Laura: That seems really inconsistent, right? You’ve written about this a bit and, one could imagine they’re actually regretting taking that principled stand against China and trying to step away from it because it did cost them a lot.
Jon: I don’t think there’s, there’s ethical regret. I think women’s tennis thought we’re going to have a lot of support and they did a victory lap on global affairs shows, but this really blew holes in the balance sheets. I’m told that their revenues were down about 30 percent because of this decision. I think they basically said, “We need to right this ship and hold our nose and essentially put ourselves out to the highest bidder. Lesson learned.”
Alex: I wanted to step back a bit and just ask a really basic question, especially if you don’t follow tennis: These deals are about money. Why does tennis need the money? How do tennis players get paid?
Jon: Tennis players get paid two ways: in prize money and endorsements. The real issue here is that the tour, the WTA, the governing body, they get the bulk of their revenues from this year-end event. So, Coco Gauff plays U.S. Open. She makes millions and millions of dollars. It’s a great story. She gets these endorsements. The U.S. Open makes all this money. There’s suites and television contracts and tickets. The Women’s Tennis Association—the league basically in which Coco Gauff plays—doesn’t necessarily make great revenue from these big-ticket events. They make the bulk of their revenue from this year-end event.
Laura: The interesting thing about this event, though, is the players would have to go there. Were there any assurances made to the women players, for instance, about dress or their conduct in Saudi Arabia? And I’m also wondering if you could talk about some of the concerns about players who are queer or would be concerned about the treatment of gay people in their country.
Jon: That’s a great question because all of this happened fast. This event is going to happen in about six weeks and it was only announced one week ago. So basically, a lot of the players and a lot of the agents and a lot of some of the behind the scenes people said “listen, we’re not necessarily putting a blanket ban on Saudi Arabia, but we need to ask a lot of questions. We need to see the site, we need to know about attire.” There was a professional wrestling event where the women weren’t allowed to wear their usual costumes. There are queer players on the WTA tour, and some of them have already been very outspoken saying, I wouldn’t feel comfortable there.
The other thing that’s interesting: I was in Saudi Arabia for a sportswashing story for 60 Minutes, maybe nine months ago or so, and I went to one tennis event —and I’ve seen high school tennis matches played before bigger crowds. So part of this is do you want to go halfway across the world? You don’t know what you’re getting. You don’t know how accepted you’ll be. A lot of these players fashion sort of social activism as part of their brand. Does it undercut that if suddenly they’re taking this money? They also don’t even know if they’re going to be fans in the stands.
So I think that the women’s tennis tour essentially said, we need to really hit the pause button, answer some of these exact questions that you’re raising. I anticipate they will be playing there in 2024.
Alex: I’m just sort of wondering from the Saudi side, what they get out of it, if it’s not something where tennis has a huge following there. Why do they want this tournament there?
Jon: This isn’t about media rights deals and selling tickets and the usual reasons why people invest in sports, at least in the United States.
What’s going on in Saudi Arabia is something altogether different. It’s this “Vision 2030,” where Saudi Arabia wants to rebrand itself and having Coco Gauff come in Saudi Arabia and pose with high-ranking officials and eat local cuisine and sort of everything you get with an endorsement, I think that’s really what’s driving this. It’s not because there’s this burning desire for Saudis to watch high-level tennis the same way it’s not necessarily why they’re having heavyweight boxing fights or WWE events or Formula One races either. This is something much bigger than just fans wanting to watch athletes.
Laura: The men’s tour has been much less wary of going there. What’s the calculation on their side? How’s it different?
Jon: It’s a really good question: Why isn’t there this blowback when the men have gone to Saudi Arabia? I think that’s a fair point. In theory, a country where people are being oppressed, that ought to bother everyone.
