Sep 2, 2024, 2:00PM UTC
I’d been promised the future of tennis was in the desert.
From the stands of the Next Gen ATP Finals in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I watched as the eighth seed, Abdullah Shelbayh, was given the most dramatic of entrances. Inside one of the stadiums in King Abdullah Sports City, which features a sprawl of soccer fields and indoor arenas across nearly 4 million square meters, an announcer summoned a brief list of the player’s accomplishments, first in Arabic and then in English. The music swelled. Bright white lasers illuminated the lines of the court before the screen at the other end of the stadium opened up to reveal a player tunnel, from which Shelbayh emerged, looking awkward and confused as spotlights swirled around him and the volume of the music rose once again. It was the most impressive light show I’d ever seen at a tennis event, far surpassing anything I’d witnessed at the sport’s biggest tournament, the US Open — a lot of pomp for a guy ranked 185th in the world, playing in an arena that was nearly empty. In a stadium that could seat 3,700, I counted fewer than 50 spectators in total, including the players’ teams and tournament workers.
Later, a spokesperson with the Association of Tennis Professionals (or the ATP, the men’s side of the tour) would tell me they were thrilled with how the tournament was going — the light show, so cool, right? I asked if the turnout was disappointing, and while they agreed that it was, it was also expected. Traveling to Jeddah was a tough ask for many fans, and tennis does have a lot of history in Saudi Arabia. That interest would, hopefully, grow with time.
Months earlier, the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund had struck a deal with the ATP to host Next Gen in Jeddah for the following four years. Next Gen is touted as a proving ground of sorts. There is the competition itself, which features the top-ranked men under 21. In the past decade, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have both won this tournament, later going on to win Grand Slams.
It’s also a trial for the sport itself. Next Gen is where the ATP tries out new things: “innovations,” it touts, as it tests everything from dramatic rule changes to wearable tech that captures players’ biometrics. And this year, a lot of lasers, apparently.
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Between matches, I wandered around the grounds. From the outside, you’d never guess there was a live sporting event happening. The parking lot was nearly empty. There appeared to be more people working the event than attending, many just idling around, looking at their phones. Out of boredom, I bought a candy bar from a concession stand, and the cashier told me I was the first customer they’d had all day.
Next Gen is a hard-court event — the most common surface — though it is unusual for several reasons. Since there are no doubles matches, the court is stripped of the lines that would frame the doubles alley, giving the area of play a narrower dimension that is destabilizing for any spectator used to looking at a normal court. The scoreboard, too, was laid out differently. Rather than the traditional scoreline, the interface prescribed more hierarchical logic to each game; the love, 15, 30, 40 order of scoring was now more legible. It was confusing to those familiar with tennis, but I could see how it might be more intuitive to someone who wasn’t.
Matches had a different rhythm, too. Games were first to four points, skipping the usual win-two-points-in-a-row drama at deuce. Sets were won in four instead of six games, with tiebreaks at 3-3. Time between serves was reduced. There were no on-court warm-ups at all.
Many of these changes were intended to speed up the match. Later that week in the finals match, Serbian Hamad Medjedovic would be allowed to take two 10-minute breaks between sets. His opponent and the tournament’s top seed, Frenchman Arthur Fils, would not be thrilled about it. “The rule is terrible,” Fils told French newspaper L’Équipe afterward. “It’s really stupid that this could happen here.”
During the event, I talked to the ATP’s chief sporting officer, Ross Hutchins, who explained that the rule changes at Next Gen were part of an initiative from the top of the organization to challenge all the sport’s assumptions, to reimagine each of tennis’s traditions to see how to break the rules “for the benefit of the fan to enjoy our sport.” Hutchins is a former player, once ranked 26th in the world in doubles, and I was surprised by how much time he spent talking about fan engagement.
Tennis is often referred to as a game of inches. Hawk-Eye turned it into a game of millimeters — three millimeters, to be exact.
He was existentially concerned about TikTok. For the better part of the last century, sports have been a monoculture because they have always been broadcast on TV — the industry term for this is “linear.” Now, people look at their phones. Surveys have shown that Zoomers don’t watch TV and, more shockingly, do not watch sports, at least not the way that their parents or older siblings do.
