For now, México City Open does not generate profitability, but the consolidation of itself and its tennis players. The Challenger ATP 125 tournament in Mexico City is in its second edition and is one of four on the spring tour in the country. Throughout the year, the Chapultepec Sports Center (CDCH) raises funds for the use of the venue for the event to take place, hoping to recover as much of its investment as possible.
“It is not a tournament that by itself makes money, but we sustain it basically with the help of the ATP, which contributes significantly with the prize money for the players. Our obligation is to complement that prize, which in this case is $159,000, and is divided according to places, between singles and doubles; also offer them a hotel and one meal a day, we give them two”, said Jorge Nicolín, director of the CDCH.
In this way, the organizers fund around 30% of the prize and sponsors such as the Camino Real hotel join in offering a considerable discount on the lodging rate. In total, the event has nine sponsors. To raise the required funds, the organization is helped by the different events that are hosted at the CDCH, for example, by the fees it has for the use of its facilities in sports such as tennis, badminton and swimming, as well as by the spill that leaves the event.
This will be the second edition of the event, because with the help of the company Mextenisresponsible for organizing the Acapulco Open (ATP 500) and that of Los Cabos (ATP 250), the Chapultepec Sports Center hosted a first Challenger tournament in 2018. In 2019, Nicolín and the CDCH were in charge of raising funds for the 2020 edition, but days after its launch it was interrupted by the pandemic.
“From a business point of view, (the tournament) is focused on recovering as much as possible. We have some sponsorships that are not important yet. We believe that we are in a beginning process on the road to maturation, once the tournament is and we no longer have interruptions, as happened to us a few years ago with the Covid-19, from then on we will have the possibility of having with major sponsorships.
Another of the difficulties that the tournament faces for its continuity is that other venues are specified in Mexico, since the ATP try to make a tour in the same country so that it is more accessible for the players to travel and play several tournaments taking advantage of the same plane ticket and that the expense for the athletes is lower. From April 11 to 17, the tour will extend to San Luis Potosí, from 18 to 24 to Aguascalientes and, on this occasion, from April 25 to May 1 to Morelos.
Until the month of June, the ATP has confirmed 88 Challenger tournaments, of which 20 land in Latin America distributed in Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia.
“Normally they go to Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara or Monterrey but the dates and even the vocation have changed, since they have become feminine. Our purpose at this stage is for the tournament to mature, to be repeated every year and from that point of view we already have Mexican players”, Nicolín mentioned.
Two Mexican tennis players participate in this edition, Alejandro Hernández and the junior Luis Carlos Álvarez (he will make his debut in an ATP Challenger 125 tournament), both received wild cards for the main draw. At the same time, four host tennis players played the qualifying tournament: Luis Patiño, Manuel Sánchez, Armando Sotelo and Alonso Delgado, however, they stayed out of the main draw.
“What the country’s tennis academies want is to recover the good name of Mexico in the sport. We haven’t had it in many years.”
Nicolin pointed out that the México City Open It is not subject to a contract for a certain number of years, but “it is a program of tennis events organized by the ATP and we are inserted to the extent that we can maintain it and support it in all subsequent spring events”, so the commitment to continue maintaining it is moral.
“We will do it to the extent that the fund reaches us, I hope so. We were affected, like the entire economy, by the pandemic. We lost many users because they couldn’t come, but little by little the sports daily activity itself has been normalized. In that sense we try to do all the tournaments that we can and not only in this one, but also with the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the Universal Tennis Rating (UTR)”.
With this in mind, the first step is the consolidation of the event and that the tennis players choose to come to Mexico to participate. In the future, the director of the CDCH would like Mexico City to have a 250-level tournament, although he explained that this will depend on the others, Acapulco and Los Cabos, also raising their category.
“Mexico City must aspire to have a 250 tournament, it is complicated by the height and the purse (in 2021 the Los Cabos Open distributed 853,000 dollars in prize money), much more money is required, they are very expensive, but I I think that if we have Formula 1 and NFL games, why not have a tournament of that nature? We will work, it is not something that will happen next year or two, but in some time we will achieve it”, concluded the director of the CDCH.
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