Saudi Arabia’s tennis investment and ATP tournament: How it is changing the sport

When Saudi Arabia proposed investing $1 billion into tennis in spring last year, it briefly upended the sport. The bulk of that money was earmarked for a combined men’s and women’s 1,000-level tournament, to be held in January ahead of the Australian Open. After months of negotiations between the ATP and WTA Tours, the four Grand Slams, and the alphabet soup of tournament owners and governing organizations, disruption appeared to have arrived.

Eighteen months later, the kingdom’s sports investment unit, SURJ, and the ATP Tour instead announced on Thursday a 56-player men’s 1,000-level tournament, which is yet to be assigned a spot in the compacted tennis calendar. The existential crisis of 2024 has instead become a game of tournament Tetris, negotiated between Saudi Arabia and the owners of existing, smaller men’s events in Doha, Qatar and Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Sources involved in the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, say that the Doha and Dubai tournaments do not wish to relinquish their licenses. The ATP Tour must now find a place for its new event, which represents a contraction in Saudi Arabia’s ambitions, but an entrenchment of its slowly intensifying relationship with tennis — and of tennis’ relationship with a nation with a heavily criticized human rights record.

Saudi Arabia received a score of 9/100 in this year’s Freedom of the World report by non-profit Freedom House, and ranked 132nd out of 148 countries on the 2025 Global Gender Gap index. Human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have criticized Saudi Arabia’s record on freedom of expression, including the criminalization of same-sex relationships and the Personal Status Law, which requires women to obtain a male guardian’s permission to marry.

In November, during the first of three WTA Tour Finals to be held in Riyadh, Saudi nationals and experts said the crackdown on dissenting voices was stricter than ever under the de facto rule of the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, which began in 2017. Thousands of political prisoners are under arrest in Saudi Arabia for speaking out against the absolute monarchy and government.

In the U.S. State Department’s most recent annual report on human rights practices for Saudi Arabia, it lists what it calls credible reports of various human rights violations, including “arbitrary or unlawful killings … arbitrary arrest and detention … crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.”

The PIF did not respond to a request for comment on its relationship with the Saudi state, and Saudi Arabian authorities declined to comment on any of the allegations in this story.

The ATP did not respond to whether Saudi’s human rights record was considered in the decision, nor other questions around the organization’s decision-making process for where events are held.

Tennis has long played events in countries with questionable human rights records. Homosexuality is illegal in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, while China, which hosts two WTA 1000 events, several smaller events on both tours and the Billie Jean King Cup Finals, “increased restrictions on human rights” in 2024 according to Amnesty International. Russia has not hosted an ATP or WTA tournament since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and its players — and those of the nation’s ally Belarus — are not permitted to compete under their national flags.

Tennis’ relationship with Saudi Arabia goes beyond the hosting of three tour events: This new tournament, the WTA Tour Finals, and the Next Gen ATP Finals. Last year, it launched the Six Kings Slam, a men’s exhibition event which awards $1.5 million for showing up and an additional $4.5 million to the winner. Both the ATP and WTA Tours have signed strategic partnerships with the PIF, which sponsors the tours’ world rankings. It is also funding a paid maternity program for the WTA Tour. This week’s confirmation of a new 1,000-level event elevates the kingdom’s status in the sport even further.

In a conference call Thursday, ATP Tour chairman Andrea Gaudenzi suggested that one solution to the calendar reshuffle that the new event requires would be having two tournament swings in February: one in West Asia and one in South America. The one headlined by the Saudi Masters 1000 will have more rankings points to award and more prize money to win than any of the South American events, which currently comprise three tournaments in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Santiago. A country with barely any tennis heritage has effectively overleapt a continent with a rich history in the sport and with one of the most fervent sets of supporters anywhere in the world.

Ever since 2022, when Saudi Arabia turned golf upside down with the LIV Tour, tennis’ powerbrokers have been conscious of a potential tennis equivalent, and have believed that the best approach to avoiding one is to work with the kingdom.

But generally, instead of turning tennis upside down, the kingdom has worked to establish footholds across its remit, while moving toward its key ambition: event ownership.

“Our ambition is to own an event, in the kingdom, both genders, and have it play a meaningful role in the tennis calendar,” Danny Townsend, chief executive of SURJ Investments, said during an interview at a summit in England last month.

“You can’t just go and rip something up and start again. If you’re an ATP 500 owner, you’ve invested in that tournament for a long time, you’ve got that slot on the calendar, you don’t want someone coming in and disrupting that.”

Now it has come in to disrupt that, though whose events and when will be affected remains unclear.

“It’s too early to speculate on the impact that the Saudi Arabia Masters 1000 will have on any particular region or event. The tournament’s place in the calendar has not yet been confirmed, and those discussions will form part of the broader 2028 calendar planning process,” an ATP Tour spokesperson said. Gaudenzi echoed these statements at his media briefing Thursday, though he accepted that a February slot “is probably a better outcome.”

