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The 2024 WTA Finals were hosted in Riyadh and won by Coco Gauff. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images for WTA)
In early November, Saudi Arabia played host to the WTA Finals, the season-culminating event of the professional women’s tennis calendar. The eight best players in the world competed for the title in one of the biggest events on the tour away from the slams, with young US star Coco Gauff being crowned champion for the first time.
2024 marked the first time the event was hosted by Saudi Arabia following an agreed three-year contract. The deal offers greater certainty after some shambolic organizing of the event in 2022 and 2023.
These two previous editions of the competition were held in Fort Worth, Texas and Cancun, Mexico. Both were only announced last minute, played in bad conditions and in front of small crowd sizes.
The event in Saudi Arabia was announced in April 2024, seven months ahead of its start. Whilst there has been little issue raised around the quality of the venue being used (the King Saud University Indoor Arena), one major issue that still exists remains the lack of local interest.
On just its second day of action (3 November), the competition attendance was put at ‘only around 400 people’. These weekend figures came despite general sale admission being offered for as little as $8.66. For context, the Wimbledon Championships regularly sells out its Centre Court tickets throughout a two-week competition and its prices for 2025 range between £105 and £315 ($149-408).
Because of its recent history of poor attendance, this could be an indictment of the tournament itself, but an underlying excuse could be the reality of a lack of major local interest in female tennis for a country with a contentious history of gender inequality and lack of female rights.
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Profiling female sport in a country where basic rights have not been historically granted to women has been a major issue for Saudi Arabia in recent years. A high-profile example came in 2023 when FIFA backtracked on plans to enter a partnership with Visit Saudi for the Women’s World Cup (soccer).
Moral and ethical stances aside, money talks and one of the biggest gripes in women’s tennis history has been the subject of equal pay. Whilst each of the four main slams offers equal prize money, there remains a gap between that earned by male players on the ATP Tour and female counterparts on the WTA Tour.
In 2023, the WTA Tour Finals offered a prize pot of $9 million, while the ATP Tour equivalent paid out $15 million. In agreeing a hosting contract with Saudi Arabia, the WTA Finals prize money is now on par with the ATP Tour Finals.
The 2024 prize pot for both competitions this year stood at $15.25 million. The WTA Finals in 2024 is now worth a maximum $5.155 million to an undefeated champion. This winners’ prize cheque is significantly ahead of even the prestigious slams, with Wimbledon, for example, paying out £2.7 million ($3.5 million) in 2024.
This has been a big year for Saudi Arabia’s push into the world of tennis. Hosting the WTA Finals has come in the immediate aftermath of its exhibition tournament, the Six Kings Slam, played in mid-October.
This tournament truly highlights the financial power of the country to grow its influence in sport. The tournament offered six leading players a guaranteed purse of $1.5 million, with eventual champion, Jannik Sinner, bagging $6 million, after just three match victories.
The tournament lineup included Rafael Nadal, in what would be his penultimate professional outing, after announcing his retirement only a week before its start. In January 2024, the Spaniard was announced as an official ambassador of the Saudi Tennis Federation.
Other major investments into the sport by the nation include the Public Investment Fund’s (PIF) naming rights partnership for the ATP and WTA Tour rankings.
Tennis is just the latest major sports push for a nation making an accelerated charge to enhance its influence in the world. More sports are continuing to sell their product to the highest bidder regardless of its negative associations.
Saudi influence on sport has already seen the creation of ‘Riyadh Season’ for which the Kingdom hosts global sporting events between October and March. The current ‘season’ outside of tennis has included major boxing fights such Artur Beterbiev vs Dmitry Bivol and Tyson Fury vs Oleksandr Usyk II; PFL Super fights such as Francis Ngannou vs Renan Ferreira; WWE events and Italian soccer’s Supercoppa Italiana competition.
Hosting these sporting events is not about making money. With such huge amounts of money being thrown at rights, prize funds and production costs, there seems little chance that the nation can turn any sort of a profit from these events.
Tournaments such as the Six Kings Slam held no major broadcasting deals and could not sell out their ticket allocation to offset these costs. Whilst there is an element of growing pains associated with bringing new sports to new audiences, which could grow in popularity within a few years, doubts remain about the global platform that sport can reach.
Saudi Arabia is looking to make itself synonymous with major sporting events and improve its global public image, detracting from its negative headlines. Its involvement in tennis this year is a further progression for greater association with bigger and better events.
In 2034, Saudi Arabia is set to host the FIFA World Cup and has shown interest in hosting the 2036 Olympic Games. To improve any potential future bid for the Olympics, it is venturing into women’s tennis as a means of diversifying its portfolio.
Involvement in high-profile women’s sports could quash any concerns of the IOC of gender issues in the country, with the Olympics in 2024 championing a near 50/50 split of male to female athletes.
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