Hearing Hutchins’ ideas for Next Gen revealed the ATP’s anxieties. The light show had been made to look good for “short-form highlights.” (I.e., should the game be tailored to TikTok?) He even proposed going as far as completely rewriting the scoring system of tennis. “Do we simplify and go first to 21 points?” (I.e., is the sport too confusing?) And the new rules of Next Gen made matches quicker. “If you take the total amount of time in a match of two hours, how much, actually, is watching action versus watching someone look at their strings or changing their shirt or toweling themselves down? And can we try and reduce the dead time in a match?” (I.e., is tennis boring?)
Some of what Hutchins was putting forward was merely to illustrate just how far they were willing to go. He suspected some of the more radical ideas out of Next Gen wouldn’t make it to tour. But he estimated that, historically, four out of every five things they tried eventually had. The point remained: the institutions of tennis were willing to rewrite the rules of tennis.
“People have to move faster these days because of the way the entertainment world is forcing change… if you don’t grow at a certain pace, you will be left behind,” Hutchins told me.
Like any culture, there’s a tension between tradition and modernity, and during Next Gen, I tried to be a good sport and embrace the latter. Watching tennis live is as much of an aural experience as it is a visual one. During the matches, I closed my eyes and focused on the sounds: the thwack of the ball, the squeaking of sneakers, and the boom of the PA announcer declaring the point’s winner. In Jeddah, though, when I would ordinarily hear applause, all I picked up was silence, like a space waiting to be filled. But with what? I wondered.
The full Hawk-Eye setup consists of a dozen cameras hard-wired around the perimeter court — eight in use, four for redundancy — a system that uses over $100K in equipment.
The cameras are calibrated, a process that takes three days.
An illustration of the Hawk-Eye system being calibrated.
The cameras themselves are not super high-definition. In fact, they can’t even see color. But the point is to capture things quickly — at 70 frames per second — in order to triangulate the position of the ball.
An illustration of a player tossing a tennis ball up for a serve, with each frame of his serve motion captured.
David Foster Wallace described tennis as a game of geometry. The construction of electronic line-calling confirms that idea. The predominant system, Hawk-Eye, measures trajectory, using a set of 12 cameras positioned around the court, each tracking the ball at 70 frames per second. The cameras themselves are not that sophisticated and, in fact, aren’t even high-definition or in color. Instead, the power comes from the processing of that footage. Using image differencing, the multiple angles allow the system to identify the ball’s position in 3D space — truth by triangulation. But Hawk-Eye doesn’t just know where the ball is and instead predicts where it’s going by calculating the ball’s speed, spin, and skid. The system assumes where a ball will bounce before it arrives, a prophecy of the future made with the confidence of the combined might of physics, surveillance technology, and an algorithm trained on billions of data points. In that way, Hawk-Eye is more precog than cop.
The system works incredibly quickly. As soon as a ball makes contact with the court, Hawk-Eye can call it out by playing a recording of a person saying “out!”
In Jeddah, I watched the semifinal match between Medjedovic and Dominic Stricker from the booth where Hawk-Eye is controlled — called the Hawk-Eye Nest, of course. There were more spectators in attendance this time, but the stadium was still pretty empty. As I was escorted to the booth, we passed all of the TV setups broadcasting the match live. Tons of screens, wires, and boxes, deployed in a way that reminded me of an arcade. Everything looked at once organized and also extremely messy, concealed half-heartedly under blankets, as we wandered through the dark, up some staircases, and finally into the booth where Hawk-Eye was operated.
I was greeted by the Hawk-Eye team deployed to this specific tournament, a polite batch of earnest twentysomething boys who all look very at home situated in front of a computer. The man behind the curtain is actually a bunch of lads, tasked with protecting the integrity of the game.
The energy in the Hawk-Eye Nest was surprisingly subdued. Everyone was playing their part, quietly and effectively, and like any desk job, it mostly involved staring at a computer monitor. I looked over the shoulder of someone whose screen was visualizing the path of the ball on the blue court below: where it had been, where it was headed. In more ways than one, this was a glimpse of the future.
Its most automated form, Hawk-Eye Live, was first tested at Next Gen in 2017 — arguably the tournament’s greatest contribution to the wider sport — and then more widely adopted during the pandemic when safety concerns around covid reduced the human footprint on the court. Now, Hawk-Eye is employed so prevalently in professional tennis that it’s more noticeable where it isn’t. As recently as this summer’s Olympic Games, American star Coco Gauff argued with the chair umpire over what she believed was an unfair call. Because the Games were in Paris, the tournament was played on clay, the only surface that has yet to incorporate Hawk-Eye. In lieu of a sophisticated computer system, what’s in and what’s out is determined the old-fashioned way: by human judgment.
