If Andy Murray were to win the ATP World Tour Finals after going undefeated through the round-robin stages, he would receive around £20,000 more than the £1 million that Rafael Nadal stuffed into his racket bag at this summer’s Wimbledon.
If it feels odd that winning Wimbledon is the second-largest prize in London, it is highly unlikely that Murray will be thinking about the money as he walks out through the dry ice on the Greenwich Peninsula.
Starting on Sunday, the season-ending championships provide the eight most lucrative days on the tennis calendar, as the champion inside the O2 Arena could potentially play only 10 sets with five straight-set victories, which would work out at more than £100,000 per set.
That is an end-of-year bonus that would even pique the interest of the investment bankers sitting at their screens at nearby Canary Wharf.
Yet Murray’s motivation for trying to win this title is the pleasure and satisfaction of beating the best players in the world to land what would be the biggest title of his career, for a victory that could propel him to scoring one of the four grand slam titles next year.
The men’s season is so long that it feels as though one year runs into another, and the self-belief that Murray could gain here would be of enormous benefit when he arrives in Melbourne for the Australian Open in less than two months’ time.
This has been an inconsistent year for Murray, yet that would be largely forgotten if he were to turn in five great performances in south-east London.
“I have to play my best tennis,” Murray said, though even that might not be enough at a tournament limited to the world’s eight leading players.
It is just as well that the court that has been laid is not as quick as the one they played on at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, where Robin Soderling smacked his way to his first Masters title last weekend.
Though the format allows for a player to lose a match and still win the title, if Murray were to start with a defeat he would have to beat Roger Federer and David Ferrer to give himself the best chance of qualifying for the semis. And even that might not be enough.
Though Murray won two out of three matches last season, he missed out on the knockout rounds by just one game.
The Scot, who dropped one place in the rankings this week to fifth in the world, as Soderling moved above him, could end the year as the world No 3. Even so, Murray is playing for more than cash and ranking points.
When Nadal plays Andy Roddick on Monday evening, it will be the Spaniard’s first competitive tennis for more than a month because of tendinitis in a shoulder.
The world No 1, who did not win a set during his three round-robin matches last season, largely because of his injury-prone knees, also has Novak Djokovic and Tomas Berdych in his group.
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