Prepared for The Coca-Cola Company · September 2026
A tapestry of emotions, on a clock.
You wrote that about football in January. We built a sport that does it in an hour and forty minutes — forty-three times in 2026, sixty-five in 2027 — with three women and three men on one shared score. This is not a hometown pitch. It is a format pitch.
A partnership proposal · about five minutes
“This one you can have fun.” — in the stands, Atlanta
A gender-balanced Professional Team Tennis League
Eight playing weeks in the middle of the summer. Switch the view to see the
same season against the American sports year, or against the college calendar our players come from.
INTENNSE Grand Slams Team events
INTENNSE Regular season Postseason
INTENNSE Regular season Postseason & championships
2026 season. INTENNSE: 5 June – 1 August, 58 days, one dark week for Wimbledon. Sources: data.intennse.com/2026/calendar.tsv; published tournament calendars.2026 calendar year. The NBA and NHL finished on 13 and 14 June; the NFL’s season opens 9 September; LOVB ran January to April. Only MLB is in season through INTENNSE’s eight weeks. Sources: published league calendars; INTENNSE figures from data.intennse.com.NCAA Division I, 2026 as it happened. Both the men’s and the women’s team championships finished on Sunday 17 May at the Dan Magill Tennis Complex in Athens, Georgia — Virginia over Texas, Texas A&M over Auburn. The NCAA has moved singles and doubles out of May: they are now a November event, so a graduating senior has nothing left on the college calendar at all. Basketball’s season opened in November 2025; the January football block is the 2025 season’s playoff. D-I carries 5,207 tennis players across 541 programmes. Sources: ncaa.com championship releases, official school schedules, NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report 2024–25.
Where our players have been on the tour, and where they sit on the rating that
covers everyone. The orange rule is where tennis starts paying for itself.
Career high September 2026MVP race ↗ (second scale) alone = no tour ranking, placed by MVP standingName in yellow = straight from college
Rounds 1–3 of the 2026 draft, plus three players the draft board leaves out altogether and one fourth-round pick: 56 in all. Forty-seven carry an ATP or WTA career high. The nine below the dotted line in each panel have no tour ranking on record and are placed by where they finished in the league’s own MVP race — among them Sofia Cabezas, fifth in that race, and Corey Craig, thirteenth, straight out of Florida State. Two more carry a career high but no current singles ranking, so they show a career-high dot alone. Fourth-round picks are otherwise excluded — 2027 rosters are three women and three men. The one exception is John Chin, 19th of 31 men over four Arcs, ahead of eight higher picks including two first-rounders. A player placed by MVP standing needs more than one Arc behind the number: Season Score is the sum of a player’s best six rounds divided by six, so a single appearance is not a season. Ranking axis runs worst to best, left to right, as in the UTR chart below. The MVP race is a separate scale, and it stops at our own best-ranked player rather than running the width of the chart — it ranks these players against each other inside the league, not against the tour. Aliona Bolsova sits inside that line on both counts: a career high of 88, inside a Grand Slam draw, and first in the 2026 MVP race. A career high is never drawn worse than the player’s current ranking: where a recorded best is stale, the best is at least today’s rank and the two collapse to a single point. Tier cut-offs: main draw top 128 — the draw size of a Grand Slam — Challenger 129–350, ITF Futures 351–900 (the ITF renamed the Futures circuit the World Tennis Tour in 2019). The orange rule is the break-even ranking — where prize money covers the cost of competing. It is drawn at ~150, which is where a peer-reviewed 2026 study puts it once a realistic cost base including a coach is counted — and every professional has a coach. The faint rule behind it is the ITF’s own 2013 figure, 336 for men and 253 for women, which sits at a worse ranking only because those costs exclude coaching and all support-team expense. It is the bar nobody actually competes under. Against the real bar: of the 26 men here with a career high, all 26 never reached 150; of 21 women, 19 never did — the exceptions are Aliona Bolsova at 88 and Usue Arconada at 130. On today’s rankings it is unanimous: 25 of 25 ranked men and 20 of 20 ranked women sit outside break-even. Sources: draft.intennse.com, stats.intennse.com MVP race, intennse.com player pages, Tennis Abstract, retrieved 20–21 September 2026; ITF Pro Circuit Review, Stage One: Data Analysis, December 2014; Schöttl et al., Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 29 June 2026.
UTR: our players against the tour’s
INTENNSE player Straight from collegeTop three picks per team Tour band (10th–90th percentile)
Bands derived from 286 players who publish both a UTR rating and an ATP/WTA ranking, taken at the 10th–90th percentile of each tier. INTENNSE ratings: the top three men and three women per 2026 roster — 28 men and 30 women carry a rating on the league’s own draft board. Source: draft.intennse.com players board, retrieved 20 September 2026.
