Why Is the Laver Cup Already Back in London?

When Roger Federer co-founded the Laver Cup in 2017, it had several mandates. One was to  bring the world’s best men’s tennis players together in a vibrant team competition styled on golf’s Ryder Cup, honoring Australian tennis legend Rod Laver. And as Federer’s agent and Laver Cup chairman Tony Godsick put it in a 2024 press release, another was to help grow “interest in this wonderful sport at new destinations around the world.”

Yet, four years after one of the Laver Cup’s most successful editions in London’s O2 Arena, the event is already back in the city that hosts Wimbledon every year. 

The Laver Cup has alternated between European and North American host sites for its eight editions, making the 2026 event the second time it has been held in London in the last three Europe-based iterations. 

At a Friday morning press conference in London, Godsick said the task of bringing the Laver Cup to new locations including in South America and Asia has proved more logistically difficult than he expected.

“We didn’t realize what we actually needed in an arena when we started this,” Godsick said. “It’s very hard to find facilities that have a certain amount of seats in a neighborhood or a country where your sponsors—you know, we have 25 sponsors now—so we have a lot of voices telling us where they would like us to go.”

Financial filings by Trident8, the Laver Cup’s parent company, reveal that the 2022 event in London was comfortably the most profitable of the four editions that have been held in Europe. 

Trident8 reported a £4.1 million ($5.4 million) operating profit in 2022. In 2024, when the Laver Cup was held in Berlin, it reported a negligible operating loss of £2,223, while it reported an operating profit of £409,319 in 2019 when the event was in Geneva. The Laver Cup’s inaugural 2017 edition in Prague saw Trident8 report a £6.2 million operating loss on the year.

Godsick said costs were a significant barrier to further global expansion, citing arenas that were either not the right size or didn’t allow for the red-and-blue lighting presentation that the Laver Cup requires.

“I don’t mind investing in the event, I don’t mind losing money, but it becomes so cost-prohibitive that at some point you say to yourself, ‘Well, you know, it doesn’t work at the moment,’” Godsick said.

After reporting operating losses in both 2023 and 2024, the company hinted at a possible adjustment to its host-site strategy in its 2024 financial filing. 

“With a greater understanding of the key criteria for a successful event to guide future site selection, management will be able to drive revenue growth and control cost, and reduce variability,” Trident8 wrote in the filing.

It added that it hoped to increase broadcast and sponsorship revenue in order to become less reliant on ticket and hospitality revenue, and thereby to expand the pool of potential host cities it can consider while remaining financially viable. The Laver Cup is broadcast on Tennis Channel in the U.S.

“Sure, we’d love to bring this to Africa, would love to bring it to South America,” Godsick said. “We’ve got to find an indoor arena that can actually handle us for a period of time that has all the specifications.”

The Laver Cup’s format emulates golf’s storied Ryder Cup by pitting Europe against the rest of the world. 

Rostering six players each, Team Europe and Team World face off in one doubles and three singles matches on each day of the three-day event. The scoring system gives matches increasing weight as the event goes on, with the first team to 13 points clinching victory. 

Each player on the winning team will earn $250,000 in prize money, while all competing players receive an undisclosed appearance fee tied to their ATP ranking.

At the event’s founding, only one of the world’s top 10 players was non-European, though that number has since increased to four. Team Europe won the first four editions of the Laver Cup, but Team World has now won three of the previous four events. 

Federer famously played his last career match at the 2022 Laver Cup in London, teaming up with longtime rival Rafael Nadal in doubles. “The appetite to see Laver Cup return [to London] was impossible to ignore,” Godsick said in a press release last year announcing London as the 2026 host.

The 2027 Laver Cup will be hosted at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles, while hosting rights beyond that have not yet been determined.

“We hope to be able to go visit other markets at some point, but it’s not as easy as we thought when we conceptualized it,” Godsick said.