Saudi Arabia will host WTA Finals
Saudi Arabia will host the WTA Finals as part of a three-year deal announced Thursday by the women’s professional tennis tour that will increase the prize money for this November’s season-ending championship to a record $15.25 million, a 70% increase from 2023.
The event for the top eight singles players and top eight doubles teams will be held in Riyadh from 2024-26, part of a recent wave of investment by the kingdom in tennis and various sports, despite questions about LGBTQ+ and women’s rights there raised by Hall of Famers Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova and others.
“We’re going into this eyes wide open that the investment in sport by Saudi certainly provokes strong views from people,” WTA Tour Chairman and CEO Steve Simon told The Associated Press. “We’ve met with Chris and Martina and listened to their concerns and we have shared their concerns through our stakeholders as well, without prejudice. We’ve also shared the concerns around women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights within the Kingdom of Saudi. Our focus is on how we develop women’s tennis for the benefit of everybody involved in the game. The reality of it is ... we are truly a global tour, a global business. We have players from over 90 nations now. We have over 90 events . ... We participate in many countries that have different cultures and values systems across the board.”
The WTA Finals has moved around to five cities over the last five editions after a deal to put the tournament in Shenzhen, China, through 2030 was disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and concerns over the safety of retired Grand Slam doubles champion Peng Shuai, who accused a Chinese government official of rape.
Saudi Arabia’s Private Investment Fund (PIF) formed the LIV Golf tour and put money into soccer, for example, and the kingdom’s role in tennis has been rising. The ATP Tour moved its Next Gen Finals for leading 21-and-under players to Jedda in November; the PIF is the title sponsor for the men’s rankings; 22-time Grand Slam champion Rafael Nadal recently became an ambassador for the Saudi Tennis Federation; he will join 24-time major champ Novak Djokovic and rising stars Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner at an exhibition event in Riyadh in October. There have been discussions about placing a top-tier Masters 1000 tournament in Saudi Arabia, too, part of a possible larger restructuring involving the WTA, ATP and the country.
Rights groups say women continue to face discrimination in most aspects of family life and homosexuality is a major taboo, as it is in much of the rest of the Middle East.
In an opinion piece published in The Washington Post in January, Evert and Navratilova urged the WTA to stay out of Saudi Arabia because, they wrote, staging the Finals there “would represent not progress, but significant regression” and asked whether “staging a Saudi crown-jewel tournament would involve players in an act of sportswashing merely for the sake of a cash influx.”