that’s part of why seeing it done at such an extremely high level is so gratifying.”
Watching tennis played at the top level, it’s hard to argue McEnroe’s point. But there’s more to the Laver Cup’s appeal than tennis mastery. As long as the Davis Cup exists, it’ll never be the only team tennis competition in the world, but the “Europe versus the World” scenario turns the very best players on the planet, albeit briefly, from adversaries into team-mates. “You can talk during the match, share some tactics, so now you’re learning from your rivals,” Argentine player Francisco Cerundolo tells Robb Report at a media event held at the Brandenburg Gate two days before the tournament commences.
Taylor Fritz, winner of eight ATP Tour singles titles, agrees. “I feel like when you have a team on the bench cheering for you, and you’re playing for more than just yourself, it brings out a little bit of extra energy and emotion,” he says. “It definitely pumps you up a lot more to play. And I think there’s also probably a bit more pressure, because you’re playing for everybody else as well.”
Russian former men’s No. 1 Daniil Medvedev—who clinched the U.S. Open in 2021—is particularly effusive about the tournament’s kudos. “You don’t understand the value of the job that you’ve put into an entire year until you get drafted and picked to represent Team Europe at the Laver Cup,” he tells Robb Report. “There’s no greater honor—I feel like it’s where all your hard work gets redeemed. Everyone is playing at their highest capacity. Having your teammates and your captains cheering you on every single point is something you don’t get anywhere else.”
Adding to the excitement is a unique points system. Both in the singles and the doubles, all third sets are 10-point tiebreakers, while each match win is worth one point on Friday, two points on Saturday, and three points on Sunday, leading to a kind of accumulating tension in the arena with each passing day. During our visit, the effect on audience engagement—the increasing levels of emotion between each and every collective “ooh” and “ahh”—is palpable in the arena. The vibe is also congenial: A multi-generational, full-capacity crowd claps in time to the ebullient techno between games and cheers in unison when an announcement reveals that a Polish couple who’ve just got engaged here will be enjoying top-tier hospitality for the rest of the tournament.
The most striking, and ground-breaking, aspect of the Laver Cup, though—and one of the reasons Robb Report’s logo is prominent at the court-side—is the tournament’s wow-factor: high-tech, photogenic, bowl-you-over theatricality, which begins the moment the players enter the arena, introduced by an effusive voiceover, with projections of them in action cast onto that distinctive black court. Meanwhile, bench cameras allow fans to see a streamed courtside view of both teams, often leaping off the bench to celebrate points scored by rivals they were going head-to-head with only two weeks previously at Flushing Meadows.
“The idea of the Laver Cup, [as well as] rivals becoming teammates, is the experience as a fan, how they deck out the entire arena, and so on,” says Roger Federer—who conceived of the tournament along with Godsick, his manager. “When you show up, from the first moment until the last, you want the experience to be one that’s fantastic.”
Godsick, who is also the Laver Cup chairman and CEO of Team8, underscored Federer’s point. “Our platform, our format, is completely different,” he said in an interview with Robb Report. “‘Tennis unrivaled’ is our slogan, and we really mean it. From the beginning, we said, let’s invest in the brand, let’s create a premium product. And if we do that, then we will attract premium sponsors.”
The approach, it’s reasonable to assert, has been successful. “We already have a Mercedes installation outside, we have Oliver Peoples’s pop-up shop upstairs, we have ON—a very fast-growing sportswear and sneaker company and one of our sponsors—making a Laver Cup collaborative shoe from the beginning of the partnership with them,” says Godsick. “Rolex have renewed for the long term, and we just announced that Hugo Boss is going to become our formalwear sponsor. Tennis has always been a sport that’s attracted luxury brands. The demographics work, it’s global, it’s elegant. It’s super premium, with social events to be seen at popping up all over them.”
As the tournament draws to a close—Europe, having trailed heading into the final day, triumphing thanks to Carlos Alcaraz’s victory over Taylor Fritz—the Laver Cup is entering a new era, with team captains Borg and McEnroe being replaced by Yannick Noah and Andre Agassi, respectively. This year’s edition, meanwhile, will turn out to be the highest grossing event ever at the Uber Arena, just as it was at Prague’s O2 Arena in its inaugural year.
San Francisco will next year add its name to a list of host cities that so far includes Prague, Chicago, Boston, Geneva and London as well as Berlin. The player line-up, as always, remains to be seen. But it’s sure to be matched by the presence of equally big-hitters from the world of luxury living.
And, of course, it’s not just the prestige brands bolstering their cultural cache through involvement. The relationship is symbiotic. “I firmly believe in the adage, ‘You’re judged by the company you keep’,” concludes Godsick.
We couldn’t agree more.
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