Davis Cup Finals Betting Offers 2024

Tennis is regarded as an individuals sport, alongside Golf and other sports where it is generally all about the players.  Despite that there is always a desire to see teams compete, especially on a national level, and just like golf has the Ryder Cup, tennis has the Davis Cup to satisfy that hunger.

By no means a modern competition, the Davis Cup has been around since 1900 and this year is the 112th edition, but has suffered in recent decades. Alongside the ever longer and more packed main tennis season with ever increasing prize money the Davis Cup has struggled to drum up interest from top players and tennis fans.

The new format brought in 2019 saw the finals of the competition take place at the end of the season over the course of one week in a single host city. This format was altered in 2021 taking part in 3 indoor venues in Madrid (Spain), Turin (Italy) and Innsbruck (Austria). For 2022-2024 five cities were used, four for the group stages in September and Malaga for the final knockout rounds in November.

This focused format combined with a much higher prize fund is hoped to push the ‘world cup of tennis’ to new heights.  Whether this will work remains to be seen, especially considering the new ATP World Cup earlier this year.

What the new structure does lend itself to however is a much better betting market, with more options for accumulators, free bets, outright deals and enhanced odds.  As you know from us by now we’ve already done the hard work and collated the best deals from the UK’s leading bookies here to ensure you get the very best value from your Davis Cup wagers.

Davis Cup Finals Betting Offers for 2024

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Davis Cup Finals Schedule 2024

How The Davis Cup Works

Tennis is, by its very nature, not a team game. Attempts have been made to make it so since first someone picked up a racket and hit a ball over a net, but the Doubles game is the closest that the sport has managed to get to making it about working together.

Singles tennis sees two supreme athletes trade blows in a manner more usually expected of boxers, requiring incredible strength and skill. The game is as much about tactics and intelligent play as it is about how hard the players can hit the ball, with those with the most concentrated minds and ability to remain focused despite outside distractions that are the most likely to succeed.

The Davis Cup is, therefore, the best example so far found of making tennis into a genuine team game. It’s not a team game in the same way that, say, football or rugby both are; you don’t have eleven players rotating their time on the court during a set or point, for example. Yet it combines the classical nature of Singles and Doubles matches that every fan of the sport loves with the desire to see players work as a team to try to win the competition.

It is known as the ‘World Cup of Tennis’, thanks to the manner in which is pits representatives of different nations against each other in a knockout format. Yet when did the tournament get underway? How has it developed over the years? What is the current format? All of those questions are ones we’ll attempt to answer here.

New Format Since 2019

There have been numerous changes to the competition in the years that followed the move to a knockout tournament in 1972, with one of the biggest ones being the move to a tiered competition in 1981.

The sixteen best teams compete against each other in the World Group, while the other nations compete in four groups based across three regional zones. The tiebreak was introduced eight years later and since 2016 it’s been used in all five sets if needed. In 2018 it was announced by the International Tennis Federation that the format would change once more for the 2019 season onward.

The format now sees eighteen teams going up against each other at the end of the regular tennis season. It was believed by the ITF that the new-look would make the competition more attractive to broadcasters and sponsors and is what earned the tournament the nickname of the ‘World Cup of Tennis’.

Up until 2018 ties were played in February, April and September before the finals themselves take place in November.  From now on however all matches will take place in February (qualifiers) and then September (groups stage) and November (knockout stage).

The Finals take place in a round-robin format. The qualifying nations are split into four groups of four, with matches taking the form of two Singles and one Doubles match to the best of three sets.

The September group stage is contested between the two finalists from the previous year, the 12 winners of the February qualifying round and and two Wild Card teams.  Of those 16 teams the four winners and four runners-up progressing to the knockout round in November.

The team that is first at the end of the round-robin stage as well as the two best runners-up overall will make it through to the quarter-finals. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are reserved for the semi-finals and the final.

The hope was that the new format would encourage the game’s top players to get involved, with many haven given it a miss in the past on account of the fact that it took place over too many weekends and took up too much time.

New Streamlined Davis Cup

Despite having stood the test of time the Davis Cup in more recent decades has suffered with many of the worlds best players choosing not to compete, or only competing in the very final stages.

This was largely due to the much higher prize money now seen for elite tennis players, in ATP and WTA events not just Grand Slams, meaning players would often choose to prepare for an upcoming individual event over playing for their country.  Tennis players now also play many more matches in a much longer season than they did before, making it a strain to compete in the Davis Cup event.

The idea behind the 2019 streamlined tournament was to create a finals single event at the end of the season held over one week in one host city.  However, 2019 did seem a bit rushed and crammed so for 2021 (2020 was cancelled due to coronavirus) the schedule was expanded from 7 to 11 days and split into 3 indoor host venues in three different cities (Turin, Madrid and Innsbruck).  For 2022 an extra day was added, now 12 days, and is split between 5 different host cities.

For 2023 and 2024 the group stage was split off entirely to it’s own week in September split between five different cities (Bologna, Split, Manchester & Valencia) .  The knockouts were then put back to November (Malaga) to give a break before the knockouts with the previous editions seeming very rushed.  The knockouts take place over 6 days.