For the majority of its existence, each professional tennis match had as many as nine line judges, each responsible for a single angle of the court, to call balls in or out. But on the famous red clay surface of Roland-Garros, Donna Vekić had returned Gauff’s serve with a wobbly forehand and just barely clipped the baseline on Gauff’s side of the court. The ball was in, but a line judge called it out, before yelling, “Correction!”
By then, Gauff had whacked the ball into the net, possibly assuming the point was already over. In cases like this, the chair umpire must decide if the wrong call was a “hindrance” to the player before their racket made contact with the ball — a strange ask from the rule book, considering the chair ump would literally have to be in the mind of the player to know. It was decided that neither the inaccurate call nor its correction was a hindrance to Gauff.
But in that moment, Gauff believed the call was unjust. She pleaded with the chair ump. “I feel like I’m getting cheated on constantly in this game,” she said to the tournament supervisor, through tears. “It happens to me, it happened to Serena.”
Gauff had good reason to evoke Serena Williams. Back at the 2004 US Open, broadcasters were testing Hawk-Eye as a fun visual replay for audiences at home. Two decades ago, it was not used for officiating at all. But during an infamous quarterfinal match between Williams and Jennifer Capriati, line judges called a number of Williams’ balls out, which, when shown by replay, were clearly in. This happened on three different occasions.
“This is ridiculous,” said John McEnroe, who was commentating on the broadcast. “Give me a break!”
Williams lost that match. To the spectator at home, who had a vantage unavailable to anyone on the court thanks to Hawk-Eye, it looked like injustice. That single match is often cited as the catalyst for broad adoption of electronic line-calling in tennis: “The reason Hawk-Eye became a thing is because they were calling my balls out and they weren’t even close to the line,” Williams recalled in 2022 on Meghan Markle’s podcast.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) mandated that to be used for officiating purposes, any line-calling system had to be accurate within five millimeters — about the width of a pencil. Hawk-Eye was consistent within under three. The Williams-Capriati match instigated official testing, and after about a year, in 2006, Hawk-Eye became available to players who wanted to challenge a line person’s call. Over the following decade, its implementation became standard across most of the tour’s major tournaments, as did players’ trust in the technology.
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There’s a belief that Hawk-Eye is more accurate and, in turn, more objective. The insinuation is that electronic line-calling could overcome prejudice. Technology overruling bias, perceived or not.
Hawk-Eye was not the first ELC system in tennis. In the ’80s, several tournaments deployed a technology called Cyclops that used infrared beams to judge if serves were out. (It’s unclear why the system was named after a mythological creature with one eye.) As Hawk-Eye succeeded Cyclops, other ELC technologies have entered the arena — Foxtenn, Flightscope, and Bolt6 are the most prominent competitors — but Hawk-Eye has become the Kleenex of the space, the brand that transcends the proper noun. So confident is the company that when I asked one Hawk-Eye exec if they had any business challenges, he said he couldn’t think of any. As a corporate entity, Hawk-Eye apparently has no anxieties about its future.
A subsidiary of Sony, Hawk-Eye Innovations is involved in nearly every major sport. For video review or, as the company calls it, Synchronized Multi-Angle Replay Technology (which spells SMART, of course), soccer and American football are the biggest sports; when it comes to ball and player tracking, Hawk-Eye is in tennis but also involved with a newer technology that tracks at least 29 points on an athlete’s body in real time (this one’s called SkeleTRACK, and it is being used by the NBA). Other forms of electronic line-calling, such as VAR in soccer, can be quite controversial, so much so that, earlier this year, the Premier League considered ditching it. In tennis, despite the occasional hiccup, players have called for Hawk-Eye to be in more and more tournaments across the tour. There has been surprisingly little fuss about Hawk-Eye replacing jobs, probably because the line judge has typically been a part-time gig for tennis enthusiasts.