I do think that with women’s tennis, this whole tour—since its inception—was founded on these concepts of social justice and Billie Jean King, who turns 80 years old in a few weeks, is still very much the figurehead. I’m not sure it’s a double standard. I think it’s a different standard just because social justice and equity and diversity and equal prize money is so part and parcel with women’s tennis.
Alex: Yeah, you can see even the ads for the U.S. Open here, celebrate 50 years of equal prize money, right?
Laura: So, we went through this debate when the WTA was making the decision and that’s been resolved now, but looking ahead, there’s a summit coming up at the end of this month between the ATP and WTA about possibly merging their tours. How do you see that playing out in the next few months?
Jon: I think everyone’s looking to golf and what happened there and saying, that’s what we don’t want to happen. I think that the fear is that if tennis doesn’t have this unified front, the Saudis are just going to say, “You know what? We’re just going to do what we did with golf. Instead of asking for one tournament, we’re just going to buy out the whole tour.”
Laura: How do you see the concerns of the two different sides being weighed, though? The ATP has more muscle, right? The men do earn more money. Is there a danger that the WTA’s concerns get pushed off to the side in this process?
Jon: Yeah, I think that’s a real concern. I’ve talked to a lot of people who said, look, the men aren’t about equal prize money. The men don’t see this as a 50/50 partnership. They didn’t stand by the women when the women took the stance on China. The men were happy to continue going to China and I think that that’s something that concerns a lot of the women.
Laura: Also, you mentioned what happened in golf. Are there any differences between the structures of those leagues, tennis versus golf, that might give tennis more of a protection or is it a really similar situation with similar vulnerabilities?
Jon: Yeah, I’d say similar, not identical. One thing you don’t have in golf is this overlay of men and women, right? You go to the U.S. Open and the men and the women, they play together. Coco Gauff finishes her match and on comes Djokovic. And you have all these combined events and you have fans who are fans of both. The other thing is that tennis is so much more global than golf. If you’re living in Western Europe, as most of the top tennis players do, Riyadh is actually closer than coming to the United States, much less going to Asia. I think tennis is a more global sport and also tennis is a sport where men and women really intersect. I think that makes it different, but that can be as much a curse as a blessing.
Laura: John, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Jon: A pleasure. Thanks.
Alex: Jon Wertheim is a correspondent for 60 Minutes and an analyst for the Tennis Channel. You can read his writing on tennis at si.com.
Laura: After the break, we’ll discuss the particular financial pressures facing the women’s game and possible paths forward.
Alex: Women’s tennis is among the most popular sports, not just women’s sports, but sports period in the world. The idea of a professional league at that level essentially needing to beg for money and sponsors is a bit perplexing. But the sport’s dalliance with Saudi Arabia is not the first time in recent memory that the Women’s Tennis Association has confronted a similar ethical dilemma.
In 2021, the WTA suspended events in China over concerns for the safety of a player who had accused a high-ranking government official of sexual abuse. The move caused the WTA considerable financial hardship. Some now attribute the WTA’s interest in a Saudi event to the money problems caused by that decision.
Caitlin Thompson is the publisher of Racquet Magazine, which recently argued that tennis is unlikely to resist the Saudi kingdom’s involvement in the sport—but it should. Caitlin, welcome to the show.
Caitlin Thompson: Thanks for having me.
Alex: To back up a bunch, part of the background here is the WTA having financial trouble or needing money in part because of what happened with China a little while back.
Caitlin: Yeah, you’re correct in categorizing the WTA as being in a tricky position financially. Not only because of what recently happened in China—even before that, the women’s tennis tour has been in a bit of a precarious financial situation.
When I was growing up, the tour had title sponsors. Those listeners who might remember, the first couple of decades of the Women’s Tennis Association, the women’s tour, which celebrated 50 years of existence this year, was originally the Virginia Slims tour. There have been always a lot of brand dollars associated with title sponsorship of the women’s tennis tour, and that hasn’t existed really since the disappearance of the Sony Ericsson brand partnership, which happened more than 10 years ago. They’ve now signed a deal with Hologic, which is like a sports/data/health/tech company. But really, the money problems have gone far beyond just sponsorships.
