There are many ways to break down this year’s Wimbledon draw: by nationality, by seeding, by top half, by bottom half or — if you are in a commercial frame of mind — by management company.  Tracking which superstar, or perhaps more important, which rising star, is represented by which organization continues to be a tournament within a Grand Slam tournament. It is as meaningful to the agents and the players as the forehands and backhands are to the fans, most of whom remain oblivious to the fact that Roger Federer is now with a management company called Team8 instead of his former agency, IMG.  IMG has long been the market leader in the hawking of tennis players. The company was founded in 1960 by Mark McCormack, an American lawyer who saw a niche and began making money from it by reaching a handshake agreement with the star golfer Arnold Palmer. Under McCormack and later Ted Forstmann, the company was transformed into a tentacled global sports and entertainment firm. In tennis, IMG owned tournaments, developed talent in many sports through its academy in Bradenton, Fla., and represented tennis’s biggest stars.  But after Forstmann died in 2011, IMG’s future was uncertain until the entertainment and media agency William Morris Endeavor and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners joined forces (and checkbooks) to purchase it in December 2013 for $2.4 billion.  It was a bold gamble that left, at least in tennis circles, a $2.4 billion question: Would the merged company, under the chief executives Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell, want to remain a major player in investing in the sport and managing tennis stars at a time of reduced margins, increased competition and high-profile defections from the traditional agency model?  A little more than a year since William Morris Endeavor took over IMG, the answer is an unmistakable yes, even if bad luck and bad play — by the rising Canadian star Eugenie Bouchard in particular — have made some of the company’s early tennis moves look less than masterful.  “Tennis and golf are synonymous with IMG,” said Whitesell, who played high school tennis in Iowa. “You are always looking for the next talent, so that will always be part of it. But I think we will always be very focused high-end on people we think can be a dominant player, and also, secondly, how can we help them broadening to opportunities to extend from tennis?  “One of the things you’re seeing now is that whether you have fashion brands that want to be around tennis players or traditional athletic brands that want to be around actors or musicians, all those walls have come down.”  William Morris Endeavor represents some of Hollywood’s leading talent, including the actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, but before the IMG purchase, its lone active tennis client was Serena Williams. The combination of firms created a global stable of players. IMG represents Maria Sharapova, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, and Li Na, the first Chinese player to win a Grand Slam singles title. Li retired late last season but remains a big part of the company’s plans.  Other top IMG clients include Kei Nishikori — from Japan, an important market for the firm — and top-ranked Novak Djokovic, courted in 2012 in a feverish attempt to plug the holes left by Federer and Rafael Nadal, who have left with their representatives in recent years to start their own boutique agencies.  Since the takeover, IMG Tennis has signed or reached commercial agreements with established players (Petra Kvitova and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga) and emerging stars (Bouchard and Nick Kyrgios), as well as the usual young prospects not yet swimming in the Grand Slam fish bowl.  “I think the focus on accumulating as much talent as possible is a real priority for IMG now,” said John Tobias, president of tennis at the rival agency Lagardère Unlimited. “Ari and Patrick are talent guys. That’s how they started their careers, managing talent, and they really view it — whether it’s an actor, an actress or an athlete — as the talent is the hook to building out other parts of their business. I think that has made IMG, in the tennis world, extremely aggressive recently.”  Aggressive but not always prescient, based on 2015 results. Kvitova, the reigning Wimbledon champion and the No. 2 seed behind Williams this year, won the Madrid Open but has struggled for much of the season with motivation and injuries. Tsonga missed much of the early season, too, before roaring back to reach the French Open semifinals.  Bouchard has been the biggest on-court disappointment. She split with her coach, Nick Saviano, in the off-season and then won only four of 16 matches since a quarterfinal run at the Australian Open. But at age 21, her commercial prospects and chances of rebounding remain strong, even if it is not clear which agency will benefit. Rivals of WME/IMG claim that the Bouchard deal is a short-term agreement, while WME/IMG would not confirm this.  Kyrgios, the charismatic Australian shotmaker, remains the young male player who generates the most global buzz, in part because of his roots: His mother was born in Malaysia, his father in Greece. But for now, IMG Tennis is not his sole representative. It is in a partnership with his longtime agent, John Morris.  