Roger Federer moves into sports management

New York: In the latest shift in a sports management business that appears to be trending toward the boutique, Roger Federer has joined with his long-time agent Tony Godsick and two US investors to form an agency called Team8.

The company, based in the Cleveland area and headed by Godsick, will represent the interests of Federer, the 32-year-old Swiss tennis star, who is one of the world’s highest-earning and most popular athletes. But Team8 also has signed one of Federer’s main rivals, the fifth-ranked Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina, with input from Federer, who spent considerable time with Del Potro on an exhibition tour of South America last year.

Grigor Dimitrov, a rising 22-year-old Bulgarian who many tennis experts view as a potential Grand Slam champion, confirmed in an email that he would also join Team8, effective January 1.

That would give the new agency a strong foothold in both the present and the future of tennis and would be a symbolic move for the 23rd-ranked Dimitrov, a player who was once nicknamed Baby Fed and whose flowing, all-court game and one-handed backhand have long elicited stylistic comparisons with Federer.

Godsick declined to confirm Dimitrov’s signing, but he did make clear that the intent was not to create another big agency in the mould of the International Management Group, where Godsick, an American, worked for nearly 20 years before he and Federer left in 2012.

“We’re trying to be a boutique agency that will manage just a small stable of iconic athletes,” Godsick said in a telephone interview from the firm’s new offices in Pepper Pike, Ohio, in Cleveland’s eastern suburbs.

“We’re really going to try to be selective here. Some of the other groups, they look to sign as many players as they can and hope a few of them stick and make it, and they really go after the juniors. We’re not going to.”

Godsick said that Team8 was also interested in acquiring or creating events and in representing athletes in sports other than tennis, as well as entertainers. He said that Federer, who is training hard and testing new rackets in Dubai after a difficult season in which he dropped to No.7 in the rankings, would be a client and not an active partner for now. But Godsick said the agency had been created in part to give Federer a platform when he retires.

“I can sell Roger Federer really well, but nobody sells Roger better than Roger,” Godsick said. “I always joke with him, ‘Look, you’ve been really successful on the tennis court, but I promise you, you’ll be more successful when you’re done playing tennis’.”