“Imagine if no one talked about Mourinho!” Meet the company that wants tennis coaches to mean business

ATP/WTA - COACHING - INTERVIEW
“Imagine if no one talked about Mourinho!”

It’s no secret that coaches have been unhappy about their situation on Tour for a while. The distress has even grown stronger since the Covid-19 disaster hit. Weekly fees, pay that’s not moving, whereas prize money is on the rise, zero protection, huge turnover and the trend of the trial periods, barely any sponsoring opportunities, and the risk of going extinct as partners or parents more and more replace them.

In this context, Unbox Sports launched last year, sensing a business opportunity in an untapped market: representing coaches, dealing with their contracts, creating content for building their image and finding them deals. Also making sure only professional coaches go through and that these coaches know their responsibilities. I talked to co-founders Yannick Yoshizawa and Flavia Araujo (both on the right of the picture above) - who also had Belgian coach Wim Fissette (currently Iga Swiatek’s coach) trust the idea - about their reasoning, how they’ve been received on Tour by the players and the agents, and what they’re aiming for. They’re currently working with some of the most well-known coaching faces on Tour.

Why Now? The Three Light Bulbs that started all: Commercial, Content and Contracts.
Yannick Yoshizawa : “I think this could have been done a long time ago. But I would say we started because three light bulbs came out, which I saw as an opportunity. It's still early on because if it were obvious, other agencies would have already been doing that.

Before doing this, I was at a technology company, and we did a product and were doing VR training for performance. I was in charge of the tennis product, looking for ambassadors, and doing the marketing, so I noticed how expensive getting a player to do promotion is and that as much as those players might love the product, they're busy, focused on other things, especially when giving feedback comes. So organically, a lot of their coaches were like, ‘Hey, you should do this, you should do that.’ So that was a light bulb. I was like, well, I can get five coaches to be ambassadors for the price of one player. The product development also became much more authentic.

Then, it was about the consistency of talent. The coaches provide a much bigger perspective than the players, and they have their own stories to talk about. So here we have storytelling demanding to happen. That leads to the third light bulb: we would focus on the commercial and media sides. We launched in January 2024 as a soft launch, and then I went to Wim Fissette because I've known him for so long. And he's like, ‘I think it's a great idea. Let's start this. You can use me as a client to see what happens.’ So we got him some sponsorship, but of course, Wim is a different story because he’s been winning Grand Slam titles and so on. But it was a good traction to start.” 

Relieving coaches from the awkward contract talks with players and agents
“When we went to Indian Wells in Miami last year, we were still only with Wim, and I spoke to 30 or 40 coaches, who are like, ‘This is great. We would love this.’ But they said there is one bigger problem, and I would say 90% of these coaches were like, ‘I don't like to negotiate my contracts with the players, with their agents. I always feel that I'm undervalued. I always feel that I cannot ask for more money.’ There was this power structure where the coaches just didn't even want to ask because they didn't want to jeopardize that job. The demand was already there for us.

We started doing that, and we noticed that in every negotiation that we got into, the coaches started being paid 10, 15, and sometimes 20% more because the truth is that these agents and the players know that the coaches deserve to be paid more. They've been paying the coaches what they were paying 10 or 15 years ago, even though the prize money has sometimes doubled in some aspects.

Regarding the content, we thought that if the ATP and the WTA were not going to mandate coaches to go to the press conference, we would start doing our own content. We're going to start reaching out, make their stories known, then we started doing our podcast. We're still trying to figure it out, the brands, activations and whatnot. And then we have a lawyer on our team as well, who looks after contracts.”

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Terminating a bad habit: the bad contracts
Yannick Yoshizawa : ”The reason why there are so many emotional decisions is that there is no consequence to that emotional decision currently, and so much turnover is because there are no termination clauses. We've seen this so often: They have a great six months or three months or nine months, and then all of a sudden, like one week or two weeks are bad, and then they stop working together. But usually, it's because there's nothing in place for them to think twice about what’s going to happen. And then six months later, you get back to the same point because then you realize, ‘Oh actually, that was a great partnership,’ so that’s an emotional decision, and we're all emotional, we cannot do anything about that, so it's just a matter of how can we put safeguards to make this sport better, and it will help the coaches, but it will also help the players too finally by the end.

