Mexico City /
After 120 years of tradition were ruined, international tennis began a crusade to bring Davis Cup back to greatness.
Three years were enough for Grupo Kosmos, led by former Spanish soccer player Gerard Piqué, to fail in its attempt to promote the most fair tennis business as a business by countries with false promises of greatness.
Now, both Grupo Kosmos and the International Tennis Federation have filed million-dollar lawsuits for the early termination of the contract that bound them for 25 years and that the governing body of tennis decided to cut due to the lack of both sporting and economic results.
Kosmos Tennis filed the lawsuit in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, while the Tennis Federation countersued for alleged non-compliance with the payments agreed between both parties.
The Davis Cup format, founded in 1900, was born as such in 1981, when the so-called World Group was established with four geographical zones, two in Europe, one in America and another for Asia and Australia. After the qualifiers, the Semifinals were played. between each zone champion and later the Final.
In that same decade and given the worldwide growth of tennis, the second and third divisions and the promotions and relegations to the World Group were born and each venue was defined in such a way that whoever had played at home from one series to the next did so as a visitor, that made the tournament reach many countries.
The format remained stable for 40 years, but the increase in the physical demand for tennis players gradually made it a less attractive tournament since the countries and tennis players who reached the Final had to dedicate a minimum of four weeks throughout the year, and this caused many of the best to decide not to compete in many rounds.
Given this, Grupo Kosmos presented a format with the creation of a World Cup, and the approach was to transfer the spirit of the Soccer World Cup to tennis, carrying out qualifiers by zones and concentrating the best teams in a single week in a single city in Spain. .
Thus, August 2018 arrived when the ITF was seduced by Kosmos’s proposal, which in return promised to reinvest 3 billion pesos during the 25-year duration of the contract.
But the proposal went from failure to failure because in 2019 one format was used, for 2020-2021 due to the pandemic it was another and in 2022 they created a new one, however, none of the three met both economic and sports expectations. .
The last straw was when Kosmos and Piqué, claiming that it was not profitable, stopped contributing to the ITF the agreed 40 million dollars a year despite the fact that each host city contributed at least 15 million to the company.
This breach ended up disenchanting the ITF, which this week received the support of the four Grand Slams tournaments to recover the greatness of the Davis Cup, far from Piqué’s false promises.
The former footballer wanted to be clever.
