Plenty of Players Are Great at Tennis. Why Do Brands Single Out Federer?

His career is winding down and the brands have stayed. Is that Federer's charm, or something peculiar to tennis sponsorship?

Ten years ago the American writer David Foster Wallace gave a piece in The New York Times this headline: "Federer as Religious Experience." It opened like this:

"Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're O.K."

Two months ago, on the grass at Wimbledon, exactly that happened.

In the quarterfinal, Federer was down two sets to none against Marin Cilic. David Beckham, up in the stands, looked like a man who had just been shown a yellow card. When Federer put the last return of the second set into the net, the 15,000 fans in the stadium groaned almost as one, every last one of them equally deflated.

Federer somehow saved three match points and turned the match around, taking his 307th Grand Slam match win. But it drained him, and he went out in the semifinal. Two weeks later he announced he was withdrawing from the rest of the season with an injury — including the Olympics, which he has never won, and the US Open, which he has missed only once.

This is the 19th year of Federer's career. In those 19 years he has won 17 Grand Slam titles and 88 ATP singles titles, and held the world No. 1 ranking for a record 237 weeks in a row. That he has passed Pete Sampras to become the greatest player in the history of tennis is by now almost beyond argument. It is just that at 34, winning even one more Grand Slam has become hard.

His results have slipped; his grip on tennis's money has not. The latest Forbes athlete-earnings list, for 2016, puts him at $67.8 million — the tenth year running that he has topped tennis. Among athletes in every sport he ranked fourth, behind only Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and LeBron James.

On last year's list of the "most marketable sports stars" drawn up by the London Academy of Marketing, Federer finished ahead of Tiger Woods. In a sporting world where winning usually equals earning, that is a little surprising.

Next to soccer and basketball, which throw off storylines and dramatic conflict, tennis and golf give the public much less to talk about. They are individual sports, so they have always needed one or two figures interesting enough to pull in ordinary viewers beyond the die-hard fans. Federer and Woods are those figures.

When we talk about Ronaldo, Messi and James, we are usually talking about skill, physique and what they do on the field. When we talk about Federer and Woods, we are talking about an elegant gentleman, and an icon for a racial minority in America.

"If an athlete stays at the top of the world long enough and builds a brand image for himself, that can stretch out how long he earns, and even raise how much he earns," says Nigel Currie of the sports marketing firm Brand Rapport. Sports like tennis and golf, aimed at the middle class and the rich, often draw sponsors with no connection to the sport at all. But these banks, carmakers and luxury houses can use Federer's elegance and good manners to carry their own brand values, or simply to look more appealing. What a player stands for ends up mattering far more than what he wins.

For the sport and for the sponsors alike, Federer looks like a special case.

As Woods is to golf, Federer over this past decade has become the word for tennis. Born into a middle-class Swiss family, he carries himself with grace on the court and off it. Rolex and Moët & Chandon sponsor Federer personally and the ATP tour at the same time. In their eyes he is the best possible gloss on this so-called "aristocratic sport."

Kobe Bryant's last season was jokingly called a national farewell tour; Federer, near the end of his own career, gets a home crowd everywhere on earth. At last year's US Open final the world No. 1, Novak Djokovic, had to beat Federer through the boos of nearly the whole stadium. The Serb looked a little helpless about it, and a little used to it — cast as the villain whenever he plays Federer.

Federer's game is just as hard to copy. The precise forehand drive, the light one-handed slice backhand, the touch and the work at the net add up to a classic, varied game that almost no one else in men's tennis still plays.

After watching last year's Australian Open final, Marc Rosset, the former Swiss Olympic tennis champion, said: "Djokovic and Murray's matches are always dull. They run the same script every time, and it would be the same if they played 50 more. Only Federer's matches have anything new or unpredictable in them."

In an era when power from the baseline rules the men's game, Federer's all-court, old-fashioned tennis really does offer more variety, and more to watch. He has kept revising his tactics his whole career: as recently as last year he came up with the Sneak Attack by Roger, or SABR — standing in near the service line to return serve and taking the ball on the half-volley to grab the initiative early.

As Federer himself has put it: "You will never be bigger than the sport." The decade in which his income climbed was also a golden decade of fast growth for tennis. Federer's commercial success is not only his own; it is the sport's.

Tennis has been a favorite of the upper classes since it began. The game of hitting a ball with the palm, invented by monks, reached the French court and swept through aristocratic circles. Under Louis XIV the gentlemen and ladies who played turned up in fine gowns and tall hats. Tennis then was closer to a way of socializing.

As the idea of aristocracy faded, modern tennis turned into a middle-class sport. But two parallel systems, amateur and professional, kept it split and held it back. Not until 1968 did the four Grand Slams and the Davis Cup let professionals compete alongside amateurs, opening tennis's "Open era." Players could now make a living from the game, and commerce followed. Two years later Pepsi became the title sponsor of the first ATP Grand Prix.

The other big thing that happened that year was that television broadcasters took an interest. The US Open went live on CBS for the first time, and the much older Wimbledon and French Open followed. With only a handful of channels on the air, millions of ordinary people saw the sport for the first time. The novelty alone made tennis a craze across the United States. By 1975 several thousand courts were going up around the country at once, billions of dollars were going into them, and participation hit a historic high.

