Naomi Osaka is at the crossroads

Tennis Channel Live: When Naomi Osaka launched her new agency

As tennis was emerging from its brief off-season, with players of all station eager to launch into a new-year reset in Australia, Tennis Channel analyst Pam Shriver predicted, “I think 2023 will be a really important year to see if Naomi Osaka can get back to being the person who won four hard-court majors in a short window of time.”

But as 2023 began to unspool, tennis officials, pundits and fans wondered, with mounting bewilderment and anxiety, what plans Osaka had regarding the upcoming Australian Open. The tournament organizers laid their questions to rest on Sunday, announcing that Osaka is taking a hard pass on the tournament—the second major of the last three that she is skipping. Her record in the three Grand Slams she entered in 2022 was 2-2.

As Shriver implied, the Australian Open looms large on Osaka’s resume, and it played a central role in her meteoric rise. She backed up her maiden Grand Slam triumph, at the 2018 US Open, just months later Down Under—and won there again in 2021, thereby positioning herself as arguably the best hard-court player in the world. If there is any event where Osaka’s history, as well as the tournament’s general vibe, is conducive to a career reset, it’s the “Happy Slam.” Instead, the feeling grows that the complicated 25-year old who launched a long-running dialogue about mental health in professional athletics is done with the sport that was her springboard to fame, wealth and celebrity.

This most recent series of events played out in a baffling manner, skewing uncomfortably close to thoughtlessness—or mere indifference—on the part of Osaka and/or her team. In late October, Osaka posted on Instagram, thanking legions of her birthday well-wishers for their “love and messages.” She signed off with the words, “I really don’t know what I did to deserve it all. Love you and I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

But as Osaka’s social media account became devoid of tennis content in the intervening months; tracking her career intentions has been reduced to following a trail of breadcrumbs. About a week ago, Osaka was tagged in a photo originally posted by a Los Angeles pilates studio. On her own Instagram, Osaka most recently posted an image of sitting with her boyfriend in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. As tennis fans went into a tizzy, given the approaching Australian Open, Twitter sleuths deduced that the photo, since removed, was taken during the couple’s October sojourn in France.

Was Osaka making some kind of statement? Punking tennis? Perhaps Osaka is telling us that she is just so over tennis, and that we should get over it too. Maybe she’s signaling that, as the highest-paid female athlete of 2022 ($51.1 million, of which just $1.1 million was earned in prize money on a modest 14-9 record), she is moving on much bigger and more rewarding things. Those would include lucrative sponsorship deals and entrepreneurial enterprises.

The tricky part for Osaka is that her own activities, and especially her lack of activities—as in, competing at tennis—may contravene her contracts and make her a risky investment. Sponsors may feel that they are just not getting their money’s worth.

Mike Nakajima was, among other things, Nike’s Director of Tennis for North America until he left the company some five years ago. He was intimately involved in marketing and managing the contractual obligations of numerous Nike stars, among them Serena Williams, Roger Federer and Pete Sampras. Nakajima told me in a conversation that all those whopping sponsorship deals a player lands generally come with plenty of obligations and conditional clauses.

There are participation targets to hit, bonus payouts contingent on performance, and other strings attached. Ignoring commitments can, and do, lead to a reduction in player compensation. A player’s manager can plead for consideration based on any number of factors, including injuries and personal struggles, but that only lasts for so long.

“If you’re a Nike athlete but not playing, it doesn’t do Nike any good,” Nakashima says of Nike’s sponsorship priorities. “The No. 1 thing for us has always been exposure—to show someone like Naomi hitting a tennis ball, or holding up a trophy.”

Obviously, it doesn’t help Nike when Osaka is doing ads for Mastercard, Louis Vuitton, Workday, Nissin or any of her other, numerous sponsors. And the Mastercard brass can’t be happy if Osaka is not out there in high profile matches, as she has been in the past, sporting their logo. To sponsors, visibility is the end-all and be-all, and there comes a point where the prestige of mere association may not be enough to keep them enthusiastic. Sponsors can reduce payouts when a player doesn’t meet obligations, but players also plead injury or other mitigating factors in order to keep getting paid.

The one certain thing is that the sponsor-related financials bandied about in the press can often be far off the mark. Sponsors rarely deluge the value or structure of the deals they make. Player agents, by contrast, seem to love leaking those figures.

“All those millions of dollars people talk about may only kick in if a player hits all these high bonus targets, but that’s often still the number that will be leaked to the press,” Nakajima said. “A lot of times we’ll look at those numbers and say, ‘That’s funny, that’s a little different from what we end up negotiating.”

It’s too early to gauge how much—if any—blowback Osaka will experience from turning away from tennis, keeping in mind that sponsors are highly image conscious and controversy-averse, even when they have a legitimate beef. It’s also difficult to predict how long sponsors will embrace Osaka if she isn’t playing tennis. She appears to be off to a solid start as an entrepreneur in different areas, including a talent management company, Evolve, which has signed Nick Kyrgios and Ons Jabeur. Perhaps she won’t need any sponsorship deals that put claims on her at all.

Osaka is currently ranked No. 47, but she’s a global star. She might have a change of heart and return to tennis later in the year. It would certainly keep her name in the media, and her market-value high. But as ESPN analyst Patrick McEnroe told me recently, “You can’t be a part-time player in your early to mid or even late 20s today. Naomi is not Serena. She (Williams) is one of a kind with a unique ability, and the confidence to do it.”

He added, “There’s no doubt that [Osaka] was born to play tennis. You can hear it in the sound of how she hits the ball.”

Now that the sound is no longer audible, the silence is deafening.