Whether 6, 7, 11 or 12 days the point is the Davis Cup finals is now one single focused tournament and that should increase the value of the event to the more occasion tennis fan and the reduced disruption to the season schedule and higher prize money should also result in more players taking part.

Only time will tell if this helps revive the prestige of the Davis Cup, and a lot will depend on how it fares in relation to the new ATP World Cup event, that now happens just one month later at the start of the next season.  The new Davis Cup event taking place at the end of the season could also mean we end up missing players with injuries or not getting the best tennis out of participants who will be tired from the main season.

Madrid Hosts 2019 and 2021 Davis Cup

In September 2018 the ITF selected Madrid to host the first two editions of the newly re-vamped Davis Cup finals.

The La Caja Mágica, a modern art icon, hosted the 2019 event and will also co-host the 2021 Cup (rescheduled from 2020) – including both semi-finals and the final.  The venue, also home to the Madrid Open, was opened in 2009 and is built based on a box design, in fact, La Caja Mágica means ‘the magic box.

The venue houses three clay courts all with retractable roofs, which will be important to ensure the tightly packed new finals schedule stays on track whatever the weather.

The main court, Manolo Santana, seats 12,500 spectators with court 2, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, equipt with 3,500 seats and court 3 containing 2,500 seats.  All courts were reconstructed in 2013 and are seen as some of the very best clay courts in the world.

The Pala Alpitour in Turin, a 16,000 capacity multi-purpose arena also used for the ATP Finals, and the Olympiahalle in Innsbruck, a 10,000 capacity indoor sports arena, will both be used for two of the six groups and one quarter-final each.

Málaga Hosts 2022-2024

It was another Spanish city chosen to host the knockout rounds after Madrid, this time Málaga.  The September group stages were split between four different cities:

• 2022: Glasgow, Bologna, Hamburg & Valencia
• 2023: Manchester, Bologna, Valencia & Split
• 2024: TBD

The venue, the Palacio de Deportes José María Martín Carpena (or Jose Maria Martin Carpena Arena) is a 11,300 seater indoor venue in the heart of the city opened in 1999.  It is a multi-purpose venue that is also used for concerts, boxing and basketball.

Thee first final in 2022 saw Canada win their first ever Davis Cup title beating Australia and in 2023 Italy beat Australia again.  The Aussies may be second to the USA in titles overall but they are yet to win a title since 2003 now.

Qualification For The Davis Cup

Qualification for the tournament takes place in February.  24 teams will compete for 12 finals slots.  This is the 12 teams ranked 12th-17th (two already qualify through wild card entry) in the previous years finals along with the 12 winning teams from World Group 1.

Each match will consist of four singles and one doubles match all played over the best of three sets, all sets can have tiebreaks.

Two singles will take place on the Friday, the doubles match followed by the reverse singles will take place on the Saturday

The 12 winners (TBD) progress to the Davis Cup group stages in September.  They will join Great Britain and Spain, who have received wildcard entries, along with the two finalists from 2023: Australia, & Italy.

Prize Money

The re-vamped Davis Cup also sees a massive increase in prize money for both nations and players.  The hope being that this will incentive more elite tennis players to compete on behalf of their countries.

There is a prize fund of $18M reserved for players and $9M for federations, to try to bring the money paid to the winners more in line with the Grand Slams.

History, Origins and About The Davis Cup

When the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association was formed in 1881 there was a desire, as there so often was in America at the time, to prove that the players that the Association represented were every bit as good as their English cousins.

The first President of the USNLTA, James Dwight, set about trying to convince his counterparts in England that players from the two nations should go up against each other in an officially sanctioned match. Though he failed in that particular task, Dwight did managed to persuade some British players to head to the United States and got some American players to head in the opposite direction.

By the middle of the 1890s, representatives from both countries would regularly head to play each other on the opposite nation’s soil, leading to a burgeoning friendship between an American player named William Larned and an Irishman called Harold Mahony.

Since 1892 England and Ireland had regularly competed in a national team-based contest, with England and France going head-to-head in a similar format from 1895. This gave Larned and Mahony the idea that a team-based competition between America and the United Kingdom would be the next natural step, with Larned returning to the States from a tour of Britain in 1896 and declaring that three British players would head to America the following summer and compete against a team of Americans.

Whilst Larned had been busy organising his unofficial competition between American and British players, representatives of American lawn tennis began discussing exactly the same thing at a tournament that was taking place in Ontario. One of the people in attendance was a tennis player named Dwight F. Davis, who many thought would be interested in getting involved and would perhaps offer up a cup or other prize to be competed over.

The following summer three players travelled to America from the UK in order to compete in US tennis tournaments, though they did not do so officially under the guidance of the Lawn Tennis Association. They performed that poorly that it convinced representatives of American tennis that the time was indeed right for an international tournament between the two nations to be properly sanctioned.

