From major contributor to non-starter, the Hopman Cup’s slide down the rankings has been dramatic.
I have fond memories of the Hopman Cup, having first gone with my grandparents back in 1991 when my family finally moved back to Perth after a couple of years living in Broome.
Even then it was seen as something of a curiosity: a teams tournament based on singles and mixed doubles.
There was nothing else like it in the world. And for years it was Perth’s flagship tennis event, providing fans with an opportunity to see some of the best players in the game shortly before they descended on Melbourne for the Australian Open.
But next year’s Hopman Cup will apparently take place on the French Riviera, at the Nice Lawn Tennis Club.
The state government’s appetite for the tournament, which is owned by the International Tennis Federation, apparently dissipated in 2019 because the male players were said to have preferred the option of the ATP Cup, a men’s only teams tournament that offered ranking points.
The first iteration of the new competition was held in Perth, Brisbane and Sydney in January 2020, with Perth playing host to the group games for teams from Spain (including Rafael Nadal), Japan, Georgia, Uruguay, Russia (including Daniil Medvedev), Italy, Norway and the US.
The knockout phase was held entirely in Sydney and culminated in Novak Djokovic’s Serbia defeating Rafael Nadal’s Spain in the final.
That meant Perth missed out on the most important part of the tournament, not to mention the fact that the world’s top female players skipped Perth completely.
According to Tourism WA, 56,856 people attended the 2020 ATP Cup over 12 sessions.
Western Australia’s daily newspaper reported that 110,364 people attended the 2019 Hopman Cup.
But the event’s organisers, including (now) WA Football Commission chief executive Michael Roberts, were confident of the tournament’s prospects.
What’s intriguing, though, is the lack of any mention of the ATP Cup in Tourism WA’s 2019-20 annual report, despite it trumpeting the success of Perth’s hosting of a match on Manchester United’s tour, a Bledisloe Cup Test, the NRL Nines, the Federation Cup final, games in the ICC T20 Women’s World Cup cricket, the Australian Men’s Hockey Masters, All Schools Athletic Championships, Ironman WA, Ironman 70.3, and the Cape to Cape Mountain Bike stage race.
In every annual report back to at least 2013-14, Tourism WA had provided a breakdown of the benefit generated by Perth’s hosting of the Hopman Cup.
In 2013-14, it was the “largest contributor of media value for the state”, generating more than $112 million worth of television coverage in key WA tourism markets.
Tourism WA also received a 25 per cent share of the profits of the venture, amounting to $431,000.
Crowds increased the following year by a further 10,000 and there was television coverage in 170 countries, with media exposure valued at almost $129 million.
In 2016, the value of dedicated television broadcasts of the Hopman Cup was pegged at more than $52 million, and 952 hours of the event was televised into Tourism WA’s key markets.
Roger Federer headlined the 2017 event, which attracted 103,167 spectators and $68 million in media value in international and domestic markets.
Similar figures in 2018 (plus the value generated by Federer’s famous quokka selfie) came on the back of 16,500 visitor nights spent in WA by out-of-state tennis fans.
Finally, the last Hopman Cup in Perth, in January 2019, generated 963 hours of television broadcasts in WA’s key tourism markets, valued at $58.9 million.
So why wasn’t the ATP Cup worthy of a mention in the Tourism WA annual report for 2019-20? Tourism WA didn’t answer that question when I put it to them this week.
But they did provide the figures. The 2020 ATP Cup generated $1,930,579 in economic impact for the state.
Tourism WA’s broadcast assets were valued at $5,428,118 in our key tourism markets.
“Peripheral Media coverage within Australia was worth $21,653,328.
[The event] had nearly 5,700 hours of global coverage, with 401 hours specifically in Tourism WA’s key markets,” a Tourism WA spokesperson said.
Those results are clearly down on the Hopman Cup figures, but that’s expected for a new event.
Perth has, however, signed on for six years of the ATP Cup, which recently returned some poor results in Sydney for an admittedly COVID-affected tournament.
The big question is whether it will ever be able to generate the same sort of returns as the Hopman Cup.
When announcing that Perth had secured hosting rights for the ATP Cup back in 2019, (then) tourism minister Paul Papalia described the Hopman Cup as “dead”.
“It doesn’t exist,” he said. But Barcelona-based Tennium, which includes French tennis players Richard Gasquet and Sebastien Grosjean among its main shareholders, is now understood to have secured the rights to host the Hopman Cup for five years from 2023.
So maybe it’s not dead, but it’s clearly dead to WA.
