It took some time before Judy Murray was convinced that going to Saudi Arabia was the right decision. Murray, a professional coach and the mother of a former world No. 1, Andy, and his doubles-specialist brother, Jamie, is a well-known advocate of women’s rights and women’s sports.
But as a community ambassador for the Women’s Tennis Association, Murray’s job is to travel wherever the tour goes and introduce tennis to those who have had limited exposure to it. So she will go to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the WTA Finals, which begins on Saturday.
“We have a really big opportunity to make some great things happen over there,” Murray said during a video call last month. “It’s a bit of a blank canvas, and a lot of the things at the grass-roots level are starting from scratch. We’re creating relationships, and once you do that you can make things happen.”
The WTA Finals are the culmination of the yearlong WTA Tour and involve the top eight singles players and top eight doubles teams. The singles competitors this year are Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff, Elena Rybakina, Jasmine Paolini, Jessica Pegula, Zheng Qinwen and Barbora Krejcikova.
Sabalenka, who retook the No. 1 ranking from Swiatek two weeks ago, enters as the top seed. Paolini, who is paired in doubles with Sara Errani, is the only player entered in singles and doubles.
A record $15 million in prize money is being offered, part of a three-year deal to host the event in Riyadh. The champion, should she go undefeated in the round-robin portion of the event, will pocket $5.155 million, the highest purse ever for a male or female tour event.
Even before it was announced earlier this year that the Finals would be in Saudi Arabia, there was some dissension about the location. Saudi Arabia was criticized, including by the Biden administration, after the 2018 murder of the U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, and the country has a troubled history of its treatment of girls and women. So holding the WTA’s season-ending event there has worried some.
None of the qualifiers for the Finals have declined to participate, but the former world No. 1 Martina Navratilova, who won the Finals eight times, has been opposed to holding the event in Saudi Arabia since the beginning.
“We lost our moral high ground when the women decided to go there,” Navratilova said by phone last month. “You have to show me some progress first. Women have to be equal citizens under the law. Otherwise, we might as well play in North Korea.”
Billie Jean King, a founder of the WTA, however, has long been a proponent of the Finals’ going to Riyadh, citing the value in bringing change to the region. Others agree.
“Your first instinct is that it goes against everything we stand for and believe in,” said Mary Joe Fernandez, a former world No. 4 and current ESPN broadcaster, in an interview in September. “But when someone like Billie Jean, who stands for equality and fairness, is open to it, I have to really take a step back and say, ‘OK, maybe it’s OK.’”
Katrina Adams, another former pro and a past chief executive of the United States Tennis Association, also sees the positive side.
“We’re bringing in the best pro athletes who live their lives differently from the women in Saudi,” Adams said by phone last month. “What does that mean for Saudi Arabia? They have to be willing to make those women feel welcome. That’s already a change maker.”
When the deal with the WTA was announced, Mohamed AlSayyad, head of corporate brand at Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, said, “We look forward to working with the WTA to increase participation and inspire the next generation of talent.”
The tournament has struggled over the last five years as it bounced around venues. After a deal with Shenzhen, China, in 2019 guaranteed the winner, Ashleigh Barty, more than $4 million, the arrangement ended when Covid began. In the past two years, there have been last-minute agreements to host the event in Fort Worth, where the size of the crowds was mixed, and then last year in Cancún, Mexico, where a tropical storm left the stadium court largely unplayable.
The WTA’s deal with Saudi Arabia is one of several attempts by the investment fund to have an impact on professional tennis as it has done with golf, with the creation of the LIV Golf tour.
The ATP’s NextGen Finals, for top-ranked players under 21, will be held in Jeddah in mid-December. The Six Kings Slam exhibition in Riyadh last month featured Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Daniil Medvedev and Holger Rune competing for three days for a $6 million first prize. Each of the competitors received at least $1 million for showing up.
The Saudi fund also sponsors the rankings for the ATP and WTA. And the fund and ATP have been trying to start a joint sponsorship deal with Tommy Paul and Matteo Berrettini and the eight-time major winner Andre Agassi by naming them ambassadors for the Saudi Tennis Federation. Paul’s contract was scuttled when he said in a documentary earlier this year that he drank the night before his doubles match at the 2017 U.S. Open. “I couldn’t even see,” he said in the film.
In exchange for several personal appearances, Agassi was to be paid upward of $1 million annually, a deal he turned down in support of Paul. Nadal has faced recent backlash for agreeing to become an ambassador this year. Nadal also plans to open an offshoot of his tennis academy in Saudi Arabia.
Those in support of Saudi involvement in the sport point to Arij Mutabagani, the female president of the Saudi Tennis Federation, as an example of the progressive changes taking place. Others recognize that the influx of hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi money can help lower-ranked players and the WTA organization, which has struggled financially over the last several years.
“There could be an upside to this,” said John Tobias of GSE Worldwide, who represents many high-ranked players. “Yes, the top players want the money, but the people who really need it are those WTA support people who are in danger of losing their jobs. This event supports the entire tour.”
Portia Archer became the WTA’s chief executive in July, so she wasn’t part of the decision to hold the Finals in Riyadh. But after doing some research, she has embraced the plan.
“Sometimes it’s good to engage,” she said in a video call last month. “When you’re on the outside looking in it’s easy to point the finger and talk about what you can and can’t do, what you should and shouldn’t do. It’s a lot harder to be able to effect change. Sometimes you can do that from the outside in and sometimes from the inside out. You just have to understand what your purpose is and stay focused on that.”
Murray’s goal in Riyadh is to teach tennis and to grow the sport. The biggest issue she sees is that in Saudi Arabia, only women are allowed to teach women and girls. She hopes that by being on the ground over the next three years, progress will occur.
“The sport hasn’t opened up to women in the past,” Murray said. “With community engagement the key to making tennis stick over there is to invest in their own people and to build a work force, particularly a female work force, to get more women and girls active. The biggest impact we can make is the investment in their own people so they can become competent and confident enough to deliver with enthusiasm and quality. And they make it happen for their own country.”
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