Why would the best tennis players in the world give up a weekend in a crowded season for a tournament that gives them no ranking points?
The Laver Cup has been answering that question every September since 2017, and it answered it again at The O2 in London from 25 to 27 September. Team Europe beat Team World 13pts to 5. Alexander Zverev sealed it on Sunday, beating Learner Tien in straight sets after a tight first set settled on a tiebreak. It’s the fourth time Zverev has clinched the trophy, and he is now the event’s all-time leading scorer with 26 points.
A comfortable win on the scoreboard. The more interesting story is how the scoreboard exists in the first place.
What happened at The O2
Yannick Noah captained Europe, with Carlos Alcaraz, Casper Ruud, Flavio Cobolli, Jakub Mensik and Rafael Jodar alongside Zverev. Andre Agassi captained a World team that included Taylor Fritz, Alex de Minaur and Tien. Europe went into Sunday leading 7 to 5, and Cobolli and Mensik stretched the lead by beating de Minaur and Fritz in the doubles before Zverev finished the job. The official Laver Cup report quoted him saying there is no better feeling in sport than winning as a team.
The format is the clever part. Matches are worth one point on Friday, two on Saturday, and three on Sunday, and the first team to 13 of the 24 available wins. Rising stakes mean the result is rarely settled early, which is exactly what a broadcaster, a sponsor and a ticket holder all want.
A tournament built from nothing
Roger Federer’s management company created The Laver Cup with TEAM8, the Brazilian businessman Jorge Paulo Lemann and Tennis Australia. They looked at a sport that is individual at its core, with a calendar already full, and built a team event. They did not try to become a fifth Grand Slam. They built something the Slams could not offer.
In 2019, it became an official ATP Tour event, and it still will not count towards ranking points. It also travels. Prague, Chicago, Geneva, Boston, London, Vancouver, Berlin and San Francisco have all hosted it; this year it returned to London for the first time in four years, and next year it goes to the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles. Each city is a fresh audience and a fresh set of sponsors, which is how a touring show works rather than how a tennis tournament usually works.
How the money works
The purse is $1.5 million, and each member of the winning team takes $250,000. With six players a side, that is the whole purse going to the winners. On top of that, players receive appearance fees based on their ranking. So the top players are not there for points. They are there for the pay, the teammates, the legends on the bench and a format that feels like nothing else on the tour.
In other words, the founders did not win the existing race. They changed what winning means.
The lesson for the rest of us
Most of us spend our working lives on someone else’s scoreboard. Job grades, annual reviews, follower counts, the salary bands in a recruiter’s spreadsheet. Those scoreboards are real, and they pay the bills, designed by somebody else, and they reward what that somebody else values.
The Laver Cup is a reminder that you can design your own format, one where you already have count for more. For the founders, that was a famous name, a legend to put it on and a format fans enjoy. For the rest of us, it might be a skill that sits between two professions, a network nobody else has, or a side income that works because it looks nothing like the day job. It is the same idea I explored in the ladder you build yourself: the rungs you build tend to hold your weight better than the ones you inherit.
Notice, too, how the event travels. Building something once and taking it to new markets is far cheaper than building something new every year. That applies to a course, a service or a product just as much as to a tennis weekend.
Where I land
The weekend left me with one question for my own plans, and I am still sitting with it. Which scoreboard am I playing on, and did I choose it? If the honest answer is somebody else’s, that is not a failure. It might just be the moment to start drafting rules of your own.
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