What did the bosses at Netflix, surely the most powerful people in broadcasting, learn from their first foray into tennis with Break Point, the fly-on-the-wall documentary now into its second season?
On the basis of Sunday’s “The Netflix Slam”, it was that the tennis didn’t matter too much and that less is very much more.
But they were not afraid to splash the cash on star quality for this exhibition match between Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz, a Las Vegas knock-up for two great players who were more than happy to take a big payday in exchange for a glorified practice session.
Exhibitions in tennis are nothing new: they have existed almost as long as the sport, offering players the chance to make a bit of guaranteed money away from the trials of the circuit, where pay is predominantly performance-related.
Nadal has shown nothing if not a keen appetite for financial security in the latter years of his career; he was recently unveiled as an ambassador for Saudi Arabian tennis, a few weeks before the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund confirmed its own deal to partner with men’s professional tennis.
Alcaraz is no stranger to the balance sheet either, having started his season by playing Novak Djokovic in front of the Saudi royal family in Riyadh.
A few months later, both men were charging $150,000 (£118,000) for private lessons in Las Vegas to anyone who would pay, and they did. Both were paid a lot more for the two hours or so they spent on court at Mandalay Bay on Sunday night, rumoured to be over $1m (£790,000).
For such an expensive affair, there were some really amateurish moments. There was no automatic line-calling, the line-judges were poor, the first game was marred by audio feedback and TV commentary coming out of the arena speakers, there were streak marks where the court had been painted, the trophy would have disappointed an under-11 football captain and the production values, in a most un-Netflix way, were poor.
Where they did get it right was the star power: rarely do you find Andy Roddick and Andre Agassi, probably the game’s best pundits, in the same studio. In the commentary box, there are few better than Jim Courier. All three are former world No 1 players and pithy, erudite analysts.
Agassi is an increasingly common sight on TV screens, having often found it easy to disappear in his first 15 years post-retirement. Now his children are into their 20s and he is ready to return to frontline TV punditry (for a price), and fans are the chief beneficiaries.
“[Alcaraz] still doesn’t know how to manage his game, and understand strategy fully, yet,” mused Jim Courier. “But it’s worth remembering [Roger] Federer wasn’t as accomplished as he is at 20 years old. It took him time to figure out what to do all with his massive amount of skill.”
Agassi responded that “Fed was always probing and figuring out ways to make himself better”, without any unearned familiarity. You yearned to hear them ponder more, but Agassi was required elsewhere, probably made to work harder for his pay cheque than any other on the night.
But who won?
Oh yes, the result. In all the excitement, we almost forgot. It looked like Nadal might have rediscovered some of his old mojo in the first set, taking it 6-3 in 38 minutes and capitalising on some Alcaraz tentativeness, having slipped and rolled an ankle in Brazil on his last competitive outing.
Alcaraz came back in the second set (isn’t it funny how often these exhibitions end up going all the way to a deciding tie-breaker?) and then spurned a handful of match points before taking the tie-break 14-12 to win the first “Netflix Slam”, a title commentators were contractually obliged to keep saying but without much pretence that it meant anything.
Both players were rusty. Nadal had already postponed this event once due to injury and has not played for two months due to a hip problem which has stifled the beginning of his farewell tour. He will play in Indian Wells on Thursday night (Friday morning in the UK) and hope to perform much better than he did on Netflix.
The producers will probably not have cared. They got their Nadal screentime, something lacking from Break Point, and they got a “dramatic” match – even if the total lack of jeopardy robbed the clash of anything more than superficial drama.
Does this mean we will see more tennis on Netflix?
It’s hard to imagine that this event alone will have bagged enough new subscribers, or retained enough old ones, to justify its multimillion dollar budget. Selling 10,000 tickets in Mandalay Bay will have helped convinced Netflix bosses and MGM International operators of the concept, but the bottom line is this can only have been a loss-leader.
Amazon Prime has already learned that it is difficult to make tennis rights stick as a going concern, especially in a subscription business where almost everything is about gaining a new customer – which in theory you can only do for each tennis fan once.
But Netflix has already shown a propensity for live events, running a golf event featuring F1 drivers last year, ostensibly a way to promote their two most successful sports documentaries, paving the way for this circus.
You’re unlikely to hear of people in the 20s inviting their “friend with benefits” round for “Wimbledon and chill” any time soon, but these one-off events might become a bit more regular.
The proof of the pudding will be in the viewing figures, which tend to be widely shared if they are good and kept secret if they are not. We await with interest white smoke from Netflix Towers.
