As the second edition of the Laver Cup begins on Friday in Chicago, tennis’s warring administrators have come up with yet another format: a 64-man, winner-takes-all event that goes under the working title of the Majesty Cup.

The new idea is technically an exhibition and would be staged in the week after the US Open. But the eye-catching detail is the proposed prize money of $10 million (£7.5 million), which is to be supplied by Gerard Pique’s iconoclastic investment group, Kosmos.

For purposes of comparison, that is about $2 million more than the entire purse at an ATP Masters 1000 event – the next-most-prestigious category of tournament after a grand slam. But whereas a Masters tournament follows a carefully delineated pay structure, in accordance with ATP rules, the twist of the Majesty Cup concept is that the entire $10 million would be taken home by the last player standing after six knockout rounds. The other 63 receive nothing.

When the Laver Cup was announced, just over two years ago, it seemed like an adventurous proposal in a tennis world that had been running along the same broad schedule for decades. Since then, though, the landscape has shifted dramatically.

After the Association of Tennis Professionals began work on a new week-long event – the World Team Cup – in Australia at the start of the season, the International Tennis Federation then produced their own plans to remodel the 118-year-old Davis Cup from a year-long knockout event into a glitzy jamboree featuring 18 nations, all gathered into one place in the third week of November.