For a technology that is largely invisible to the public, Hawk-Eye has an aesthetic from its origins as a TV video review mechanism. Back in its broadcast replay days, audiences didn’t simply get the call of in or out. There was a whole build-up. Onscreen, after a player challenged a call, the image zoomed in from directly above, as if filmed by a camera suspended in the sky, pitched from the heavens, reflecting the vantage point of God. It was a form of theater, but a compelling one: as audiences waited for the animation, they clapped; when the placement of the ball was unveiled — whether its shadow-like imprint is touching a white line or not — audiences oohed and aahed. The delicious drama of a slow reveal.
There’s nothing more fundamental to tennis than the idea of keeping a ball in play. It is even more fundamental than the racquet. (The sport was originally called jeu de paume, French for “game of the palm,” and was originally played with your hands.) That’s why the men’s player with the most Grand Slam titles isn’t the sport’s most graceful player or its most relentless, but its greatest returner. You’ll never lose a point if you keep the ball in the lines, within the realm of what Hawk-Eye defines as the playable court.
Tennis is often referred to as a game of inches. Hawk-Eye turned it into a game of millimeters — three millimeters, to be exact.
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Line-calling is not the only use of Hawk-Eye. Once you track that much data, you can do a lot more than call a ball in or out. In fact, Hawk-Eye collects enough data that it can re-create an entire match in virtual reality. Even in more complex sports, like football, with 22 players across a 5,350-square-meter field, Hawk-Eye is able to contribute to the metaverse thing — as it did last year, when it contributed to a system that took a Jaguars-Falcons game, digitized the players to make them look like Toy Story characters, and broadcast that version live in parallel to the traditional telecast. Whether anyone wants this experience is debatable, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the technology and the herculean corporate synergy that lined the NFL up with Disney’s intellectual property. (That still sounds better than NFTs, which had been pushed on me in many conversations with the ATP.)
I’d been assured by representatives at the ATP that Hawk-Eye was ensuring the sport had a bright future, “embracing a technological future for tennis” that would be “inevitable.” But it wasn’t just automating parts of officiating or leveraging brand-name cartoon characters. A lot of it had to do with sports gambling.
During the match I observed from the Nest, Hawk-Eye would collect countless data points, much of which was being transmitted live not just to the chair umpire officiating the match but to business partners of the ATP as well — the most lucrative of which are, recently, sports betting companies. Everything that was happening on-court would be sent through an algorithm that would process that information to create more accurate betting odds that could be distributed to the world’s gamblers.
This was news to the Hawk-Eye boys. Andrew Birse, a technical project manager, gave me a puzzled look and then got a little defensive: “We mostly deal with on-site capture.” Another operator, Juan Martinez, followed up: “We don’t know what anyone does with it.”
I felt bad. They’d had no idea.
After thinking about it for a moment, Birse said, “That’s probably good for us. It means more people want it. More people want our services.”
In 2021, the ATP formed TDI. The goal of the firm was to manage an “asset” that had risen dramatically in value over the past decade: data.
The ATP was one of the first sports organizations to sell its data, which has become so lucrative that it nearly equals how much it makes on its broadcasting rights. (The Slams negotiate theirs separately.) As part of the organization’s deal with Hawk-Eye, the great wealth of that data comes from ball and player tracking would be owned by TDI — at least for the ATP’s own events — making it licensable and, therefore, profitable.
I’m told there are four levels of data captured and transmitted. Level one is the score, which is controlled entirely by the chair umpire on a small tablet. (Their chair has a pressure sensor, nicknamed a “whoopie cushion,” that knows when an ump’s ass has gotten up from the seat.) Level two is observational data, like winners, errors, aces, serve percentage — the kind of stats you’re used to seeing on TV. This is collected, usually, by a person sitting and watching the match, which means it can be quite subjective and inconsistent. “The quality of that data, honestly, was simply not something we could build a business around,” David Lampitt, CEO of TDI, told me. Ball- and player-tracking systems like Hawk-Eye produce level-three data and are so effective that it has become a more consistent way to reverse-engineer level-two data.
(Last is level four: biometric tracking, which comes from wearable tech and is only starting to come into play now, still incubating at places like Next Gen.)
As a professional sport, tennis can best be described as a sprawl: of events, of institutions, of incentives. In 2024, there will be 63 ATP-level tournaments and nearly 200 more lower-level Challengers competitions — plus this year’s Olympics, and that count doesn’t even include the ones that are women-only. Tennis also has a seven-body problem, with organizing and decisions being made across the ITF, the ATP, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), and the four Grand Slam tournaments, each of which are their own entity. (Imagine if every quarter of the Super Bowl was operated by separate company, with each negotiating their own broadcast deal.)
