Well we could call it that the leagues buy the WTT if that sounds better. Or a bunch of top players could get together with some businessmen and start their own organization which buys out the WTT and the leagues. At the end of the day it's just a corporate merger. How the governance would work between the players, associations, tournaments, leagues, etc. would need to be worked out. But the key point is they could all collectively generate more revenue if they stopped competing against each other and putting on so many events.
league and WTT should be different tiers
in face totally different.
in NBA, you have league, then FIBA world champs
in tennis, you don't have leagues, but have ATP tours (and other tours).
so the history of table tennis is leagues
WTT want to remove leagues all together and make players full time like ATP
WTT has been waterdowned to near 100 events under its umbrella, and i'm almost certain if the financial statement are shown, no one will want to buy it.
you hear of money buying clubs. Haven't heard of money buying federations.
But again, this is conflict of interest and against the constitution - so while we have some fun talking about it, WTT/ITTF does not allow people to buy it, so case close?
and they should not be competing against each other - that is where the problem started.
WTT has fulled the schedule so much ,that leagues are holding back schedule releases, waiting for WTT to update them and then plan around it.
Look at German league finals, especially the womens - happening in the middle of summer, because there is no time to have the finals earlier.
I see the leagues are supporting the players as much in wtt participation and taking a backfoot in scheduling.
But ask any player, any league, any federation if they enjoy the scheduling - I will be amazed if you find a higher number in favor of.
I've lived in the US all my life so I'm only vaguely familiar with the details of the various national TT leagues, which is why I'm asking about this. Perhaps the politics/institutions/languages are simply too hard to overcome to get all of the leagues/clubs and the WTT to merge. But this type of consolidation is exactly what happened in tennis in the 1980s.
each league has they values, merging doesn't make it better. They need to be of bonding culture to merge.
You should just allow each league to do they own and the sport benefits. Have you seen American sport league merge with other countries? no right? at most partnership - having a world series, ie flying 2 NBA teams to Asia and have some matches there.
With tennis, it was tours, tennis doesn't have leagues.
In fact, there is too much tours with WTT now, its so crazy that staff retention rate is terrible and the staff is getting paid to same to do double or triple the work as before.
with WTT, is more really better?