Down to the wire; Sudden Death
Two Arcs that finished a point apart. Each clip picks up in the closing minutes,
with the full Arc a click away.
Sudden death, level at 142
The final three minutes of Freeze v Rise, 20 June. The clock runs out with the teams tied, and the next point decides it: 143–142.
“Football is more than a game; it’s a shared passion with a tapestry of
emotions that unites billions.”
Arnab Roy, President, Coca-Cola Global Category · January 2026
The same release describes a rollercoaster of emotions
turning mundane moments into shared experiences, with Coca-Cola as the companion through the
drama and the delight. That is a description of a product, and the product is not football. It is
any sport compressed enough that the emotions arrive faster than the boredom.
Tennis is not that. A five-set match is four hours long and one person wins it
alone. We rebuilt it: three women and three men on each team, one shared cumulative
score, about an hour and forty minutes. Every point counts the same whoever wins it, so
the scoreboard never stops moving and the finish is almost never settled early. Two Arcs last
season were decided by a single point.
■ The clip
We did not write this. A child in the stands did.
The film at the top of this page is a boy in a cowboy hat, at an INTENNSE
match in Atlanta, being asked what he makes of it. He came to watch his sister play. What he
says is: “this one you can have fun.”
It is the most Coca-Cola thing anyone has ever said about tennis, and it was
said by accident, by someone who had never seen the sport played this way. We have spent a
year trying to write a better line and have not managed it.
Atlanta, Season 2
■ You have done this before
In 2014 you put your name in front of a co-ed team tennis league that did not exist yet.
The Coca-Cola International Premier Tennis League
Five sets a tie — men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s
doubles, mixed doubles, and a champions’ set. No-ad scoring. City
franchises. Standings by games won. Federer, Djokovic, Murray, Nadal, Sharapova and Serena all
played it, and Coca-Cola was in the title from the first season.
It was signed by an operating unit, not by a global platform committee. That is the
only precedent we need, and it is yours.
It did not last, and the reason is the reason we exist.
The IPTL was an exhibition: five city legs across a fortnight, players on appearance fees, no
home market, no salaried roster, no season and no table. When the appearance fees stopped, so did
the league.
We are the inverse on every one of those four. Players are
salaried employees, not entrants. There is a home city. There is a season — forty-three
matches this year, sixty-five next. And there is a table, which means results in June still
matter in August.
■ How you bought the last one
You did not buy perimeter. You bought moments.
In July you joined the Kings World Cup Clubs — a format invented four
years ago — and the structure of what you took is the interesting part: Coca-Cola
on the goal-scoring moments, Powerade on the hydration breaks. Not boards. Beats.
Our format is built out of beats, because it runs on a clock and the score never
resets. Here is what is available in the same shape:
The final sixty secondsWhere the score is most often decided, and the only
minute of the night nobody looks away from.
The two-point BoltThe shot that can swing a tie in one point. Two Arcs last
season finished on one.
Sudden deathLevel on the clock, next point wins. It happened twice in
2026.
The ball keepersThey wear the jersey and are part of the team, not staff
— which makes a first afternoon on a professional court a whole family’s way into
the sport.
■ Why here, and why it travels
Coke Studio started in one country. This is the same move.
Coke Studio began as a single-market music property in Pakistan and became
a global platform, because the format travelled even though the city did not. We are asking
you to read Atlanta the same way: not as a hometown, but as the place with the highest
density of tennis players in America and therefore the right place to prove something built
to export.
ALTA, founded in Atlanta in 1934, calls itself the largest tennis-based
community organisation in the world and reports more than 60,000 members.
Tennis is played in every country you sell in. A team format that fits a broadcast window and
puts men and women on the same scoreboard is the version of it that could travel.
Season 2, Atlanta
■ Where you already are, and are not
Thirty-two positions in this city. None of them in the sport it plays most.
32Coca-Cola sponsorships in Atlanta — the most of any brand
0Tennis properties in the portfolio, anywhere
43→65Arcs in 2026, growing to 65 in 2027
478,483Unique viewers, Season 2
You already back a women’s team here — you
are an Atlanta Dream partner. This is the co-ed version, in summer, in a window where the NBA and
NHL have finished and the NFL has not started. And there is no tennis anywhere in the portfolio
to conflict with it.
■ The ask
An hour, and the moments list.
Not a stadium board and not a pouring deal. A format partnership structured the
way you structured the last one: named moments, on the clock, in a product that manufactures the
thing you have sold for a century.
We will bring the full inventory, what each piece delivered in 2026 where we can
prove it, and the three-year shape as teams move into their own markets in 2028.