MELBOURNE, January 29, 2016

A new men’s team event is set to start in 2017, as the CEO Tennis Australia Craig Tiley announced the Rod Laver Cup in Melbourne on Thursday.

The concept is similar to the Ryder Cup, when Europe faces the rest of the world with six players in each team, four of them based on their ATP ranking. The other two will be picked by each team captain. It is going to be a 3-days-event, played annually in late September, with the exception of the Olympic years.  Three singles matches and one doubles match should be played each day. In the event of a tie after the 12 scheduled matches, a final doubles encounter would be played to determine the winner. There would be no permanent site, but it is planned to hold the 2017 event in Europe on an indoor hardcourt.

The Laver Cup was created by Team8, the agency that represents Roger Federer. It will be also backed by Tennis Australia, the organizers of the first Grand Slam tournament of the season, as well as Swiss-Brazilian businessman Jorge Paulo Lemann. He is ranked among the 30 richest people in the world with an estimated net worth of US-$26 billion. In his youth, he won the Brazilian National Tennis Championships five times and also played Davis Cup for Brazil and Switzerland.