Tennis backers remain a mystery

Rafael Nadal, who has been allocated to the Mumbai team, could make $1.2 million a night in the international city-based tournament. Photo / AP

Big names signed but where did $29m come from?

Mahesh Bhupathi, the impresario behind the launch of the International Premier Tennis League, has put his plane on the runway by allocating 28 leading players - including Andy Murray, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams - into four squads for his city-based tournament.

How high will the plane fly? The signs are positive, yet there are also significant gaps in the information coming out of the player auction in Dubai - notably the identity of the four team owners who have reportedly bid a total of US$24 million ($29 million).

The players now know which city they will be representing. Murray, for example, is down for Bangkok, alongside Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Victoria Azarenka. Nadal is on the team-sheet for Mumbai, Djokovic for Dubai and Williams for Singapore. But they remain unclear as to who will be paying their wages.

Where cricket's Indian Premier League made a big deal out of its inaugural auction in 2008, inviting TV cameras into a hotel ballroom in Mumbai and turning the bidding process into a sport of its own, the tennis equivalent was more clandestine.

We know that the auction happened at the Oberoi in Dubai, and that all of the "icon" players were signed with the exception of Australian Open champion Stan Wawrinka. But the IPTL has not offered any official confirmation of the individual players' fees.

With US$24 million being committed to these first 28 players, Nadal's share is understood to be close to US$1 million a night, while Murray and Djokovic can each expect to pocket a seven-figure sum for playing three matches in as many days.

The schedule is becoming clearer, with the duration of the tournament now being trimmed from 23 days to 16. It will work like a travelling circus, with each team playing their home matches in a three-day window, starting in Singapore on November 28-30 and finishing with Dubai on December 11-13.

The "icon" players are only expected to make themselves available for that three-day period of home matches, so avoiding the fatigue of excessive air travel. And the allocation of each leading player to a franchise has been arranged with a view to fitting in with that player's schedule.

Murray's commitments, for instance, will be from December 2-4 in Bangkok, which gives him time to head on to Miami afterwards for his annual training block with Ivan Lendl.

This partly explains why the auction could not be televised. It was a "collaborative" process, according to the organisers, rather than a fully competitive race in which each owner tried to land the biggest names.

"I'm not very sure how it was for the rest, but I was pretty nervous," said Bhupathi. "From the league perspective we wanted the right mix and I believe we have four balanced teams."