WME/IMG remains a work in progress. A number of top IMG executives left or were dismissed after the takeover, and the debt load is heavy. IMG remains handcuffed at the Miami Open, the most significant tournament it owns, by a legal battle that limits its ability to expand and keep pace with the increasingly opulent Indian Wells event, which is owned by the billionaire Larry Ellison. And it is blocked from increasing its event holdings by rules limiting the number of tournaments that can be owned by a single company to four on the Association of Tennis Professionals Tour, even though Emanuel and Whitesell have said they are interested in acquiring more tournaments.  IMG is perhaps the best example of a tennis omnivore with its appetite for events and players, and its deeply entrenched influence in the administration of the sport. But tennis is a sport in which apparent conflicts of interest are particularly prevalent.  Take, for example, the legion of tennis broadcasters who have connections, sometimes commercial, to the players on whom they comment. Darren Cahill works for Adidas in its player development program, but he calls matches for ESPN involving players under contract with Adidas. Justin Gimelstob coaches John Isner, yet he has commented on some of Isner’s matches recently for Tennis Channel.  IMG has long had employees on the board of directors of both the men’s and women’s tours, but one of the potential pitfalls of such an arrangement is obvious: Increases in prize money that benefit players working with an agency could hinder the profits at tournaments owned by that same agency. A client’s soaring appearance fees could mean that he or she is effectively priced out of IMG-owned events.  “When we represent talent, we represent the best interests of the talent,” said Tobias of Lagardère. “We don’t have some alternative interests in the back of our mind that we need to keep prize money down so the Chennai tournament does better financially, or we don’t want the prize money at Indian Wells to go up dramatically so that Miami will have to match it.  “It’s a tricky thing. Look, I’m not saying they are doing anything wrong. I’m just saying because they are so big and powerful, there are conflicts that will pop up for sure.”  And IMG is not alone in this — a rival agency, Octagon, also has an employee, Jorge Salkeld, on the Women’s Tennis Association board.  Fernando Soler, the head of the tennis division at WME/IMG, said that the company was “always a target” but that conflict was inherent in the tennis world.  “Everybody picks on IMG when it’s time to talk about the conflict of interest,” he said, adding: “Everybody is conflicted. If you are not conflicted, it means you are no one, because you do very little.”  Emanuel and Whitesell, coming from Hollywood and beyond, reject the idea that their company or another could have too large an influence over an industry like tennis.  “No conflict, no interest,” Emanuel said. “We represent writers, directors, actors in television who put shows on the air. Same thing with movies. We have Lollapalooza, where we put acts. It is the nature of it. In every vertical we do that. The great thing about the business is if you don’t treat the client properly, whether it be in television, movies, tennis, golf, etc., there’s a door.”  The question is whether WME/IMG, as it builds toward a possible initial public offering, can keep future Federers and Nadals and their agents from walking through that door to create their own smaller shops.  “I had a great 20 years at IMG,” said Tony Godsick, Federer’s agent, “but as Roger’s career boomed, his interests were increasingly in conflict with the interests of IMG as a whole. I left to start my own firm when it became clear that I would have to frequently choose between what was best for Roger and what was best for IMG. That tension is not anyone’s fault. It’s just inevitable when a company in our business tries to do it all. And I think this is why you see a trend of iconic athletes gravitating away from mega-agencies.”  Emanuel and Whitesell argued that boutique agencies lacked the necessary global work force and reach that a larger one like theirs could offer.  “If you think, in this day and age, a collective group of minds thinking about a problem for a client, an actor, a musician, an athlete, is not better than one person thinking about it on a global basis, there’s something wrong with that,” Emanuel said.  Team8 is more than a one-man operation, but it is not yet in position to deploy 17 employees to China and elsewhere as Emanuel said WME/IMG had recently done for Li as it drew up a detailed business plan for her in retirement. The final plan included licensing deals and book and movie projects.  Max Eisenbud has managed Sharapova for IMG since her childhood and also represents Li and the young American Madison Keys. Unlike Godsick, he has not yet set out on his own.  “If you have these global deals,” Eisenbud said, “I need the people in the office globally to help me make it happen.”  Godsick made the point that, where the biggest stars are involved, outside expertise was rarely hard to recruit.  But the WME/IMG merger is all about one-stop shopping, and all about making good on a $2.4 billion gamble. What is clear, for now and with another Wimbledon draw to break down, is that Emanuel and Whitesell view tennis and its stars as part of the solution.  A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2015, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tennis Power Broker Gambles to Reassert Its Marketing Magic . Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
In purchasing the management company IMG, long a leader in marketing tennis players, William Morris Endeavor has placed a $2.4 billion bet that it can profit in an increasingly difficult era.