CVC Capital Partners Will Invest $150 Million in WTA

“The way we set all this up, WTA Tour Inc. is not touched,” he said. “The WTA still controls 100 percent all of the governance, regulatory and calendar issues.”

But he acknowledged that tour and CVC officials would communicate to ensure that WTA decisions did not hurt commercial opportunities.

“Absolutely we will,” he said. “But the WTA has complete control of both entities and can make the decisions it feels are in its best interest.”

CVC will have no representative on the WTA board, but it will have two of the eight seats on the new WTA Ventures board, which will be chaired by Simon.

CVC, based in Luxembourg, was founded in 1981 and has 25 offices worldwide and more than $100 billion under management. The WTA investment is relatively modest compared with the more than $2 billion it spent in 2021 to acquire a 10 percent stake in the commercial arm of La Liga, Spain’s leading soccer league. CVC also paid more than $700 million in 2021 to acquire the Ahmedabad cricket franchise in the Indian Premier League and about $500 million more the same year to take a 14.3 percent stake in the Six Nations rugby union series. CVC agreed to sell its controlling ownership stake in Formula 1 to the American company Liberty Media in 2016.

Tennis has had some spectacular misfires with outside investors. In 1999, ISL Worldwide, a Switzerland-based marketing company, signed a 10-year agreement for $1.2 billion with the ATP that fell apart two years later. In 2018, the International Tennis Federation signed a 25-year, $3 billion deal with Kosmos, a Spanish investment group, that led to radical changes in the Davis Cup team event, but the partnership imploded this year.

CVC has held talks with the ATP, but its tennis investment is only in the women’s game. For now.

Simon continues to favor convergence and has even expressed interest in a merger between the ATP and the WTA at some stage.

“If we can ever get to the point where we could bring it all together, this agreement with CVC allows for that to happen,” Simon said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/sports/tennis/wta-cvc.html