Tennis fans in Asia have been hearing a lot about a bold, innovative, breakthrough approach to presenting tennis.

Which has been done before.

Nothing new under the sun, indeed. But not if you listen to the people around the International Premier Tennis League.

In fact, it is nothing more than a revival (and tweak) of World Team Tennis, which began play in 1974, 40 years ago, in the U.S.

A retired Indian tennis player is given credit for the current league, which features only four teams and a season that lasts 16 days. Which makes it a much less bold experiment than was the World Team Tennis, which opened with 16 teams, four decades ago, during the height of tennis mania in the U.S.

The revived concept was pitched, as all new entities are pitched, in India, as “quite a bit like” the Indian Premier League, the mostly successful cricket league. Which is hailed as revolutionary because it has some aspects of entertainment pegged to cricket.

(But also is unstable enough to change its franchise list every season, even in a country with 1.3 billion cricket fans.)

So, anyway, the premise is … you assemble individual tennis players, the best you can afford, and create teams from them. People show up to see the players trying to perform inside a team concept (though no more than two of them can play at once, of course, in doubles) … and you tote up the scores (however you choose to hand out points) … and you have a winner.

The way organizers have handled the first year is to take all four teams (or most of them; various players drop in and out) to each of the four franchise stops (Manila, Singapore, Delhi and, finally, Dubai, here in the UAE, and see how they do. Each team plays the other three over the course of three days.

Has it been a success? It is if you ask the league.

In theory, all but a few tickets were sold for the three nights the league will be in the UAE, playing at a swimming stadium converted for tennis. But on opening night, tonight, The National’s staffer noted lots and lots of empty seats.

The story line is that the tickets were, in fact, sold and just not used.

We do know this … World Team Tennis, in the States, had a bit of a surge at the start, as people turned out to see the players in a more social setting. Some people paid lots of money for courtside seats in what often were basketball arenas.

But eventually the process got stale, and the players didn’t seem all that serious, and the league tended to fade out.

Unless it has managed to sell itself as a television experience, I would expect the IPTL will experience a similar trajectory.

The fault line under all this is … can you pay enough to get tennis players to give up their limited time off away from the game?

That the answer to that often is “no” is what crippled the WTT. The IPTL likely will have issues over that, too.