Mr Disney's most controversial plan among many is the introduction of Round Robin in some tournaments in 2007. Yes, these will be some of the smaller events, but even then it is a ridiculous notion which basically serves to protect the best interests of the Tournament Directors and the top players.
Therefore with this being the case it is another form of apartheid where the people at the top who are already advantaged, get further benefits and while the Tournament Directors have to make money, it's not about them, though since the bottom line is making profits at the expense of the players and as long as it brings more money to Mr.Disney then the rest is just damage that can be written off according to the Mr.Disney gang.
As for whether the players are for this or not, this is very debatable at best. The ATP have said that they allegedly have fan support for this particular change to the game, which is interesting as to where this mysterious fanbase is. Where did they do these surveys and which people did they ask? It's interesting cause there are certain groups of people who wouldn't piss on each other if they were on fire, yet they can agree that RR in tournaments besides the World Team Cup and The Masters Cup is fundamentally flawed at best or a disgrace to the game at worst. Then again it's not difficult to manipulate a question to get a particular response you want.
The knockout system is what makes tennis special and unique and that is how the top players made their way through the ranks of the Futures and Challenger events, and they were able as youngsters to play in these events, where if they won their match then they were guaranteed to go through the next phase.
The common phrase so far is that "Federer may lose once, but he won't lose twice", and this is on the money and as for Federer he used to believe in the system and now he doesn't support the RR. I just wish he would use his influence as the best player in the world to make some people at ATP headquarters make sense.
The fact that there are chances that set ratio will be used to go through to the knockout phase and also if all things are equal, then the player with the higher ranking goes through, that is very fair. Also there is enough suspicion of match fixing within tennis and with these events it will increase the chances and also there is the opportunity for certain results to be fixed to give a greater benefit to a particular player.
One of the main reasons the players have not made more noise about it, is basically in essence they are mercenaries. Well the lower ranked are against it for obvious reasons and their collective voice isn't as great as the elite players and since they have don't have the star power and pull. Also the ATP has increased prizemoney, but as the old saying is that "everyone has their price". Since tennis is a selfish sport, of course they are going to think about the present and not worry about the future.
The biggest problem is that the schedule is too long and this is cosmetic to distract from this problem and how does RR help when it means more matches so to protect the top players. One of the more intelligent things to do would not have Masters events back to back, but that is deemed complex.
Sure these changes will make people like the mafioso Ion Tiriac happy and as for the fans, it's not like they really matter in the scheme of things. The ATP are more interested in the profit and loss column and it does say something when Mercedes a long time sponsor of the game quits at the change of leadership. Also the relationship between the ITF and ATP which was cold at best has now gone even colder at the moment.
Now we can only wait for the results of this experiment, which really should not be taking place and there are more players speaking out against it, the problem is it won't be enough of them or loudly enough. Mr.Disney does not care about the game of tennis and is there just to bring attention to himself and hog the spotlight instead of consolidating and thinking through various strategies. He has a 1000 ideas a day and 1001 of them are bad, on that note it would be for the benefit of tennis as a whole if the Round Robin experiment fails.
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