The arrival of this event differs from the biggest to be held in the kingdom, the WTA Tour Finals, in how and why it landed there. In the summer of 2023, the WTA was close to agreeing to take its flagship season-ending event to Saudi Arabia as it scrambled for a venue with the funds and infrastructure sufficient to replace Shenzhen in China. China had terminated its 10-year deal for the event in response to the tour’s decision to boycott the country for 18 months, over its refusal to investigate whether a former top government official had sexually assaulted the former doubles player Peng Shuai.

Amid criticism from legends of the sport, including Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, the WTA alighted on Cancun, Mexico instead, which hosted a disastrous tournament played in rain and high winds, on uneven courts, in front of temporary stadia.

Then it signed its deal with Saudi Arabia in spring last year, before hosting the inaugural event last November. The WTA rejected criticism that it had sacrificed the principles of equality that underpinned the tour since its foundation in the 1970s, putting on a number of initiatives for local women. There were coaching clinics, and access to the players.

WTA chief executive Portia Archer said in a news conference that some host nations do not share values with the organization, before being asked whether there was a limit to how much of a non-alignment the organization would accept.

Archer said in response that she had “misspoke,” adding: “My intention was to really say that we respect the values, even if they differ from other countries that we find ourselves in and compete in.”

Players were asked about the kingdom’s human rights record before the event began, and only Coco Gauff directly expressed reservations, saying that she might not return without seeing change. A week later, after winning the event and picking up a cheque for $4.8 million, she spoke in glowing terms about her time in Riyadh.

“Honestly, my experience has been like a 10 out of 10,” Gauff said. “I’m pretty sure, the WTA sent us a survey, and honestly, I have no critiques or complaints. My last couple Finals experience haven’t been like the best, even despite the result. But yeah, coming here, I just felt welcome.”

In a phone interview last year, Nicholas McGeechan, the founding co-director of human rights advocacy organisation FairSquare, said: “The entire purpose of these tournaments and ventures if you’re someone like MBS is not to start these conversations but to shut them down.” There were no questions around human rights during Gaudenzi and Townsend’s media briefing Thursday.

Lina al-Hathloul, a Saudi who left the country in 2011 and whose sister was imprisoned and tortured in 2018 after leading the campaign for women to have the right to drive, said “the same people who allow women to play tennis are also torturing the activists,” in a phone interview during last year’s event, from Belgium, where she now lives.

Men’s players will face similar questions to Gauff and her peers when this new ATP Masters 1000 begins, as early as 2028. They will also experience what the WTA Tour Finals participants did: being paid pioneers for the kingdom’s ambitions in tennis, a sport in which Townsend acknowledged that it is starting from effectively zero.

“There is no point in us just bringing a tennis tournament to Saudi and then hoping that fixes anything. If I’m going to inspire a new female tennis player to play tennis, where is she going to play tennis? There are no tennis courts. We’re going to need to build a bunch of tennis courts,” he said in September.

“Now there’s a tennis court. Who is going to coach her to play tennis? We need to bring in a bunch of coaches … That’s why we work so closely with the Ministry of Sport, because we’ve got to coordinate our efforts to drive participation and engagement, which just isn’t there.”

At the start of last year’s WTA Tour Finals, Arij Almutabagani, the president of the Saudi Tennis Federation, said that the kingdom now had over 14,000 female tennis players.

The nature of those questions will also depend on the outcome of the calendar Tetris that now has to begin. If the event takes place in February as expected, it will affect the three ATP Tour events held in South America. In a recent video interview, the Argentinian former world No. 8 and French Open semifinalist Diego Schwartzman bemoaned how he felt South America was being increasingly neglected by the sport’s powerbrokers.

“The main guys on ATP are not thinking about South America,” Schwartzman said. Gaudenzi said Thursday that a swing including the new tournament could take place at the same time as the one in South America, but there is a stark contrast between the fervent atmosphere at the South American tournaments and those that have been held so far in Saudi Arabia.

Attendances picked up for the last couple of days of last year’s WTA Tour Finals, and the final in particular was well attended, but some of the opening days were extremely empty. The second day was never more than about 10 percent full. There have been sparse crowds too at the first couple of ATP Next Gen Finals, though the Six Kings Slam events have come closer to the 8,000 capacity.

The kingdom’s push into tennis may have transformed from sharp to gradual since last year, when the Grand Slams were so spooked that they drew up plans for a new Premium Tour, with around 14 tournaments serving the world’s top 100 players. But a showpiece men’s event to go with one on the women’s side underlines that Saudi Arabia is convinced of its significant place in the tennis universe, and underlines that the sport is comfortable with that significance in the face of its human rights record.