Alex: Seen in that light, it makes it both more understandable, but also more striking that they would be considering taking money from Saudi Arabia, in terms of guarantees for player security and safety and the sort of ramifications of what it means to be involved with repressive foreign governments. It seems like there should be even more heightened awareness around it.
Caitlin: It’s interesting. There is heightened awareness, certainly of the safety and sort of bodily autonomy of a lot of these players. But also, there is—even from within their own organization—a lot of dissension about the opportunity to earn money.
Some of them have been very vocal and outspoken about not feeling safe traveling to certain countries and some of them have basically just said, I’m here to make money. And it’s unfortunate because I think it misses some context when you frame it as, should we be safe or should we be paid? I think that’s an oversimplification that actually isn’t necessarily at odds. But I do think the leadership of the WTA is in a bit of a tough spot because they don’t have a unified player voice that is in agreement about what it should do.
Alex: Yeah and I can totally sympathize with and understand the player point of view that, effectively, if the men can go take this money and it’s no big deal, why is it such an issue for us? That makes perfect sense.
Caitlin: Unless you’re a really sort of outspoken and educated player and keep in mind, and this is not a denigration at all, but most professional athletes are not necessarily schooled in the art of political protest.
Alex: They’ve been doing it since they were young. They’ve been doing sports since they were young.
Caitlin: Correct, and that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to…
Alex: A sophisticated understanding of geopolitics.
Caitlin: Correct. Especially if you add in the context, especially on the women’s side, although it’s affecting both tours, of the current sort of boycott of Russian and Belarusian tournaments and the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes at certain tournaments and in certain contexts. It’s this sort of really complex geopolitical conversation because there are players from almost every country, certainly every superpower, with a lot of very different stakes.
Laura: I understand the complexity of debating it in the abstract as kind of a social justice issue, but the incident with Peng Shuai illustrated that this isn’t an abstract or broad political discussion. It raised the possibility that top players themselves could actually be in danger. I think one of the main concerns about going to Saudi Arabia is this is a country where women have very limited rights.
How do you square that with sending some of the most successful female athletes in the world to that country and can you guarantee the safety of those people, and the teams around them?
Caitlin: Yeah, it’s a valid question. To be clear, they have not yet agreed to take Saudi money or events in Saudi Arabia. It should be said, they had a huge opportunity and it was rumored to be happening during the U.S. Open and there was a lot of dust-up. There was a lot of back channeling. I spoke to several players, several people I know on governing-body organizational committees who were all talking about how this almost happened and how that means it could happen in the future, but it didn’t. I think a lot of the reason it didn’t happen is and they announced that the WTA Tour Finals would be in Cancún this year, is because there was a backlash to the notion of going to Saudi Arabia among stakeholders, among the audience members, among players themselves. It should be noted that even though this is very much up for consideration, as are a number of things, they had the chance and they didn’t take it, at least not yet.
I think one of the things that I can share in terms of insight that is driving a lot of this conversation is the idea of equal pay. I think the tours don’t generate an equal amount of revenue. Part of that has to do with the traditional subjugation of women’s sports, the way that the rights are negotiated, the way that the title sponsorships are negotiated. But because they’ve made this commitment—and by they, I mean most of the tennis ecosystem and tournaments have made a commitment to equal pay despite not generating equal revenue—a lot of the new investment and a lot of the ability to generate new dollars has gone into paying players equally, as opposed to investing in things that could ultimately make the league more valuable.
So it’s an optics versus investment strategy that I think, again, is very short-sighted and there’s not been a tremendous amount of outside thinking or outside innovation. And you have a lot of cases where people are motivated only in the short term.
