Gerard Pique has described his Kosmos group’s time in charge of the Davis Cup as “a resounding success story”, but they are now “claiming up to $50 million” from International Tennis Federation (ITF) after the relationship turned sour.
Back in 2018, the Kosmos group signed a controversial $3 billion with the ITF to organise the team tournament for the next 25 years.
The move was met with outrage by traditionalists as the event was revamped and they opted to scrap most of the home-and-away ties and adopted a World Cup-style tournament.
But in January this year, the ITF announced that the deal with Kosmos had been terminated, insisting that there was no immediate threat to the competition’s future, although no further details were released about the reason for the decision.
Former Spain and Barcelona defender Pique – founder of the Kosmos group – has defended his company’s time as custodians of the Davis Cup, saying he is proud and lifted the lid on the financial dispute between the two organisations.
“We believe that what we did with the Davis Cup is a resounding success story,” he told Marca. “We arrived with a competition that was in decline, it was at a low point. And on a sporting, economic and audience level, above all, we turned the tournament around.
“That is evident and verifiable with numbers. We quadrupled our income in one year. We went from three to 15 sponsors. What happens is that in 2020 COVID arrived and changed everything in all sports.
“We had an agreement with the ITF, we paid them a very large sum of money, I would say out of the market, $40 million a year. In an equal competition, like the ATP Cup, which was the same thing, Tennis Australia was paying $10 million to the ATP. So we were paying four times as much.
“In 2020 there was no Davis Cup, for part of 2021 it was played behind closed doors… the fixed amount we were paying was out of the market. After the termination by the ITF there is now a dispute between us in which we are claiming up to $50 million.
“We can’t say more because of confidentiality restrictions. But I am very proud of everything we did. We turned the competition on its head and then came COVID, which was impossible to foresee.”
Pique added that Kosmos wanted to renegotiate the terms with the ITF following COVID, but the organisation was not keen and it was confirmed in late January that Kosmos had taken the tennis body to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) for the “unjustified” termination of the contract.
Just last week Dietloff von Arnim, president of the German Tennis Federation and ITF presidential candidate, stated: “The disaster we have experienced with Kosmos has massive financial consequences for the ITF.”
Naturally, Pique is unimpressed.
“I saw the comment and I think that people are not informed, or they don’t know or they want to use us for a political, electoral issue, because they have the elections in August,” he said. “The president of the German federation had a good relationship with us.
“The ITF, with our agreement, has benefited. Right now they have contracts that we signed worth €70 million. The Billie Jean King Cup [deal] was closed in Andalusia thanks to us.
“We believe that everything that has happened is very unfair. I think that the Davis Cup will last two or three years with the contracts that we closed at the time, but I see a complicated future for it.”
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