Why WTA Tour Finals is leaving Saudi Arabia, and the future of women’s tennis’ flagship event

Last November. A concrete bunker under an arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, serving as the office of women’s tennis chief executive Portia Archer. Inside the arena, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina, two of the eight best players in the world, are about to play for the biggest winner’s check in women’s sports history at the WTA Tour Finals, the flagship, season-ending event.

Inside the bunker, Archer is looking further into the future. The WTA Tour would be thrilled, she says, to extend its agreement with the Saudi Tennis Federation beyond the original three-year deal, ending in November 2026.

“We’d actually enjoy being here for even longer than we have been or than we agreed to be here,” Archer says during an interview, expounding on the community events for women and girls in the kingdom, and the education of new fans by legends and luminaries of women’s tennis.

She has seen the excitement in the eyes of girls picking up rackets and greeting the luminaries of today, who say in news conferences that they are all in on the event’s hosts, and the record prize money for women’s sports that they furnish. Attendance has been up 24 percent over the first year.

The event won’t always be in Saudi Arabia, and will return to its core markets in Europe and the Americas eventually, but, Archer says, “both those things can be true.

“We can want to stay here a little longer than the three years that we’ve committed to, and also be thinking about where we go after we leave.”

Too bad that, as Archer was speaking five months ago, staying a little longer had largely ceased to be an option.

By then, the WTA Tour Finals had outlived its usefulness to Saudi Arabia’s wider tennis ambitions, two people briefed on its sports ministry’s operations, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said. While there were still some talks to be had with the WTA, which would not close the door on any possibility of extension before those talks, they were not likely to go anywhere.

At the moment, the WTA Tour’s deal with Saudi Arabia appears to be ending at the conclusion of its planned term, though the ultimate outcome has yet to be finalized. The world’s leader in women’s sports got the market and the money that it wanted for its most important tournament, as well as some years of stability for a tournament that had been forced into itinerancy.

But Saudi Arabia got what it wanted out of the world’s best women’s tennis players, too, and the new market for the WTA Finals came at the price of exposure. The stars of the WTA often played in front of a half-empty arena with a capacity of just 3,500, in front of cameras beaming to potential sponsors and future hosts around the world.

The event had granted Riyadh and the kingdom legitimacy, despite its never having hosted a tour event. It proved one tennis tour’s willingness to accept its widely criticized human-rights record as a price of doing business. The men’s tour is next to stage a top-tier event in the kingdom, which will start as early as 2028.

“We have an incredible opportunity to bring the WTA Finals, a world-class, premium global event showcasing the best in women’s tennis, to a new home,” a spokesperson for the WTA said in a statement last week, following an initial report in Bounces that it would be leaving Riyadh after this fall’s edition.

“This is a historic moment in women’s sports, and we are having conversations around the globe with potential partners,” the spokesperson said.

“No decisions have been made yet about a location for the 2027 Finals, but as with all decisions regarding the future of the WTA, we are working closely with players and focused on continuing to build a strong future for women’s tennis.”

Saudi Arabia had appeared ready to play a major role in that future, until it did not.

In 2024, its sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) signed a deal with the WTA to put its name on the women’s rankings. PIF has a similar deal with the men’s tour, the ATP. The fund also sponsors a maternity and fertility program for women’s tennis, launched last year.

But just weeks before Archer arrived for last year’s WTA Tour Finals, PIF and its sports investment company, SURJ, had finalized a deal to host a new ATP Masters 1000 event, the highest-level tournament outside the Grand Slams.

The event is planned for February, starting in just under two years’ time. Its scope, and the money involved in securing it, was short of what Saudi officials had wanted to put on and what the ATP wanted to receive. The original proposal was a 96-player, combined men’s and women’s event as part of a possible $1 billion investment into tennis, but the WTA could not accommodate another 1,000-level tournament without sacrificing an existing one.

So SURJ and the ATP Tour alighted on a 56-player, one-week event, still a significant coup. It will leapfrog the 500-level events held in Qatar, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, whose license-holders’ refusal to budge means the new tournament’s exact place in the calendar remains fraught.

Hosting the WTA Tour Finals cost Saudi Arabia roughly $25 million a year, including the license fee, prize money and expenses. Recouping that investment with a small, half-full stadium was never likely, and while returns on investments are not a necessary concern for the kingdom, it has become less lavish with its spending on sports in recent years.

The government could save money that had been going to the WTA Tour Finals from its Ministry of Sports, and still strengthen its foothold in the sport, by shifting its focus toward the new men’s tournament through PIF’s sports investment division, SURJ. The new event requires construction of a new tennis complex in a to-be-determined city.

Also, Saudi Arabia had not partnered with the WTA solely for financial reasons. Bringing a top-tier women’s sports event to the country and having its citizens watch women compete represented an opportunity to varnish its human-rights record, which has been criticized by several organizations regarding its treatment of women.

“My experience has been very good here the past few years,” Jessica Pegula said in a news conference during last year’s event.

“Not a lot of complaints.”

