The PTPA’s Nassar says there is no intention to rip apart the sport, in the way the LIV Tour has divided golf. He goes so far as to say settling out of court is one of the association’s goals.
“The goal is not to litigate this to the end,” Nassar says.
“We are absolutely prepared to do that. We’ve built a real organisation, we’ve built a war chest to be able to see this through.
“But what we want is to get everybody to the table to reform the sport the way that many of them have already spoken about.”
Those talks will not be easy to organise. There is a lot of bad blood between the PTPA and the tours. On Tuesday, the ATP accused the PTPA of consistently choosing “division and distraction through misinformation over progress”.
“Happy to add defamation to our lawsuits,” was Nassar’s response on social media.
The ATP will have confidence in its legal position after winning an anti-trust case brought by the German Tennis Federation in 2008 and so some of the PTPA’s demands may need to be addressed by a court.
The US legal process could take years to reach the requested jury trial, although Margaret Garnett has already been appointed as the judge.
The UK complaint has been filed to the Competition and Markets Authority, which is the country’s principal competition regulator. There were six different plaintiffs for this case, including Corentin Moutet of France and British men’s number nine Jay Clarke.
But Clarke later withdrew, saying he did “not fully align” with the case.
And the EU challenge, which also lists different plaintiffs, has been lodged with the European Commission, in the hope that the EU’s main executive body will find “severe infringements of its competition rules”.
What is certain is that this will be a very costly exercise for all sides, which will financially affect the tours and the players for as long it lasts.