In the article, The Djoks on the Sponsors, published by The Economist in September 2011, they talk about how hard it is to have enough talent to be good enough at tennis to be even looked at by potential sponsors, but then how often times it is even harder to have this star power image that these big companies want for the players that they endorse.
"As an individual sport, tennis needs highly marketable winners if its commercial sponsors and, ultimately, the tournaments themselves are to prosper."
This statement makes a lot of sense. For your average fan definitely wants a small handful of huge stars who are constantly winning so they can cheer them on. Personally, I like it when the field is very open and there is a large number of people who could be winning the titles but for whatever reasons that just isn't what is generally liked by fans. Companies love these supremely dominant stars because if they are endorsing them and the player is winning, then they are making lots of money. As the article mentions Federer was the perfect money maker because he won so much and brought so much money to the companies endorsing him as well as just money into tennis in general getting more people to view the sport.
"Even so, recent data from Nielsen seems to support the doubts. The research company has devised a model that measures an athlete's overall endorsement potential in the all-important American market, based on a national survey of more than 1,100 people from different backgrounds."
So this excerpt is talking about a system developed to show just how worthy of sponsorships certain players are. I found this very interesting because while Federer and Nadal got very high scores, Djokovic did not. Even though Djokovic had been winning lots of tournaments right before the study was done. I do have to take into account the fact that this was in 2011 and that now in 2015 Djokovic has a much larger fan base and has been at the top of the game for a few years now and so by now there is definitely a big chance that he would be at the same All-star status as Federer and Nadal.
"Although the French sports company Babolat was the original inventor of natural gut strings, it did not begin making tennis rackets until 1994. It remained relatively obscure for a decade. But in 2004 it secured the backing of a then-unsung Rafael Nadal for a new racket called the Aero Pro Drive, which has since become one of the world's most popular."
This right here is the perfect example of why the endorsement to the right player can literally mean everything for a company. Without Rafael Nadal, Babolat is a company that nobody except for people who are super involved with tennis would know about. With this move to get Nadal using their racket, Babolat is now arguably the biggest brand in the entire sport. They were able to find a person with incredible talent who was dominating in the sport as well as have a fantastic off court image and because of this the company sky rocketed in popularity soon after.
Discussion Questions: What do players do to prevent injuries?
If a player gets an injury, what do they do to handle it and take care of it?
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