World Team Tennis Returns With New Model—and Some Star Players

World Team Tennis is back.

The tennis event, which was cofounded by Billie Jean King in the 1970s and last held in 2021, will relaunch with a new look, new teams, and a new spot on the tennis calendar.

The revamped WTT will be played in early December with three teams: The New York Empire, Florida Flamingos, and Toronto North. The matches will take place at basketball and hockey venues in each city: Barclays Center in Brooklyn (home of the NBA’s Nets and WNBA’s Liberty), Amerant Bank Arena in Florida (NHL’s Panthers), and the Coca-Cola Coliseum in Toronto (PWHL’s Scepters and WNBA’s Tempo).

The event also signed a one-year broadcasting deal with Versant to air all six night matches on CNBC and stream on Fandango.

WTT has taken a modern approach to rebuilding the event, akin to recent startup sports leagues like Unrivaled and TGL, which have recruited top players by offering equity stakes. TGL was recently valued at $1 billion, while Unrivaled secured a funding round in August that valued it at $650 million. Both have doubled their values within the past two years.

The tennis event will be the first to provide equity to players, and it’s already secured commitments from 15 top men’s and women’s stars, including Coco Gauff, Jessica Pegula, Victoria Mboko, Taylor Fritz, Frances Tiafoe, and Tommy Paul.

Gauff’s deal was particularly notable as it came with an equity stake in the Florida Flamingos, one of the three franchises that will play during the relaunch. She’s the only player-owner in the event’s 2026 lineup.

World Team Tennis CEO Stephen Amritraj, who acquired the IP to World Team Tennis in 2024, expanded on the league’s revival in an interview with Front Office Sports. 

Below is a Q&A portion of the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Front Office Sports: What spurred your decision to bring back World Team Tennis?

Stephen Amritraj: My dad and uncle were kind of two of the more prominent Indian tennis players back in the 1970s (Anand Amritraj and Vijay Amritraj, former top-80 and top-20 players, respectively), and I’d heard about World Team Tennis because of them. They actually migrated from India and settled in L.A. because they played for the iteration of WTT in the 1970s and 1980s. World Team Tennis helped them assimilate in the U.S. as immigrants, and so I’ve always loved it.

I always loved the concept of a mixed gender team league. I think that Billy Jean King and the founders were so ahead of their time in the concept of men and women playing together as teammates and contributing equally to the overall outcome of the match. 

FOS: How will World Team Tennis be different this time?

SA: We wanted to stay true to the foundational values, most importantly: both genders contribute equally to the team score and then also the innovation of the game.

I think the biggest change that we made was moving the dates of the season. It used to be in the middle of the summer. We wanted to get it out of where the traditional tennis calendar is, and so we moved it to December. We took a lot of player feedback to make that decision.

Changing the format was another one. It used to be one set of men’s singles, one set of women’s singles, one set of men’s doubles, one set of women’s doubles, and one set of mixed doubles. Now it’s No. 1 men’s singles, No. 1 women’s singles, No. 2 men’s singles, No. 2 women’s singles. All one set, no ad, and a mixed doubles super tiebreaker. 

FOS: You mentioned the tennis calendar. What did you learn from the players to make sure that they would still play competitive tennis in December during WTT despite the long tennis calendar?

SA: I think that we have full confidence that they are going to give their all, and they’re very committed to the league. They’re all compensated to actually have bonuses for their wins, and 

they want to play for a team, and they want to win. (Players are compensated with base fees, equity, and match bonuses)

In terms of the tennis calendar and the extent of it, it really is tied directly to ranking points. And so what happens with that is you have this constant pressure to continue to play.

We’re different in a lot of ways.
We’re a one-set team competition that is not forcing insane amounts of travel. And if you don’t want to play it, that’s fine. I think that we’ve put it in December because players can see where they are in between some time off when they would have finished their season and have it as part of their December training. 

And for someone who’s been injured for a decent portion of time, an opportunity to get their feet wet before going into Australia is truly invaluable. (The Australian Open, the first Grand Slam on the calendar, starts in 2027.)

FOS: Players are offered equity in WTT. This is similar to what many other upstart leagues like Unrivaled and TGL have done. What is the equity structure?

The majority of players are getting equity in this. We really wanted to attract the headliners, and we wanted to attract our commitment for a longer period of time by offering that. There’s vesting terms as there would be with any technology or any other kind of company where there’s attachments to be able to acquire that equity.

I think that there’s great alignment in terms of where we will go together—and I just think that it’s never been offered to tennis players before, so we’re really excited to be the first.

FOS: The mixed doubles format has been pushed by several major tennis tournaments as of late, including the US Open. Why is that the case? How does it benefit WTT? 

SA: It’s just so clear that this format was so far ahead of its time. They’ve been doing this for 50 years, so it’s not this new fad of trying to get the biggest names in tennis to play mixed doubles.

The top seven or eight performing tournaments in the world are mixed gender combined events. It’s clear what the US Open has done has been awesome. It needed reform and needed to be revamped, but the idea that this is all happening now shows WTT had it; it was just the wrong time.

FOS: It also seems like there’s a focus on the atmosphere and entertainment. What will the vibe be like at WTT?

SA: We believe that the growth of tennis is a large part in combination with the fashion, culture, lifestyle, and entertainment that happens around the sport now. We’ll have a live DJ that’s spinning in the arena. We are excited to invest in having arenas where we can leverage the Jumbotron, other tech elements that really make this more fan-friendly.

It’ll have a high-energy vibe that you would have in pretty much every other sporting event. The US Open does an amazing job at this. We’re going to be more like the US Open than Wimbledon, for sure.