Atp tour

1. INTRODUCTION


This paper will be based on the ATP Tour and how does it work. I will be focusing on the most important tournaments of this championship such as the four Grand Slams and the London Finals.

The ATP was created on 1972 with the aim of gathering all men tennis players and looking after their shared interests. Since 1990 this association organizes the whole championshipwith different tournaments in 32 different countries.

Nowadays we are living one of the most exciting periods in tennis history, and much of that is because the great level of the players, not only the top-ten but all players on the ATP, so the association should take advantage of that and do what they are trying to do now, which is attracting more fans than ever.

I will be going through howdoes the ATP World Tour work and how is it structured as well as which are the different tournaments and which are the marketing strategies the association will be following in the next years and the sponsors they work with. I will also take a look at the most important tournaments such as Grand Slam and the ATP World Tour Finals and analyze which are the problems and opportunities theassociation is facing at the moment.

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2. ATP WORLD TOUR

Since 2009 the men's group of tennis tournaments is called the ATP World Tour. It consists of 65 tournaments played in 32 different countries from January, when the season begins, to November.

There are different kinds of tennis tournaments and they are divided into 5 categories.
There are:
* 4 Grand Slams(Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and US Open)
* ATP Masters 1000(Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, Rome, Madrid, Toronto/Montreal, Cincinnati, Shanghai and Paris)
* ATP World Tour 500
* ATP World Tour 250
* ATP World Tour Finals (London)

The 8 players with most points at the end of the season are able to play ATP World Tour Finals, which the last years has taken place in London.Most of the tournaments are managed by the ATP, but the Grand Slams that are the ITF issues as well as the ATP Finals which they manage together. However, all these tournaments award players with points for the ATP ranking. This association publishes weekly a classification of all professional players, which is called the ATP Entry Ranking. This ranking is used to decide which players can takepart in each tournament and who the seeds are. It takes into consideration the last 52 weeks, so players in order to maintain their position in the ranking must at least get the same result or better than the previous year in the same tournament.

3. ATP WORLD TOUR MANAGEMENT

The ATP is formed by 3 different bodies:
* Board of directors (Player representatives, Tournamentrepresentatives and a chairman)
* Player council
* Tournament council
The player council is formed by the proper players with Roger Federer as President and Rafael Nadal as Vicepresident in order to support and protect their interests. In the other hand, the Tournament council is divided into 3 areas: 5 people in Europe, 4 in America and 4 people resposible for the international group.

But whoreally manages the tour is the board of directors, with Adam Helfant as the head and a different to the International Tennis Federation president.
* Adam Helfant → Executive chairman and President
* Gavin Forbes → American representative on Board of Directors
* Mark Webster → Responsible for marketing, selling and negotiating the television rights
* Charles Humphrey Smith →International Group Council member
* Giorgio di Palermo → Director of Player Relations
* David Edges → Player Board Representative for the International region
* Justin Gimelstob → Player Board Representative for the Americas region
* Laurent Delanney → Chief Executive Officer, Europe
* Brad Drewett → Chief Executive Officer for the International Group since and is encharged of...