Shanghai, Beijing among front-runners to host ATP World Tour Finals

The ATP World Tour Finals is guaranteed to take place in London next year. However, there’s already an ongoing discussion as to which city will take over from 2016 and beyond.

The tournament has been held in London since 2009 and has been highly successful, according to ATP CEO Chris Kermode.

“We’re here obviously in ’15. We do have a one?year option to stay in ’16, which we have to kick in by think I about March or April next year. It’s been hugely successful here. I think it shows the demand for tennis here in the UK. The two sessions [a day] has worked, which people were severely questioning when we first started.

“But I also have sort of due diligence to look at where the other options are, see what offers are on the table. I think it’s a testament to the strength of what we built up here that there is huge interest from four other regions. We’re currently in discussions.”

A report published at the Telegraph, cited progressive Asian cities such as Shanghai and Beijing as frontrunners. Other Middle-eastern cities such as Doha and Dubai are not far behind in discussions.

Shanghai has hosted the year-end event from 2005 to 2008.

Kermode said that there’s also a possibility that the surface will be changed. In past interviews, world number three Rafael Nadal stated that he would like the season-ending tournament to be contested on clay.

“Rafa I speak to regularly about this. I mean, it’s a good question,” Kermode said. “There is a school of thought that you could change the surface each year to be the season?ending thing. There’s some logic in that. I’m not saying we’re going to do that in case anyone writes that. The other side is it does end the swing of indoor events. So what we try to do, there’s hard-court swings, clay-court swings. This just happens to be at the end of the season that is the indoor swing. I personally think it makes sense to do that. Again, open to looking at anything.”