That kind of expansion inevitably left more courts and facilities than anyone needed. By the late 1980s the market had gone quiet, attention shrank year after year, and only in the past decade has the sport climbed again.

Today sponsorship spending on tennis approaches $800 million. The ATP's television audience has hit a record 900 million, up nearly 90 percent on a decade ago. More than 4.5 million spectators go to ATP tour events in person every year. These numbers are still far from the reach and the money of soccer or basketball, but tennis is plainly the most commercially successful individual sport there is.

Over that decade the ATP has been one of the reasons why. Etienne de Villiers, chairman at the time, pushed through a run of reforms: Hawk-Eye, bigger prize money, a better calendar, new tour events, longer television coverage and much larger marketing revenue. To this former Disney executive the ATP was not just a sports body but a brand image in need of constant upkeep, and making it more appealing to viewers was the heart of the job. That year ATP revenue rose 15 percent and television hours hit a record.

The revival also owes something to globalization. By the number of courts, tennis is the second most international sport after soccer. It has a solid audience in Europe, North America, South America and Australia, and its best players have always come from everywhere. In recent years Li Na and Kei Nishikori have opened up the Asian market as well.

That spread buys depth with breadth, making up for the fact that tennis has less going on than team sports do. It also appeals enormously to big multinational sponsors. Pepsi put its name on the first ATP Grand Prix in 1970; today the ATP's main official sponsors come from the Middle East, the United States, Europe and China.

Social media has opened up new possibilities too — think of the table-tennis craze set off by the "internet celebrity" Zhang Jike. The pull of these individual sports has less and less to do with the matches themselves. And it rests, in large part, not on the most devoted fans but on the general public, who do not know tennis especially well. We watch Maria Sharapova sometimes because we are watching fashion; we watch Djokovic sometimes because we want to see him clown around; we watch Federer sometimes because we are following his family and his manners.

Sport is sometimes a piece of theater. What draws people to soccer and basketball is not the spin and flight of the ball but the passing and the running off it, the shifts in tactics, the clashes with opponents — and away from the court, the transfer news and the old grudges. Those dramatic parts are the richest and the most interesting. An individual sport like tennis has to fill that gap with more personality from the players, or with stories from off the court.

One more thing not to overlook: over this decade the Big Four have lifted tennis's profile enormously. Each plays differently and behaves differently — Federer elegant and unhurried, sharp in attack; Nadal fiercely competitive and modest, forever running; Djokovic lively and clownish, steady and complete; Murray gloomy and reserved, stubborn in defense. Since the Open era began, perhaps only that vividly drawn group from the 1970s and 80s — Björn Borg, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Ilie Năstase — bears comparison.

In a sense these four between them created tennis's golden decade. Part of the attention they built turned into ATP television revenue, the source of the rising prize money of recent years; the rest went straight to them as sponsorship money.

Federer is the one who represents them all. He arrived out of nowhere at Wimbledon in 2001 by beating Pete Sampras, and two years later won his first Grand Slam title. Then, after four years of ruling the sport, he finally passed Andre Agassi to become the highest-earning player in tennis, at $29 million.

In the decade since, his income has more than doubled. He had a poor season this past year, yet the long contracts he has signed with sponsors still guaranteed him $60 million off the court.

Most of that growth comes from sponsors. Ten years ago he had five; now he has ten. And the middle-class character of tennis has brought Federer the same kind of sport-unrelated sponsors found in golf and Formula One. They are mostly banks, carmakers and luxury brands: long-standing international partners such as Rolex and Mercedes-Benz, and Swiss companies aimed more at the home market, such as Lindt, the coffee-machine maker Jura and Swiss National Insurance.

The sums have risen as sharply as the number. The ten-year, $120 million deal he negotiated with Nike in 2008 is still the largest sponsorship figure in the history of tennis, and that one contract alone puts his earnings beyond most ordinary players. Moët & Chandon, an official ATP sponsor, pays him another $6 million a year, and the rest of his contracts are worth roughly $2 million a year each.

Big companies trust the steadiness of Federer's game and of his image. Rolex, Credit Suisse and Jura are all willing to sign with him in ten-year spans. Wilson went further and gave him a lifetime contract in 2006. The Swiss is like a permanent preferred shareholder of theirs, drawing a $2 million "fixed dividend" every year. Add up the contracts he holds now and, even if he wins no prize money at all from here on, Federer will remain one of the best-paid players in tennis.

But Federer is 35 now. Entering the second half of their careers with him are Nadal, 30, and Djokovic and Murray, both 29.

Between them the Big Four have won 42 of the last 46 Grand Slam titles. Being so evenly matched, they have also produced a long run of classic meetings. The 2006 Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal was compared by David Foster Wallace to "a marvelous script in which a king faces the man who would kill him, a head-on collision between a southern Europe that worships the aesthetics of violence and a northern Europe that pursues artistic temperament, a duel between Apollo and Dionysus."

These stories, too, will become history. "It's true, the Big Four are getting older," Nadal said. "A new generation will take the places we used to hold. That's normal, isn't it? Obviously we will not be here forever."

Which leaves tennis, and business, with one question: who can replace Federer as the next star?

Among this year's US Open semifinalists, Djokovic has the dominance and the complete game Federer once had; Wawrinka shares his nationality and his one-handed backhand; and Nishikori looks a lot like another sponsors' darling. None of them looks like the answer.

(Graphics: Wu Lingwei)