On Wednesday the ATP announced a five-year take care of the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, that may give it naming rights over the participant rankings in males’s tennis. There will quickly be courtside PIF branding at a number of of the season’s greatest tournaments: Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid, Beijing, and the ATP Finals. In distinction to the prolonged and doomed energy battle that performed out in professional golf, the tennis excursions appear desirous to roll over and take their cash.
Back in 2018, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic agreed to play an offseason Saudi exhibition match in Jeddah. That match was introduced a day after reviews of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate in Turkey. The gamers, who stated they’d agreed to the match a 12 months prematurely, ultimately known as it off, citing an ankle difficulty for Nadal. In the years since, Saudi Arabia turned a daily cease for gamers to schedule an offseason money seize, and now it hosts an official ATP occasion. Starting in 2023, the ATP hosted its year-end showcase for promising younger gamers, the Next Gen Finals, in Jeddah, and can proceed doing so by means of 2027. A full-on, high-profile ATP match can’t be far off.
Meanwhile, the ladies’s tour is in talks to place its year-end WTA Finals in Riyadh on the finish of 2024. Those rumors impressed huge names within the girls’s sport to talk out on the opportunity of high gamers competing in a rustic the place girls lack equal rights. Billie Jean King spoke in favor of the Saudi partnership, basically arguing that direct engagement is the one method to change native social mores; you may hear her broaden on this argument in this November interview with The Tennis Podcast. Meanwhile, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova wrote a Washington Post op-ed in January arguing strenuously in opposition to the Saudi incursions into girls’s tennis. They wrote that they helped construct the WTA “to empower women in a male-dominated world,” and objected to this potential host. “Not only is this a country where women are not seen as equal, it is a country where the current landscape includes a male guardianship law that essentially makes women the property of men,” the column learn. “A country which criminalizes the LGBTQ community to the point of possible death sentences.”
The girls’s tour appears to be like to be in a spotty place operationally and financially, which could make it susceptible to overtures from deep-pocketed sportswashers. Last 12 months, the WTA seemed poised to position the WTA Finals in Saudi Arabia, earlier than pivoting last-minute to a dysfunctional occasion in Cancun that left gamers sad. In March 2023, the WTA sold a 20 percent stake to non-public fairness agency CVC Capital Partners for a $150 million funding. The tour has additionally been struggling to make up the cash misplaced in its non permanent boycott of China, which voided a $140 million deal to host the WTA Finals there. At the top of 2021 the WTA introduced that it could be suspending its occasions in China, as CEO Steve Simon demanded a full investigation into tennis participant Peng Shuai’s allegations of sexual assault in opposition to a high-ranking authorities official. In April 2023, the WTA caved and introduced it was resuming occasions in China. “We’ve been in this for 16 months and we are convinced that at this point our requests will not be met,” Simon said. “To continue with the same strategy doesn’t make sense and a different approach is needed. Hopefully, by returning, more progress can be made.”
The Saudis are additionally making their enchantment on to beloved gamers. Back in 2018, when Nadal was reconsidering his first-ever Saudi exhibition, he expressed some doubt. “I know something happened very bad inside [the consulate] there. And my team is talking to them, to analyze the things,” he said. “I hope the things will clarify as soon as possible.” Last month, Nadal announced that he was an envoy for the Saudi Tennis Federation.
In an interview with the Spanish radio station COPE earlier in February, Nadal “swore” that he had not signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Saudi Arabia and that the cash would not enhance his life; he stated he took the gig as a result of he was hopeful concerning the future. When requested what would occur if there have been a homosexual tennis participant, Nadal stated, “In my academy he won’t have problems; in the country I don’t know.”
“The changes can’t be from night to day, we need to adapt and Arabia is in a process of change and I think that it’s going to improve all of these facets,” Nadal stated. “If that doesn’t happen, I’ll have been mistaken, but I want to contribute to this change, so that it’s a more sporting country, and that men and women can practice tennis in total equality, and that’s what they are telling me [they want]. I don’t think they are hiring me to sportswash their image. I can do nothing or I can accept the challenge, which is what I’ve done.”
Nadal will play his first match within the nation later this 12 months, in an October exhibition alongside Djokovic, Daniil Medvedev, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, and Holger Rune. (Though there are not any dates locked in but, that is a month wherein there are nonetheless a number of huge ATP occasions to play.) The future stars of males’s tennis will in all probability put out of your mind a time when the ATP wasn’t totally entangled with petrostate sovereign wealth. Eventually Nadal must look again and work out whether or not that was such a good suggestion, or if he was certainly mistaken.