Gauff, who said during the first edition that she would consider not returning without seeing political progress,spoke of inspiring a new generation of Saudi girls during the second.

“I don’t think this region has had a lot of female representation when it comes to sports and athletes actually playing here,” Gauff said last November. “So, to have us here be the first to do that, I’m really looking forward to maybe one day there’s a Saudi girl playing on tour when, well, I hope I’m still there.”

After two years of playing in Saudi Arabia and praising its facilities and approach, the WTA and its stars had done what its backers required. Saudi Arabia did not need them anymore.

Last November in Riyadh, that message hung in the air, without being said outright. The city was largely devoid of banners or other signs that the world’s top female tennis players were in town.

Their matches took place in an arena on a university campus, rather than in a bustling neighborhood with foot traffic. Outside the arena, there were some food stands and activities on a small plaza, but nothing like the sort of street festivals that accompany major sports events. Until the final matches, the arena was often half-full, but the appetite for and attention on those matches was buzzing and appreciated by the players.

And while players spoke highly of the hosts during their appearances at the WTA Tour Finals, during more recent tournaments, they have spelled out their hopes for the future of their flagship event more clearly.

“I feel like it still needs to grow into an event that showcases the pinnacle of our sport,” Pegula said in a news conference at the Charleston Open in late March.

For casual tennis fans, the WTA Tour Finals might feel like an afterthought at the end of a long season, especially given the smaller crowds it draws in comparison to tennis’s other showcase events. But qualifying for the tournament, in which only the top eight singles players and top eight doubles teams of the season compete, is a massive achievement. Players relish the opportunity to test their games against the best of the best.

“It’s the thing that we all dream of playing,” Madison Keys said in a news conference last month. She played two matches in Riyadh last year before withdrawing due to a viral illness.

“It’s the event of the entire year that everyone [on tour] is talking about. I just hope it ends up in a place where tennis fans get to see it and appreciate it, and it gets to be the event it deserves to be.”

Part of that lack of buzz is an issue of marketing, said Pegula, who has qualified for the Finals in each of the past four years, meaning she’s seen the nomadic event in a few different iterations. There was the flat atmosphere of Fort Worth, Texas in 2022 and a disaster in Cancun, Mexico in 2023 which saw the players rebel against courts they said were dangerous in a hastily constructed temporary stadium.

At the time, a WTA spokesperson said that the tour had worked “on an expedited timeline amid weather challenges to ensure the stadium and court meet our strict performance standards.”

It was that haste and instability, driven first by the Covid-19 pandemic, and then by the abrupt end of a long-term deal with China’s sports authorities after the country refused, in the tour’s view, to substantially investigate the disappearance of tennis player Peng Shuai, which in part led the WTA to alight on the financial security that Saudi Arabia could provide.

It has not provided the engagement that the players want out of the event. Staging the Finals in a place with a built-in tennis fandom makes a big difference in overall atmosphere. The 2021 edition in Guadalajara, Mexico also came together hastily, with the WTA Tour announcing that the event would be moved from Shenzen two months before it started.

But the WTA had some history in Guadalajara thanks to a 125-level tournament that debuted there in 2019, and the lack of lead time for the Finals didn’t keep a boisterous crowd from showing up. Players enjoyed loud, engaged fans and an event that felt as much like a celebration as it did a competitive tournament.

“Mexico was great in that sense. The people are so passionate,” Paula Badosa, who reached the semifinals in Guadalajara, said during a Charleston Open news conference.

“The atmosphere was amazing, one of the best ones I remember.

“So, yeah, I expect the same. It’s the WTA Finals, the best players in the world. For me, it has to be a crazy event, and hopefully they can do that, I don’t know, in the best place possible, if it has to be in Riyadh, Riyadh. If it has to be in U.S., U.S., or if it has to be in Mexico also, I’m happy. … It’s very important that it has a big, big crowd, because it’s what the players deserve.”

“Obviously, we have all the Slams and stuff like that which are amazing, but I do feel like the ATP Finals seems a little bigger,” Pegula said.

“Because it is really tough, you’re playing against the best players of that year and to win that is a really big deal. But I think, marketing-wise, it gets a little lost still. I know it’s a long year, it’s hard to keep up, and sometimes at the end of the year, maybe people check out a little as fans. But I think it’s really important that we continue to grow that.”

Big crowds are at the top of the WTA Tour’s priority list as well — for its players’ and its sponsorship partners’ sake. As the tour searches for a new home, a host city that can deliver strong attendance, fan engagement and media exposure is of paramount importance. Riyadh is eight hours ahead of the East Coast of the United States, meaning matches often took place in the middle of the night for one of the WTA’s most important markets from a sponsorship standpoint.

One WTA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships in tennis, said cities in the Americas are in contention, while national media in Poland and Czech Republic have reported that Gdansk and Ostrava or Prague, respectively, are interested.

A separate person briefed on the WTA’s plans to relocate the event, speaking anonymously for the same reason, said no decision is likely until this summer.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Sports Business, Culture, Tennis, Global Sports, Women's Tennis

2026 The Athletic Media Company