When the world’s best players backed Saudi Arabia as the host for this weekend’s WTA Finals, one of the motivations was to avoid a LIV Tennis situation.
So says Jessica Pegula, the recent US Open finalist and world No 6 who also sits on the WTA Player Council.
“The golf thing, I don’t think was a perfect situation,” Pegula told Telegraph Sport, in 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, reportedly handing Spanish star Jon Rahm more than $300m, it has also split the sport down the middle and denuded PGA Tour events of star power.
In tennis, though, the official Tours have been gradually moving towards a closer relationship with Saudi Arabia – something that the golf authorities may now wish they had considered at an earlier date.
The ATP, who run the men’s tour, moved their NextGen event to Jeddah last year. Now, the WTA Finals are beginning a controversial three-year residency in Riyadh.
The hosting agreement for the WTA Finals has nevertheless caused significant angst. The anti camp is led by 1980s legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who wrote a joint letter pointing to the Kingdom’s repressive gender politics and its criminalisation of the LGBTQ community.
The letter concluded that “Taking the WTA finals to Saudi Arabia would represent a significant step backwards, to the detriment of the WTA, women’s sports and women.”
But WTA founder Billie Jean King has backed the move, saying “I don’t think you really change unless you engage”, and the current players have taken her view as gospel. It should also be noted that the top eight women are receiving record prizemoney of £11.75million for this year’s instalment of the Finals.
‘Everyone was on their toes’
“A lot of people went back and forth,” said Pegula of her fellow members of the WTA Player Council, who also include Victoria Azarenka and Maria Sakkari. “There was a lot of thought. And I think that started also when they [Saudi Arabia] went to golf and a lot of other things.
“Wasn’t just tennis, right?” added Pegula, who is the only Player Council member to qualify for the Finals. “I think people were thinking about this even before, when they [the Saudis] wanted to be involved in a lot of other sports, Everyone was on their toes.
“We definitely tried to talk to people that are from the area. We’ve talked to Ons [Jabeur, the Tunisian former Wimbledon finalist who is the most successful Arab player the game has seen] a little bit as well. I’ve talked to some female golfers who have been here already for events. Even some of the Player Council and [WTA] board representatives came here and visited it just to see, you know, try to get an understanding and be more on the ground.”
The picture that the Saudi hosts have presented in the build-up to Saturday’s opening matches has been uniformly upbeat, with Judy Murray leading a series of coaching clinics around 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’ve had several people come up to me and just tell me how amazing it is to see us competing here, how it’s really going to help the sport.”
‘Even the girl ball kids were just freaking out seeing us’
Pegula, an unusually business-savvy player whose billionaire parents own the Buffalo Bills among other major American sports franchises, added: “They’ve got 60,000 girls now playing tennis in schools. Even the girl ball kids were just freaking out seeing us in the hotel, asking for autographs. When you see you’re changing those girls’ lives, I think it starts to take precedent over what you’re trying to achieve.”
On top of the events already being staged, Saudi Arabia has also bought into both Tours via a branded sponsorship deal that promotes the Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
Meanwhile, the ATP board has spent much of the last year trying to find space in an already overcrowded calendar for another Masters 1000 event, to be staged in Riyadh. One report on Saturday suggested that commercial terms have finally been agreed, with the event due to begin in either 2027 or 2028.
In the structure of both Tours, the Player Council elects three representatives to the board of directors (who in the WTA’s case 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 took their turn in front of the media. Each one argued that the presence of the tournament will help emancipate women in a country that ranks 126th out of 146 in the Global Gender Gap Index.
Gauff: ‘I want to see it for myself’
Amid the general positivity, the only player who expressed concern about the choice of venue was Coco Gauff, one of the most politically informed players on the tour, who said she would wait to see whether the promised progress actually materialised before deciding whether to return to Riyadh in the future.
“I would be lying to you if I said I had no reservations,” Gauff explained, when asked if she was worried about Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights. “It’s one of those things where I want to see it for myself, see if the change is happening. If I felt uncomfortable or felt like nothing’s happening, then maybe I probably wouldn’t come back.
“As far as being here for a week, I really feel like it’s in the progress of going forward. The people I’ve spoken to, they say it’s in that way. I can only trust what I’m being told. Obviously, I don’t live here, so I can only trust what people are telling me that live here.”