All of the Lights: What’s Holding Back the Laver Cup From Expanding Globally
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The Laver Cup’s Latest Excuse Against Going Global
The wonderful thing about tennis in the era we live in. It is now a truly global sport, but has anyone convinced the Laver Cup?
During this year’s event in London, Laver Cup chairman and co-founder Tony Godsick was asked about the tournament’s long-promised expansion into new parts of the world. His answer was a tour de force in the increasingly familiar language of sports event management: arenas are complicated, sponsors have opinions, having proper lights for the presentation of the matches is difficult, some buildings are too big, some are too small, and apparently one city was told to build a new arena and obligingly did so, only for the Laver Cup to decide that it was too big.
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There is a certain beauty to the absurdity of it all.
“We didn’t realize what we actually needed in an arena when we started this,”Godsick said in an interview with Chris Oddo of Tennis Now. “We were not arena experts.”
Fair enough. Nobody is born knowing how many lights are required to stage a tennis tournament. But the Laver Cup is now entering its ninth edition. At some point, perhaps becoming an arena expert should have been part of the job.
The Laver Cup Was Supposed to Be Different
The Laver Cup was launched in 2017 as something tennis did not really have: a premium team event built around the biggest names in the sport, with Europe facing the rest of the world in a three-day indoor spectacle. It was created to directly mirror what professional golf has with the Ryder Cup (Europe vs USA) and the Presidents Cup (The World-ex EU vs the USA).
It has worked. The matches are fun. The atmosphere is different. The black court is unique. The players seem to genuinely enjoy themselves compared to the grind of the ATP Tour. Seeing Carlos Alcaraz and Taylor Fritz among the latest generation of stars in London is precisely why people tune in.
There is a reason the Laver Cup has survived and grown, the demand to see the sport’s stars is high. But there was always another part of the sales pitch. It was supposed to travel globally.
And it has traveled. Prague, Chicago, Geneva, Boston, London, Vancouver, Berlin and San Francisco is hardly a stationary tournament. But look at the map rather than the brochure and the limitations become obvious.
Europe and North America, in a simple rotation. London, the same city that long hosted the ATP finals, hosts this year’s event. Los Angeles, which surprisingly has lacked an ATP event for over a decade, gets 2027.
South America and Central America, Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand remain waiting.
For an event whose entire identity is built around bringing the world’s best players together, that is becoming a narrow definition of the world, a problem tennis is already accused of.
The Lights Are The Problem?
Godsick’s explanation is that the Laver Cup has very specific requirements: enough seats, the right arena size, appropriate lighting, and sponsors with their own preferences.
Godsick is charming, but it’s difficult to believe he’s being entirely honest about why the Laver Cup hasn’t moved to a broader map. Tennis has spent decades staging major events in places far and wide, in a different form of international competition, the legendary Davis Cup.
Major international tennis has repeatedly found its way into arenas far beyond the usual Grand Slam capitals via the Davis Cup, and even some ATP 250 events, that now face consolidation.
And if South America needs a building capable of hosting a serious indoor tennis event, there are three conveniently named “Movistar Arena”. In Buenos Aires, their Movistar seats 15,000, in Santiago, Chile, it’s 12,000, and in Bogota, Colombia it’s 14,000. Mexico City’s Arena CDMX seats over 20,000 and has hosted UFC and WWE.
Dakar, Senegal has Dakar Arena, built in 2018 with a capacity of 15,000.
Seoul, South Korea has the Olympic Arena that holds 15,000 and hosted the 1988 games. Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Arena, built in 2007 also hosts 15,000.
So perhaps the problem isn’t that the buildings don’t exist. Perhaps the problem is that finding the right building is easier when you actually want to find one.
Tennis Has Become Very Good at Staying in the Same Places
This is not uniquely a Laver Cup problem.
The four Grand Slams are the ultimate examples of tennis’s geographical inertia. Melbourne, Paris, London and New York have been the sport’s four great annual destinations for generations.
Then there are the established ATP and WTA tournaments, Indian Wells, Miami, Rome, Madrid, Shanghai and the rest. Tennis has plenty of international reach, but the biggest events tend to accumulate in the places that already have the money, infrastructure, corporate relationships and audiences to stage them. That makes commercial sense. It is also convenient.
The Laver Cup was supposed to be one of the events capable of breaking out of that pattern because of its annual flexibility. Instead, its geographical expansion increasingly looks like something that will only happen whenever everything aligns, and nobody knows when that will be.
There Are Markets Waiting for The Laver Cup
Aug 25, 2025; Flushing, NY, USA; General view of fans during the first round of the men’s single between Joao Fonseca of Brazil and Miomir Kecmanovic of Serbia at the US Open at Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre. Mandatory Credit: Mike Frey-Imagn ImagesIndia hardly needs an introduction as a potential tennis market. South America has enormous tennis culture and some of the sport’s most passionate fan bases. Chile has a history of success in the sport. Brazil has Olympic infrastructure and major entertainment venues. Argentina has hosted Davis Cup ties and produced generations of elite players, but these nations professional tournaments have also had their share of struggles.
Asia, meanwhile, has already demonstrated that it can put on major tennis events. Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo are already established ATP destinations, Seoul is hosting the WTA this week and the wider region has the arenas, audiences and commercial infrastructure to support something on the Laver Cup’s scale, over one weekend.
And then there is Australia and New Zealand, which somehow seem particularly strange omissions from an event named after one of Australia’s greatest sporting figures who is now 88 years old.
None of this means staging the Laver Cup in these places would be easy in terms of logistics or travel. It would not be. Godsick is right that the logistics are complicated. A three-day event featuring twelve elite players, a custom court, television production, sponsors, hospitality and a huge temporary transformation of an arena is not something you organize without years of diligence and planning. But difficulty and impossibility are two very different things.
The Laver Cup Should Want the Bolder Trip
Godsick, Roger Federer’s agent, is describing the obstacles as though they are evidence that the Laver Cup cannot reasonably go elsewhere right now. They could just as easily be evidence that the tournament has reached the point where it needs to take the perceived risk required to do it.
The Laver Cup needs a reason for a tennis fan in Santiago, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Auckland or Buenos Aires to look at the calendar and have the opportunity to plan a trip. Especially when there’s an opportunity for the “World” team to feature players like Joao Fonseca and Ignacio Buse, or perhaps inspire the next Kei Nishikori who recently told the media after his final US Open match” “It’s kind of sad that there is no top 20 or top 30 Asian players after me. That a little bit worries me.”
That would actually make the tournament feel global, and be a welcome change from the current editions.
The Last Word
And perhaps that is the irony of all this. The Laver Cup has created a very good product. The players like it. The fans like it. The matches are entertaining. The atmosphere is genuinely different from the rest of the tennis calendar. There’s an opportunity to attract an even more diverse list of commercial sponsors.
So why keep putting it in the same sort of places instead of going global?
Enjoy London. Enjoy Alcaraz, Fritz, Zverev and the rest. Enjoy the black court, the charged atmosphere and the splendid sight of tennis players pretending they are all best friends for three days.
But after the final ball is struck in London, perhaps the executives of the Laver Cup should look at a map. There are quite a few lights on it.
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