The competition was supposed to take place in 1898 in Newcastle but, ironically, the US couldn’t field a strong enough team and the idea was abandoned. In 1899 just one British player travelled to the States for a reciprocal tournament, meaning that many feared the idea of a competition between nations was dead before it had even begun.

It was during the same summer, however, that Dwight Davis and other members of the Harvard University tennis team were travelled across the country in order to pit East and West coast talent against each other. The mini tour proved to be immensely popular with the watching public and Davis began to think that if a competition between two different parts of the same country could inspire such enthusiasm then there would be no reason why an event that saw two different nations go up against each other wouldn’t do the same thing.

Davis immediately approached James Dwight and the pair tentatively agreed the terms for just such. tournament, with Davis ordering a sterling silver punchbowl from a silversmith called Shreve, Crump & Low based in Massachusetts at a cost of $1,000.

Whilst the modern day tale of the competition’s formation paints Davis as being instrumental, hence his name being attached to it to this day, the reality is that he actually had very little to do with it bar the donating of the trophy that the teams compete over. Nevertheless, the first tournament took place in 1900 at the Longwood Cricket Club in Boston.

The Americans won the first three matches, taking the British by surprise, in what was the inaugural version of the International Lawn Tennis Challenge; the competition that car to be referred to simply as the Davis Cup.

Development Of The Competition

In the early years the tournament was just a chance for American and British players to go up against each, but the British soon began to dominate it and by 1905 it was expanded to bring in players from Austria, Australasia, Belgium, France and a combined side that represented Australia and New Zealand.

As the competition’s original name of the International Lawn Tennis Challenge suggests, the format was that of a challenge cup, with teams playing against each other for the right to face the winner of the previous year in the final.

In 1923 the competing nations were split into two zones, which are the America Zone and the Europe Zone. The teams would play against each other in their own zones before the winners of each competed in the amusingly named Inter-Zonal Zone, with the victor from that match up then earning the right to play the defending champion.

The Eastern Zone was added to the competition in 1955 and the addition of a third zone meant that the winner of one of the inter-zonal match ups was given a bye into the first round of the Inter-Zonal Zone part of the tournament. In 1966 Europe was split into Europe Zone A and Europe Zone B in order to avoid any teams being given a bye by having four zones.

Arguably the biggest change to the competition occurred in 1972 when a decision was taken to turn it into a knockout tournament, with the defending champion require to compete in every round for the first time. Perhaps that was in part inspired by the domination of a select group of nations, with the competition not having been won by a team other than the US, Great Britain, France or Australia / Australasia since its formation.

Knockout Tournament

In 1972 the Davis Cup moved to a knockout format, meaning the previous champion now needed to compete in all the individual rounds. Within two years the dominance of Britain, the USA, Australia and France had been broken when India and South Africa made it to the final.

India refused to send a team to South Africa to compete because of the country’s apartheid policy and so South Africa were awarded the trophy. In 1975 the final was competed between Sweden and Czechoslovakia, with the former winning 3-2 and proving that the decision to move to a knockout tournament had made it more competitive.

The tiered system we know today was then brought in in 1981 and the tie-break in 1989, extended to include all sets in 2016.

Davis Cup Trophy

The Davis Cup Trophy is a remarkably impressive thing, being both tall and broad. In actual fact, however, the Davis Cup itself is the same sterling silver punchbowl that cost Dwight Davis $1,000 dollars all of those years ago.

Since then it has grown on account of the fact that more and more tiers have been added to it in order to add a plaque denoting the winning team and players with each passing year.

By 2018 the trophy stood at three tiers in height overall, or four if you want to include the punchbowl that sits on its top.

Once the plaques that sit on the trophy have all been filled another tier will be added in order to continue the competition’s tradition.

Fed Cup and Other Competitions

The Davis Cup is exclusively for male tennis players, with an equivalent for female players coming in the form of the Fed Cup. By 2018, only the United States, Australia and the Czech Republic had had the honour of holding on to both cups in the same year.

There is also a trophy known as the Hopman Cup, which is far less prestigious than either of the others but that is a competition for mixed teams.

Records and Statistics

Previous Winners Since 2010

Record All Time Davis Cup Winners

The table above shows nations that have won the Davis Cup on two or more occasions

*In 1972 the David Cup format was change to a knockout tournament

Statistics, Facts and Trivia

Between the competition’s first iteration in 1900 and the final one before the major changes were introduced to its format for the 2018 event, there were a number of interesting statistics that it’s worth drawing your attention to. Firstly, the United States appeared in the final more than any other team, achieving it sixty-one times. They were also the most successful team, winning it on thirty-two occasions.

The US side boasts the title of most consecutive wins of the Davis Cup, lifting the trophy seven times between 1920 and 1926. That was during the Challenge era, however, with the maximum number of consecutive wins since 1974 standing at two. The US, Sweden, West Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic have all managed that.

Australia appeared in more finals consecutively than any other nation, managing it twenty-three times during the Challenge era. Sweden hold the record for the post-Challenge era with seven. The all-time record for the most games in a tie is three hundred and twenty-seven, managed between India and Australia during the former’s 3-2 win in 1974.