Laura: Is anyone talking about other potential routes forward? Because it seems simple to frame this as we either take the money from Saudi Arabia or we’re under threat. I think that argument’s really useful for someone who’s in the position of making that decision, right? Because it’s like, our hands are tied. We’ve got to do it. Look what’s happening everywhere else. Look at what happened with LIV Golf. They just took it out from under the PGA, we just have to do this. Are there any other options? I know, for instance, there were several other bids on the WTA Finals this year, which were not that different in terms of money from the Saudi one.
Caitlin: That’s my understanding as well. I think that’s a great point, and one that sort of most closely aligns to my own thinking, which is to say, OK, understanding that we need several seismic changes within the sport. One is probably most urgently to unite the tours so that there can be more coherent and sort of aligned interests. Whenever the sport is held with men and women together, competing at joint events—not just Slams, but joint events—it by far drives the most engagement, fan viewership, etc. That to me is indicative of the way that the sport needs to evolve, which is to say, tennis has a really unique value proposition, and not only do the men and women play on the same field, a lot of times they’re doing it at the same time. Mixed doubles is the only thing that I can think of that involves two genders competing in the same competition, and it’s really sort of unique.
Tennis has, by far, under optimized a lot of its value. The CVC deal, the European-based, private equity firm rumored to have bought 20 percent of WTA Ventures, a group that’s tasked with commercializing the WTA, indicates the desire of private equity to get involved and there are very few places in sports where it can go. If the options on the table are to try to compete to buy a football club in Europe, try to compete to buy a team in the NFL or the NBA, or buy giant chunks of tennis, tennis starts to look like a really good bargain because of how under-optimized it is.
I think what’s really missing from the framing, as you said, Laura, is it about are we going to continue to exist, or do we take Saudi money? Well, that’s a very convenient framing for the people who are deciding or trying to force that decision matrix. If you look at, OK, between the Emirates, giant banks in the U.S. and Europe and consortiums of people who are dying to get into this sport, all of a sudden, the options start to look really exciting and endless. They just tend to threaten the very few people who are in the very few rooms who are deciding these things. I understand why they don’t want that to be the decision.
For me, it’s a no brainer. Just get four or five giant private equity firms, each of whom is writing a check for a billion dollars, which sounds preposterous, but if you look at the regular amounts of money that are spent in the sports spaces, it starts to look like pennies, and all of a sudden that becomes a viable way for the tourists to not only continue but thrive.
Laura: When you put it that way, the Saudi money is basically just the only way of keeping the management and business structure as it exists more or less intact, which would be great for the people who are in charge of that business structure, but actually it isn’t good for the sport.
Caitlin: That would be my argument. It’s less about do we need to take this money and more just, OK, well, knowing that we need to take some money, who is going to be incentivized to leave the structure in place and who’s controlling these deals?
I think had that WTA Finals deal gone through, that would have been a very hard thing to undo, and the fact that that can get kicked down the road is not the best outcome, but it’s also certainly not the worst. For those of us who want to see the sport continue to be on the right side of history, which tennis has been—it has been the platform for women, people of color, gay people, trans people to make a really huge societal impact. We’re talking today on the 50-year anniversary of the Battle of the Sexes, right? Tennis has been this vehicle and I’d like to see it continue to lead. My viewpoint is, let’s just wash out the entirety of the organizing structure and get basically bigger thinkers in the room and then we can have a better conversation.
Alex: Caitlin, thank you so much for talking to us today.
Caitlin: Thank you for having me.
Laura: Caitlin Thompson is the co-founder of Racquet Magazine. You can read Gerry Marzorati’s article, “The Saudi Quandary” at racquetmag.com.
Alex: The Politics of Everything is co-produced by Talkhouse.
Laura: Emily Cooke is our executive producer.
Alex: Lorraine Cademartori produced this episode.
Laura: Myron Kaplan is our audio editor.
Alex: If you enjoyed The Politics of Everything and you want to support us, one thing you can do is rate and review the show. Every review helps.
Laura: Thanks for listening.