Despite dismal attendances, the Saudi regime knows that women’s tennis needs their money more than they need the WTA tour
The bar in women’s tennis has been lowered so much that all this event had to be was not a disaster.
The WTA Finals, supposedly the showpiece event of the women’s professional tour, has been left so battered and bruised by successive cataclysms that organisers just wanted to get through this latest edition without major incident. Success would be defined by absence of catastrophe.
Remember that the last two hastily arranged events to end the season have been utter fiascos. Two years ago the WTA Finals were held in Fort Worth, Texas, in a converted rodeo venue that still smelled like one. Last year, organisers had barely finished building the temporary stands in Cancun when players arrived for an outdoor tournament scheduled during hurricane season.
Both deals to host the event were done at the last minute on a one-off basis, so when a three-year contract to host the WTA Finals in Riyadh was announced back in April – moral grounds aside – at least they were several points ahead of previous hosts.
All the more embarrassing then when, seven months later, organisers still failed to fill the stands for some of the world’s best players. There were barely 400 people watching.
“It’s extremely disappointing when you’ve got the world’s best players – Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff – performing in front of a crowd like that today,” Tim Henman told The Telegraph earlier in the week.
“The organisers here are in a privileged position where they’re not trying to necessarily make money out of the gate receipts. So they should get out into the communities and into the schools, because we need spectators here to witness the best players and create that atmosphere.”
Officially, the WTA said that it is “bringing tennis to a new audience and that takes time to build”, but it’s hard to believe the tour would have been happy at Britain’s second-most recognisable tennis player and foremost TV pundit taking potshots at their flagship event.
The i Paper understands efforts were made to disseminate tickets to schools, universities and tennis clubs but uptake has been poor.
Various explanations have been offered including ongoing exam season and the upcoming mid-term break – the event is being held entirely at the King Saud University – or the fact that play starts at 1pm in a culture where everything happens a lot later. At other tennis events in the Middle East, the tennis does not start until late afternoon at the earliest, and sitting down for dinner close to midnight is not uncommon in Riyadh.
But poor attendance at tennis events in Saudi is not unique to the WTA Finals. When Saudi Arabia hosted the ATP Next Gen Finals in Jeddah last year, players were frustrated at crowds – despite their sparsity – disrupting play by moving around during points. One report even alleged that fans were being paid to attend, although organisers denied it.
There genuinely seemed to be close to the capacity of 8,000 for last month’s so-called “Six Kings Slam”, a slickly produced exhibition event a few miles away that got the full bells and whistles treatment and attracted Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner with its enormous pay cheques. But almost none of those “fanatics” turned up a few weeks later for their female counterparts.
Aside from the disappointing attendances, which are set to improve on Friday and Saturday (Saudi Arabia’s weekend), the event has been relatively hitch-free. The venue is a marked improvement on its Texan and Mexican predecessors, with individual changing rooms for players, proper practice facilities and a beauty salon and spa on site. And those players have been allowed to speak their mind when asked difficult questions about the country they find themselves in, a luxury not afforded to most who live there.
“I want to see it for myself, see if the change is happening,” said Coco Gauff, by far the most politically well-versed and yet also the youngest player at the event.
“If I felt uncomfortable or felt like nothing’s happening, then maybe I probably wouldn’t come back.”
She added: “I really do feel like in order to ignite change, you have to start little by little. That’s how I’ve been taught growing up black in America, knowing our history.”
Gauff’s US teammate Jessica Pegula said: “I was on every player call I could make with the WTA. One of the things I said: ‘If we come here, we can’t just come here and play our tournament and leave. We have to have a real programme or real plan in place.’”
The plan, according to both the WTA and the Saudi Tennis Federation (STF), is to get one million Saudis playing tennis by the year 2030, a wildly ambitious target when you consider there are reportedly only 177 tennis clubs in the country and most have only appeared in the last four years.
Judy Murray has been running tennis classes for girls as part of the outreach programmes around the Finals, which are a good thing but are also standard practice. And there are 14,000 women already regularly playing tennis in Saudi Arabia.
But all of these figures are hard to verify because, while women’s rights may have improved marginally in the country under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s rule since 2017, freedom of expression has certainly not.
Reporters Without Borders say Saudi Arabia is the 166th worst country in the world for press freedoms (Russia is 162nd) and the number of imprisoned bloggers and journalists has tripled since Bin Salman’s accession.
In the face of such statistics, as well as the state-sanctioned murder of Saudi journalist and dissenter Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, WTA CEO Portia Archer’s insistence that her colleagues “never actually had any issues with freedom of expression” rings a little hollow.
The new chief, in place since July, has not shied away from the truth of the matter, that the size of the investment on offer from Saudi Arabia was too good for the struggling WTA to turn down. Cynically, the Saudi organnisers know that too. How and what they do at this event matters little. The one million women is an unrealistic pipe dream that no one will be able to hold to account.
All that really matters is that they have people like Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek sitting in front of a camera telling the world how great Riyadh is. Even Gauff, who said this week the LGBTQ+ community “are seen and are heard”, appeared only mildly sceptical about being in Saudi Arabia.
The WTA will be back, for two more years and probably a few more after that. They need a good story, but more than that they need stability, financial and actual.
And let’s be clear: the Saudi Arabian regime want people talking about their country as sporting host, not an authoritarian dictatorship, which is why they are willing to pay so far over the market rate (although still pocket change for the £700bn Public Investment Fund) for the event.
The reality is that women’s tennis needs Saudi Arabia so much more than Saudi Arabia needs them.