“Imagine if no one talked about Mourinho”
I hate to compare, but it's like football in Europe. Imagine Mourinho, and imagine if no one had talked about him. Imagine he didn't have any media time.

People know how many titles he's won, but no one talks about how many Grand Slam titles someone like Wim Fissette won, how many players he's coached in the top five, blah, blah, blah. The WTA has started doing that, and now, finally, the Grand Slams and the ATP have approved of (on-court) coaching. Truly, it's just a missing storyline, and we saw the opportunity to get early in this. Now, what the coaches, I do think they appreciate that someone is looking after them. Everyone likes support systems, right? That's what the coaches want initially, and then they hope it's an evolution to bring them more money.”

How to sell it to the players and their agents? Usually, they don’t like the middlemen…
Yannick Yoshizawa : “The first impression, you're nailed, is like, ‘oh my gosh, now I have to deal with this person.’ Not because they don't like the middlemen, but because they know they will have to pay so much more than what was used to for 10 years, 20 years. But now, after a few contracts, our experience was much more positive because even the agent always felt like, ‘I don't like to have that conversation.’ It's not appealing to the coach, and even on the other side, when Naomi and Wim decided to split, it's not an easy conversation for the agent to have with the coach. So, having that middle person to deal with that communication part reduces the conflicts.

In the end, if you have more professional contracts, and if you give more exposure to more coaches, then the coaches who are not there for the right reasons, they're going to start filtering out because when you interview them, and they don't know what to say, well then you're not going to have the boyfriends or whatever it is. Also, I wouldn't say the players are paying less and less, but the players do not want to increase the pay like prize money has. But once you negotiate, they understand. The elephant in the room is that no one wants to say, ‘You need to have this certification to sit in the box.’ When Zidane wanted to become a coach, he had to go to FIFA training because it was better for the sport in general.

Facilitating the workflow for everybody involved

Flavia Araujo: “I found that with that scenario in which we're facilitating things for coaches (as they did at this year’s Australian Open), the agents also saw an opportunity to load off some of the obligations of the player: Now we're actually a bigger team. I can sit down at the table with the coach and the player and not in a way that we're intruding. There's a fine line, but the agent knows that as soon as it's helpful, as soon as there's an opportunity, we can step in as their teammate whenever you need. We have the resources and the ways to do it. We'll talk to the coach and figure it out. 

They saw a lot of value, and we got many messages of thank yous and how appreciative they were. So maybe the players still may have some unknown feelings about this new experience, and we'll learn from that, but from what we have learned so far, especially from the agent's perspective, as the agent is making a lot of decisions for the player, we can really be a great teammate to that team. Everybody knows that the things that we do are in the best interest of the team because their images are interconnected, and their success is connected. 

We've all been in the tennis industry in some fashion for a long time, so those are connections and relationships that we care about, and that's what makes Unbox Sports stand out. We care, we're small, we're honest and transparent about where we are in our journey with ourselves, with our coaches, with the industry. We're putting in the time, we're trying to figure it out here, and we want to give this a chance. The coaches respect that, too.

What are the goals? Contracts and monthly salaries (instead of paying them weekly)
Yannick Yoshizawa: “These are not concrete numbers, but to give a sense of direction of where we think this is going: In two years, we truly believe that all coaches in the top 200 will have a contract with players. And it's gonna be us. We're not gonna do 400 contracts, but we're gonna do the majority of them. That's the market share. But you need to prove it, and then I think Flavia has done an incredible job in putting them out there.

My goal as a business is to have standards in the industry when it comes to contracts. I would set a goal that 60% of the coaches should have monthly salaries, 60 to 70 percent of coaches should have termination clauses, and hopefully, 80% should have at least a piece of paper signed by both sides, just a piece of paper or a napkin with both names saying hey we're gonna work together. A success from the commercial side would be to see 50% of these coaches having sponsors on their clothing, and a bigger success would be for it to be the same sponsors as the players so as a team, it looks clean. And then I also think that it should be mandatory for all coaches to be at press conferences.”

Flavia Araujo: “It would be really cool to have us be a part of the framework for the bigger tournaments as an engine that helps the coaches. It's something to introduce as a partnership moving forward as long as it continues to bring value for both sides and actually amplify the impact and the benefits of bringing the coaches to the light.

