Getting the ATP to reform itself took two years of internal negotiation. Phase Two requires seven independent organisations — with fundamentally different interests — to agree on unified governance. There is no roadmap for this in professional sport.
When Andrea Gaudenzi launched OneVision in 2022, he was careful to frame Phase Two as a natural evolution rather than a distant aspiration. Phase One would get the ATP’s house in order. Phase Two would bring the rest of tennis into the same structure — the WTA, the ITF, and all four Grand Slams working under a unified governance model for the first time in the sport’s history.
Three years later, Phase One has delivered real results. Phase Two remains, in Gaudenzi’s own words, “a collective effort” — diplomatic language for a negotiation that has barely started and faces structural obstacles that no amount of goodwill can easily overcome.
Understanding why Phase Two is genuinely hard — not just politically sensitive but structurally complicated — is essential to understanding whether tennis can actually become the unified commercial force it needs to be to compete at the level its audience potential demands.
The Seven-Body Problem
Tennis is governed by seven independent organisations: the ATP, the WTA, the ITF, and the four Grand Slams — Wimbledon, Roland-Garros, the Australian Open, and the US Open. Each has its own board, its own revenue model, its own legal structure, its own commercial agreements, and its own institutional identity built over decades.
Gaudenzi has been direct about what this means in practice. “It’s difficult to write the story if different chapters are written by different people and sold in different bookstores,” he told Sportcal. “As much as we could try to collaborate, if you have seven independent entities with seven different boards making different decisions, it’s going to be very difficult to create a seamless experience.”
This is the central tension of Phase Two. The problem is not that these seven organisations disagree about the destination — broadly, everyone agrees that a more unified tennis is commercially more valuable. The problem is that each organisation has different incentives, different power positions, and different things to lose from any specific unification structure.
Why the Grand Slams Are the Hardest Piece
The four Grand Slams are the most significant obstacle to Phase Two — not because they are hostile to collaboration, but because they have the least to gain from it and the most to lose.
Wimbledon, Roland-Garros, the Australian Open, and the US Open are the sport’s four most valuable commercial properties. They set their own prize money, negotiate their own broadcast deals, control their own ticketing and sponsorship, and operate entirely outside the ATP’s governance structure. The ATP has no authority over Grand Slam prize money, no seat at the table when Wimbledon negotiates its BBC deal, and no mechanism to compel the Slams to participate in any unified commercial structure.
The Slams’ media rights alone illustrate the complexity. The Australian Open is on ESPN+ in the US. Roland-Garros is on beIN Sports and TNT Sports. Wimbledon is split between ESPN and Tennis Channel in America, BBC in the UK. The US Open is on ESPN in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK. These are independent commercial agreements with different partners, different terms, and different expiry dates. Bringing them under a unified rights framework would require each Slam to exit existing deals, align on a collective negotiating position, and accept a revenue-sharing model with the tours — all of which cuts against the interests of the individual Slams.
Wimbledon alone generates more than £250 million annually. The All England Club has no structural incentive to share that revenue stream with the ATP or WTA in exchange for a seat at a governance table it doesn’t currently need.
The WTA Complication
The WTA adds a separate layer of complexity. Phase Two requires ATP-WTA alignment as a precondition for any broader unification — you cannot create a unified tennis governance structure with the men’s tour on board and the women’s tour absent.
But the WTA has been navigating its own significant structural challenges. The tour’s suspension of events in China following the Peng Shuai situation in 2021, and the subsequent return to the Chinese market, created governance complications that are still being resolved. The WTA’s commercial arm — WTA Ventures — is a relatively new entity. The ATP and WTA are now actively discussing what Gaudenzi calls “Tennis Ventures” — a potential merger of Tennis Data Innovations, ATP Media, WTA Ventures, and the collective commercial assets of both tours into a single entity.
That conversation is real and meaningful. But it is also at an early stage. Merging two organisations’ commercial infrastructure while simultaneously managing their separate governance structures, player relationships, and tournament calendars is not a short-term project.
What Tennis Ventures Actually Means
The Tennis Ventures concept is the most concrete expression of Phase Two thinking, and it deserves attention because it represents a genuinely different commercial model for tennis.
The idea, as Gaudenzi has described it, is to create a single entity that combines ATP Media, Tennis Data Innovations, WTA Ventures, and potentially Grand Slam commercial assets into one unified commercial operation. This entity would negotiate media rights, data rights, and sponsorship as a single unified tennis product rather than as fragmented tour-by-tour, event-by-event deals.
The commercial logic is straightforward. A unified tennis product — ATP, WTA, and Grand Slams in a single rights package — is worth substantially more than the sum of its parts. Netflix, Amazon, and Apple are not primarily interested in men’s tennis or women’s tennis or Wimbledon. They are interested in tennis as a global sport with a billion fans, a generation of compelling new stars, and content that travels across demographics and geographies. That product only exists at full commercial value if it can be sold as a unified whole.
The data rights precedent from Phase One is instructive. Tennis Data Innovations consolidated ATP data rights and nearly doubled the revenue by going to market as a single unified package rather than individual tournament deals. Tennis Ventures would apply the same logic to media rights, sponsorship, and digital content — across both tours and potentially across the Slams — at a scale several orders of magnitude larger.
The Realistic Timeline
Gaudenzi was re-elected as ATP Chairman in February 2026 for a third term running through 2028. His stated priority is advancing Phase Two and completing a comprehensive product review — covering rankings, compensation, calendar, and event format — to be implemented in 2028, coinciding with the introduction of a 10th ATP Masters 1000 in Saudi Arabia.
That timeline is telling. 2028 is six years after Phase One launched. The ATP’s own chairman — the most committed advocate for unified tennis governance in the sport — is working to a six-year horizon for meaningful Phase Two implementation. That is not pessimism. It is an honest acknowledgement of how long it takes to align seven independent organisations with different interests around a common structure.
The early signs of Phase Two are visible. The T7 working group — the ATP, WTA, ITF, and four Slams meeting collectively — exists and is functioning. Tennis Data Innovations is generating real revenue. WTA Ventures is operational. The conversation about Tennis Ventures is active. These are foundation layers, not finished structures.
What Failure Looks Like
It is worth being direct about the alternative scenario, because the tennis industry tends to discuss Phase Two in aspirational terms without acknowledging the downside.
If Phase Two fails — if the Grand Slams decline to participate in unified governance, if the ATP and WTA cannot agree on a Tennis Ventures structure, if the fragmented rights landscape persists — tennis will continue to underperform its commercial potential indefinitely. The sport will keep producing compelling athletes and growing participation numbers while media rights stay fragmented, fan experience stays inconsistent, and platforms like Netflix cherry-pick exhibitions rather than making the transformative rights investments the sport needs.
The window for tennis to consolidate its commercial position is not permanently open. Sports rights markets are consolidating around a small number of major platforms. The sport that arrives at that negotiating table unified — with a single rights package and a single governance voice — will get a fundamentally different deal than the sport that arrives as seven separate entities negotiating separately.
Phase Two is not just about good governance. It is about whether tennis is organised well enough to capture the commercial moment it is currently living through.
That urgency is real. Whether the sport can move fast enough to act on it remains the defining question.
Tim Lee is the founder of Baseplay Tennis and head coach at Baseplay Tennis Academy in Singapore.
