New blow to management as Rafa jumps ship ...

Seeing as I've re-discovered my full access to The Times, I thought I'd bring over a couple of other pieces.

This one is to advise that like Federer, Rafa is also jumping ship from IMG - just as Djokovic gets in on the party. They must be giving him plenty of the filthy lucre to lure him over as soon as the two jewels in their crown have left. Gives him more $$$s to tuck away in his Monte Carlo tax haven home bank account, doesn't it?

And there seems to be a suggestion that Rafa will set up on his own, with his Dad and Carlos Costa.

Here's the article ...

Rafael Nadal is preparing to join Roger Federer and leave IMG Worldwide, the sports management company, just as it announces the recruitment of Novak Djokovic, the world No 1, to its portfolio of sporting stars.

When Federer declined to sign the new contract offered by IMG in May, the upshot was bound to be a realignment of the representative forces in tennis. The prospect of Nadal taking a similar decision — setting up on his own with his father, Sebastián, and Carlos Costa, his manager, taking care of his business enterprises — prompted the pursuit of Djokovic, for which IMG’s head of tennis, Fernando Soler, was in Monaco last week to finalise negotiations.

The loss of Nadal from the books will be another blow to the prestige of IMG, which had the world at its feet when Mark McCormack was the supremo. The company’s credibility has taken a number of knocks since his death in 2003. At least persuading Djokovic that he should move from the Creative Artists Agency to become its tennis top dog will be seen as a significant consolation prize.

Mike Dolan, the IMG chief executive, told the Financial Times before the Djokovic signing that the rise in the value of sports rights was inflating the size of deals that sport stars could attract, making it harder to hold on to the top names, such as Federer and, it appears, Nadal.

The next story is whether Andy Murray will re-sign for XIX Entertainment, which has managed him for the past three years. The signs are that, despite moves from IMG and Lagardère Unlimited to prise him away from the company owned by Simon Fuller, the music entrepreneur, that Murray will remain loyal.

Whoever represents whom, the stars of the game will be playing for greater wealth than ever at the Australian Open next month. The grand-slam tournament has announced that the two champions will each receive A$2.4 million (about £1.56 million) and there will be a 32.7 per cent increase in prize money for the first-round losers, in line with recent announcements from fellow grand-slam events.

Nadal, who stepped down from his position as a vice-president on the ATP Player Council during this year, nonetheless greeted the news. “It is good to see that tennis keeps improving, keeps being healthy,” he said. “That is what we fought for, to make our sport bigger.

“This improved situation will help, but we cannot stop here. We need to keep working hard to make it bigger and bigger and to keep improving a lot of things, and especially for the guys of lower ranking, that they have more opportunities to keep travelling every week and to have a good career.”

The Spaniard also greeted with enthusiasm the news that, from 2015, there will be a three-week gap between the French Open and Wimbledon, thus extending the grass-court season. “I hope to enjoy these weeks,” he said. “I really work hard for that. My goal is [the Olympic Games in] Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

“For you, three weeks on grass is great, and for me, too. It is an historic surface, which is less aggressive for the joints and for our bodies, and it is great to create more tournaments on this surface.

“I would like to see more tournaments on clay in the future, too. The sport has to move in the right direction and that is to try to have players longer on the tour. Playing so much on hard courts makes it very difficult to predict that it will happen.”