Tennis tournament in Vienna is putting more and more pressure on Swiss Indoors in Basel

The media conference with tournament director Roger Brennwald on Sunday afternoon before the final is as much a part of the Swiss Indoors as the shadow of Roger Federer that has inevitably fallen over this tournament. The Swiss Indoors are a monument in the Swiss sports calendar and, with a budget of 17.5 million francs, the highest-grossing event among 21 events that are brought together in the Swiss Top Sport association.

Brennwald, now 78 years old, held the tennis tournament for the first time in 1970 in an air dome in Muttenz. The first winner was the German Klaus Berger. He received a wristwatch as a prize. This year the winner Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard will receive 446,045 euros. The Frenchman is 21 years old and is in position 50 in the ranking – hardly anyone had him on the favorites list in Basel.

Perricard’s name is an outlier on the prominent Basel winners list; In addition to Federer, it also includes Novak Djokovic, Pete Sampras and Boris Becker. Basel can boast of having welcomed practically all of the world number one players to the Rhine knee at least once. The exceptions are the first and current number 1, the Australian John Newcombe and now the South Tyrolean Jannik Sinner.

Newcombe has long since ended his career, but Sinner is still high on Brennwald’s wish list. The Italian is looked after by Stan Wawrinka’s manager Lawrence Frankopan, with whom Brennwald has good connections. But Sinner was promised to the tournament in Vienna this year, where he would have competed as defending champion. There is a silent agreement between Basel and the Austrian organizers that they will not poach the defending champions from each other. But Sinner took part in the Six Kings Slam in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia the week before last and was missing in Vienna.

Vienna is in the fast lane

The highly endowed exhibition in Saudi Arabia, which attracted players with an entry fee of more than a million dollars and presented Rafael Nadal with a racket made of solid gold, is a nuisance and a threat to the tournament organizers. Brennwald avoids the topic. His Viennese colleague Herwig Straka is more relaxed. He says the players are not employees of the tour. You can’t tell them where they should compete. “There is a lot of interest in tennis. That’s positive. We’re trying to reward the players for coming by increasing the prize money,” says Straka.

Straka sits on the ATP management board as a tournament representative. He says Riyadh is trying to win a Masters 1000, a top-tier tournament. «We have a station open. However, there are already existing events that would like to move up.”

Vienna has been in direct competition with Basel for a long time. Initially, Federer’s presence in Basel alone was enough to keep the Vienna event at a distance in international comparison.

Now that is no longer the case. This year the threshold for the last player to be accepted into the main field in Basel is at ranking position 54, and in Vienna it is 50. That is a coincidence, but Vienna now has the stronger field across the board. Before Sinner and Daniil Medvedev’s cancellation, five top ten players had registered on the Danube and only two in Basel. The winner in Vienna was Jack Draper from Great Britain, world number 18.

Brennwald doesn’t like hearing such comparisons, but the development hasn’t gone unnoticed by him either. Before the final of the Swiss Indoors, he said that when he heard who was competing in Vienna, he felt like he had to dress warmly. “We have invested more in players this year than ever before, and more have been offered to us. But at some point the money ran out.”

The mortgage of a botched negotiation with Roger Federer

Brennwald says the density in men’s tennis is enormous. “We can no longer measure the quality of a tournament solely by the number of top ten players we have signed, even if we have sometimes done that ourselves. What has always distinguished us is that we have relied on young players who really took off a year or two after their appearance in Basel.”

The crowd in the St. Jakob Hall still proves Brennwald right. Even though the arena was only sold out for Sunday’s final, the tournament was once again well attended with 63,206 spectators. The Swiss Indoors seem to have arrived in the post-Federer era. Even if the shadow of the outstanding athlete continues to be present in every corner of the hall. No other player has had a greater impact on the Swiss Indoors than him. The Basel native made his first appearance as a ball boy and later won the event ten times. For the last time in 2019.

Federer ended his career two years ago – at the Laver Cup in London. Since then he has not returned to the hall in Basel where he grew up so much. Two years ago, his management denied the organizers the wish to say goodbye to Federer in a dignified manner. The managers told the organizer that it was too emotional and caused irritation.

Things are different in Vienna. The local hero Dominic Thiem was bid farewell in a dignified setting at the Wiener Stadthalle last week. The audience said goodbye to him with a great choreography, and Thiem politely thanked him for it.

The relationship between Federer and Brennwald, however, is strained. A little over ten years ago, Federer tried to take part in the tournament in order to possibly take over it later. Brennwald viewed this as an attempt at an unfriendly takeover and leaked details of the negotiations to the public. Federer has not forgiven him for this to this day.

People close to the tournament director say that Brennwald would probably act differently today and be more willing to talk. Brennwald is now 78 years old. But he doesn’t want to retire yet. The foundation on which his life’s work stands is more fragile than ever.