You're also going to see that with us putting more exposure on the coaches, it’ll come with more responsibility, so if the coaches feel more eyes and more materials on them, they also have a different sense of responsibility. They have a different sense of behavior and how to go about things. They're going to be professional. Now, there’s a voice behind them, which is us telling them, ‘That wasn't cool. Let's talk about it and remove the emotional conversation, but let's talk business, let’s talk fairness, and from someone coming from the business world into the tennis world, you wonder why those things are not in place, things that would absolutely not be accepted in the business world.”

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QUESTION OF THE DAY
Should They Get More Respect?

You were 94,74% to think that Madison Keys winning the Australian Open this year was good for the sport.

BUSINESS / MEDIA 
More Money All Around

Who gets a bigger bag?

• The Laver Cup welcomes Genesys, “the global leader in cloud customer experience and contact center solutions,” as an official sponsor. The brand will be a global supplier for the event in 2025 (San Francisco, Sept. 19-21).

• The French Tennis Federation signed a new sponsoring deal with SVR dermatological laboratory that aims to put sustainability at the heart of its business. The company has been involved with the FFT since September 2024 and signed until August 2027. The brand will be activated during many FFT invents and will also appear on the outfits of the French players during the Davis Cup.

• Irish sports tech company Output has secured $4,8 million in funding. “Output Sports' technology enables strength and conditioning coaches, sports scientists, and rehab professionals to capture and analyse athletic data using a single wearable sensor system. It is currently used by more than 800 sports organisations, including over half of all English Premier League clubs,” reports RTE.

SOME BREAK POINTS… 
The US Open and the Australian Open are shaking the scheduling

And it all started in Paris. When Roland-Garros moved its start to the Sunday instead of the traditional Monday (to make more money), nobody would have thought that years later, it’d spread. And yet! The Australian Open ended up moving to the Sunday, and now the US Open has announced it will do the same. Guess what? Melbourne - which had record crowd numbers - was like, hold my vegemite, and is now thinking about moving to…the Saturday. Wimbledon? I’m sure you guessed it: Wimbledon is apparently shrugging all of this and will, for now, remain a Monday start. “I think the appetite to go to 15 days is zero, first and foremost because of the courts… From Wimbledon’s point of view, 14 days for the championships is enough,” said Tim Henman. Will it change once they get the new setup with qualifications happening on the main site? Time will tell.

Why this frenzy? Well, the week of qualifications has been turned into a real event now, seeing tons of fans coming in to watch the matches but also have fun through the various activities, catch a glimpse of the stars at training, and even get to attend exhibition matches on the ground. Grand Slams are now a full three-week event.

Do I have an issue with this? Not really, as it was great last year in Paris to see so much activity on the ground during the quallies. I’d only say, though, that it’s not ideal for the sport to have the four biggest events suddenly deciding to go on their own regarding the scheduling. It’s like when they decided to change the rules for the tie-breaks of the third set and fifth set: it took them a year to get that it should be the same rule everywhere. So here it’s going to have to follow suit at some point: same start of the tournament for everybody, please. Also, good luck to Craig Tiley for trying to convince main draw players to start on the Saturday, and also good luck to the Tour for avoiding being at war with the ATP and WTA events happening on that week.

• Felix Auger-Aliassime clinched his second title of the season, on Sunday in Montpellier. The Canadian, already a winner in Adelaide, ended the dream run of Aleksandar Kovacevic in a final that provided all the thrills of a blockbuster.

• Ekaterina Alexandrova won in Linz against Dayana Yastremska in the final.

• Belgian Elise Mertens got her hands on the title for the return of Singapore onto the tennis scene.

• The PTPA is launching an initiative to financially help players facing doping accusations.

• Daniil Medvedev has terminated its collaboration with former French player Gilles Simon after a year. Gilles Cervara will now be his only coach.

• Davide Sanguinetti decided it was a good choice to enter the Elena Rybakina drama-filled team, duetting with Stefano Vukov.

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READ: Davis Cup shenanigans in full force: French arguing with Brazilians, and Belgians landing on Chileans followed by a disqualification of the Chilean. A mess.

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