Table of Contents
When the best players in the world backed Saudi Arabia to host the This weekend’s WTA finalsone of the motivations was to avoid a LIV Tennis situation.
That’s what Jessica Pegula says, the recent US Open finalist and the world number 6 who is also part of the WTA Player Council.
“The golf thing, I don’t think it was a perfect situation,” Pegula told T.elegraph sportin relation to Saudi Arabia’s notorious LIV Golf project. “I think we wanted to learn from that situation (and) not let it get to that point.”
Although LIV Golf has poured billions of dollars into players’ pockets, it is reported giving Spanish star Jon Rahm more than 300 million dollarsIt has also split the sport in half and stripped PGA Tour events of star power.
In tennis, however, the official Tours have been gradually moving towards a closer relationship with Saudi Arabia, something golf officials perhaps now wish they had considered at an earlier date.
The ATP, which runs the men’s tour, moved its NextGen event to Jeddah last year. Now the WTA Finals begin a controversial three-year residency in Riyadh.
However, the agreement to host the WTA finals has caused great anguish. He The anti camp is led by 80s legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.who wrote a joint letter pointing out the Kingdom’s repressive gender policy and its criminalization of the LGBTQ community.
The letter concluded that “taking the WTA final to Saudi Arabia would represent a significant step backwards, to the detriment of the WTA, women’s sport and women.”
But WTA founder Billie Jean King backed the move, saying, “I don’t think you really change unless you commit,” and current players have taken her view as gospel. It is also worth noting that the top eight women will receive a record prize money of £11.75 million for this year’s finals.
“Everyone was alert”
“A lot of people came and went,” Pegula said of her fellow WTA Player Council members, who also include Victoria Azarenka and Maria Sakkari. “A lot of thought went into it. And I think that also started when they (Saudi Arabia) went golfing and many other things.
“It wasn’t just tennis, was it?” added Pegula, who is the only Player Council member to qualify for the Finals. “I think people already thought about this even before, when they (the Saudis) wanted to participate in many other sports, everyone was alert.
“We definitely tried to talk to people in the area. We’ve also spoken a bit to Ons (Jabeur, the former Tunisian Wimbledon finalist who is the most successful Arab player to ever see the game). I’ve talked to some female golfers who have already been here to attend events. Even some of the representatives of the Player Council and the board of directors (WTA) came here and visited just to see, you know, try to understand each other and be more on the ground.”
The picture the Saudi hosts have presented in the build-up to Saturday’s opening matches has been uniformly optimistic, with Judy Murray leading a series of training clinics in Riyadh. As Pegula explained on Friday: “We’ve already been able to do a lot of things here for a lot of the young girls, the young women. “I had several people come up to me and tell me how great it is to see us compete here and how it’s really going to help the sport.”
‘Even the ball girls were scared when they saw us’
Pegula, an unusually business-savvy player whose billionaire parents own the Buffalo Bills, among other major American sports franchises, added: “They now have 60,000 girls playing tennis in schools. Even the ball girls were scared when they saw us at the hotel and asked us for autographs. When you see that you are changing the lives of those girls, I think that starts to take priority over what you are trying to achieve.”
In addition to the events already being organized, Saudi Arabia also participated in both Tours through a brand sponsorship agreement promoted by the Saudi Public Investment Fund.
Meanwhile, the ATP board has spent much of the last year trying to find space in an already packed calendar for another Masters 1000 event, to be held in Riyadh. A report on Saturday suggested that commercial terms have finally been agreed and the event will begin in 2027 or 2028.
In the structure of both Tours, the Player Council elects three representatives to the board of directors (which in the case of the WTA are now Julia Boserup, Anja Vreg and Kurt Zumwalt) and then guides their voting on decisions.
On Friday in Riyadh, each of the eight qualifiers for the WTA Finals had their turn before the media. Each argued that the tournament’s presence will help emancipate women in a country that ranks 126 out of 146 on the Global Gender Gap Index.
Gauff: ‘I want to see it with my own eyes’
Amid the general positivity, the only player to express concern about the venue choice was Coco Gauff, one of the most politically informed players on the tour, who said she would wait to see if the promised progress actually materialized before deciding. whether I would return or not. Riyadh in the future.
“I would be lying to you if I said I had no reservations,” Gauff explained when asked if she was concerned about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. “It’s one of those things I want to see for myself, see if change is happening. If I felt uncomfortable or felt like nothing was wrong, then I probably wouldn’t come back.
“As far as being here for a week, I really feel like it’s in the progress of moving forward. People I’ve talked to say that’s the case. I can only trust what they tell me. Obviously I don’t live here, so I can only trust what people who live here tell me.”