• International Premier Tennis League

Why tennis is being made to look like a 1990s video game

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga celebrates with team-mates Treat Huey and Andy Murray at the first event in the new International Premier Tennis League © Getty Images

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International Premier Tennis League. The name sounds like a 1990s sports video game with a ridiculously unrealistic voiceover.

The reality is every bit as fun, noisy and silly: it's the new tennis series being held in Asia right now. It's contested between The Manila Mavericks, The DBS Singapore Slammers, The Micromax Indian Aces and, of course, The Musafir.com UAE Royals.

I myself am a diehard Musafir.com UAE Royals fan and have supported them man and boy. You?

The IPTL has lured some of the sport's biggest names - Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Serena Williams - out to Asia for four three-day events. The weekend just passed was played in the Philippines, it's Singapore on Tuesday, then Delhi and then Dubai. Legendary hotbeds of tennis, all.

There are numerous innovations with the scoring in the one-set matches: at 5-5, there is no tiebreak but rather a four-minute 'shootout' to decide the winner. There's no advantage point if a game reaches deuce and (my personal favourite) the "power point", where either contestant can play a joker and score double on that one point. If they do it while drinking a correctly branded sports recovery drink and looking earnestly at a sponsored wristwatch, they win a balloon.

The players are, naturally, getting a fat wad of cash for showing up - Nadal, for instance, was offered a million bucks a night before injury hit. For his tennis, not some sort of Indecent Proposal. And each of the team has a 'Legend', like Goran Ivanisevic and Andre Agassi, who plays alongside the current models. Tennis is good value for that: everyone enjoys seeing the heroes of yesterday prove/disprove that they've "still got it", something that you cannot enjoy in team sports, despite what Arsene Wenger's continuing employment might suggest.

Overall though, it all smells a bit ghastly for many tennis fans. In fairness, they don't get many tennis tournaments in the Philippines and Singapore, so it's a chance for supporters there to see their heroes, albeit in a grotesque parody of sporting competition.

The commercialism of the IPTL smells a bit ghastly to some fans © Getty Images

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The tennis calendar is a famously brutal one, with December traditionally being the one month out of 12 where the players get a bit of a break from competition. You would hope that next time Murray, say, sighs about the treadmill or blames a lack of rest for a poor tournament performance that his conditioning won't have been hurt by turning out in this. The bank balance certainly won't have been harmed.

The choice of the shindig's title clearly and deliberately evokes the Indian Premier League, the contest that has given cricket such an almighty kick up the backside. The IPTL even aped the IPL's player auction, and it shares with it the 'creation out of the clear blue sky' of franchise teams, something very alien to British sports fans but familiar to Americans. The notion of team identification or support is spurious at best in such an individual sport as tennis, but boy is it a marketeer's dream, and giving each 'team' three days of home fixtures is a smart ploy.

Surely few who follow cricket and tennis (or indeed football) can hear the idea of an 'International Premier Tennis League' of non-competitive matches, some of them between retired or relatively unknown players, with no ranking points or prestige at stake, being staged in the Far East, without thinking immediately of betting.

There's been no suggestion of any skulduggery, or any reason to think that anyone involved is susceptible, but if you were going to design a sporting event to be vulnerable to the influence of unscrupulous gamblers, this ticks too many boxes.

Still, the fans have flocked to the events, eager to see top quality players, albeit playing exhibition level tennis. It feels to some of us in the old world like another staging post on the road to sport as purely an entertainment product, stars hauling tired bodies in front of the cameras for another quick and dirty payday, and never mind resting properly for the really important, prestigious major tournaments. But money is being made, and that's the main thing. So in that case: come on you The Musafir.com UAE Royals!

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