The tennis profession of Naomi Osaka, one among the largest sports celebrities on this planet, has taken on certain familiar characteristics in the course of the past 16 months.
Her achievements have been limited on the court due to a series of self-imposed layoffs to administer her struggles with mental health, motivation challenges and the occasional physical ailment, but she has enjoyed wild success off the court, solidifying her status as one among the world’s highest-paid athletes and by far the highest-paid female athlete.
As she sits out the Italian Open to nurse an Achilles’ injury and prepare for the yr’s second Grand Slam event, the French Open, set for later this month, Osaka announced that she could be starting a representation agency to take further control of her mounting business portfolio. Osaka and her longtime agent, Stuart Duguid, have left IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate, to start Evolve, which is able to manage Osaka’s business interests and potentially those of other clients the agency may sign.
News of Osaka’s decision to start out Evolve was first reported by Sportico.
A four-time Grand Slam singles champion, Osaka, 24, earned roughly $60 million last yr, in keeping with Forbes, with an estimated $55 million coming from greater than a dozen corporate sponsors. She was tied for twelfth on the Forbes list of top-earning athletes with Tiger Woods. Conor McGregor, the mixed martial artist, held the highest spot on the list, earning $180 million.
In an interview Wednesday, Duguid said Osaka’s most important priority remained winning tennis matches and tournaments. He said her typical day involves training and coverings together with her physiotherapist within the morning followed by lunch, but once that’s over, she almost at all times wants to interact in her cultural or business interests.
“She’s not someone who likes to play video games and binge Netflix all day,” said Duguid, who has worked closely with Osaka since she was a teen.
Osaka’s rating has tumbled prior to now yr and a half, largely because she has played so little. She was ranked second on this planet originally of 2021, but dropped to eighty fifth this yr. She made the finals of the Miami Open in April, and is as much as thirty eighth, and he or she hopes to climb back into the highest 10 by the tip of the yr.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t need to be No. 1 again,” she said on the tournament in Miami.
A spokesman for IMG declined to comment.
Losing a star of Osaka’s magnitude is a major loss for the corporate, though it’s going to probably proceed to earn money on existing endorsement deals that it negotiated on her behalf. She is one among a handful of transcendent tennis stars IMG has represented prior to now twenty years. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal left the IMG fold in recent times to start out businesses with their agents, Tony Godsick and Carlos Costa.
For Osaka, the goal of Evolve is just not simply to lower your expenses on paying commissions to a 3rd party, but additionally to grow her business portfolio to $150 million annually in the approaching years, from roughly $50 million today, but not by signing deals that put more company logos on her tennis outfits.
Duguid said Osaka might actually pare down her endorsement portfolio. The model for Evolve is analogous to businesses arrange by several of Osaka’s role models within the sports industry, a lot of whom have change into close friends, including LeBron James and Stephen Curry. Osaka was also close with Kobe Bryant, who died in 2020 in a helicopter crash and who was an early mentor to her.
She has been weighing a enterprise like Evolve for the reason that Tokyo Olympics, where she lit the Olympic cauldron and was the face of the Games in Japan, her home country. Osaka has wanted more leeway to take a position in businesses, have an ownership stake in them and grow her own. She began Kinlò, a skincare products company focused on individuals with melanated, or darker, skin tones, last yr.
That announcement got here days after Osaka exited the U.S. Open after being upset by Leylah Fernandez, an unseeded Canadian, within the third round. She announced in a teary news conference after the match that she planned to take an indefinite break from tennis. She had previously taken seven weeks off after she dropped out of the French Open last spring following a conflict with tournament organizers. Osaka had stated that she wouldn’t take part in mandatory news conferences after matches. Organizers had threatened to throw her out of the tournament if she didn’t fulfill her news media obligations, so Osaka withdrew.
Neither the breaks nor her drop within the rankings appears to have affected her ability to grow her business off the court. Now, Duguid said, she is going to attempt to retain her leading position off the court as she tries to regain the one she once had on it.
“That is something that scratches an itch on the side for her,” he said.