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Though the ATP has an 80 percent stake in it, TDI exists as an independent entity and functions as a go-between for all seven bodies. Lampitt explained that this arrangement allows them to “pool resources, drive synergies and cost efficiencies, and drive incremental value from managing assets in a more coordinated and centralized way” — language that sounds lifted right out of a McKinsey deck.
But TDI was described to me by others as not just the sport’s data arm but also its betting arm.
Sports leagues cannot currently be directly involved in sports gambling for the obvious reasons of integrity — if the business incentives of an organization like the ATP are suddenly in line with that of a sportsbook, how are we to trust that matches wouldn’t be fixed to maximize profits? So, instead, the relationships are separated by contracts.
But the way the ATP sees it, while sports betting isn’t something it can monetize directly, the activity is in line with the organization’s mission to drive fan engagement. Gambling was just as much a way to accomplish that as making the game more suitable for TikTok.
Betting is already suited to it. Unlike most sports, tennis is not a fluid competition, nor is it a linear chase for points. Instead of a competition where points fill a time limit, points in tennis actually create time. Technically, a match can go on forever, or close to forever, as an infamous 11-hour John Isner-Nicolas Mahut match stretched over three days at Wimbledon 2010, though most men’s matches last between two and three hours.
This has to do with the scoring, which, in tennis, is like a Matryoshka doll: a point lives in a game, which lives in a set, which lives in a match. The scoring system is the sport’s weakness and strength. For the newcomer, it can be unintuitive and a little daunting; but it also constructs a competition that can turn on a dime. Each unit of the game — the point, game, and set — can offer the players a reset. And for the spectator, it maximizes the excitement, knowing that comebacks are immensely possible.
It could be argued the most engaged fan is, after all, a gambling addict.
This is also what makes tennis such a ripe sport for gamblers. Several people I spoke to across the industry estimate that tennis is either the second or third biggest sport for bettors worldwide, even though it is far from being the second or third most popular sport for viewers. Everyone agrees that the construction of a match, the way it breaks down into so many discrete moments of tension, gives people the opportunity to put down money in a myriad of ways. The most obvious bets are on who will win a match. But with the huge surge of new data available has come the opportunity to create so many more gambling situations.
This is good for a company like Sportradar that is always inventing new methods for bettors to play. Sportradar is a multinational entity, with offices across 34 countries, involved in every major league, and acts as a go-between for the rights holders and betting operators around the world. They put together several products for sports books, but the most important one is calculating odds, as well as the raw and live data that calculate them. “We offer anything to do with fueling the betting industry,” Caroline Roques, a Sportradar spokesperson, told me.
Sportradar is especially excited about micro betting, which is exactly what it sounds like. It allows people to bet not just on the outcome of a whole match but moments within it. Who will win the next point? Will the next serve be an ace, let, fault, or double fault? The window to place these bets is mere seconds. The thinking: not everyone has time to watch an entire tennis match. Micro markets give the bettor more instant gratification.
These innovations in gambling come thanks to the exponential growth in data sold by firms like TDI, which comes from the strides in data capture by technology like Hawk-Eye. As has been the trend in technology for the past decade and a half, stronger algorithms have been developed thanks to the introduction of larger data sets. A big part of Sportradar’s business is dependent on coming up with accurate odds. “[Micro betting] is definitely tied to the emergence of having more data available,” says Sophie Thomas, vice president of group operations at Sportradar. More data means better models and a better understanding of the factors that can change the outcome of a bet. More data means better odds — for the oddsmaker. “If you can’t have this level of predictability, it would be impossible for you to offer micro markets because you would never be able to win as the house, basically. You would constantly be giving away money all the time to bettors.”
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Sportradar is far from the first entrant into micro markets. There are startups like Huddle, YouTuber turned pro boxer Jake Paul’s Betr, and Simplebet, which launched back in 2018 and was recently acquired by DraftKings. But Sportradar will begin offering its clients micro betting data this October for tennis, and next year for the NBA.
Though Hawk-Eye’s data capture has enabled the possibility of micro markets in tennis, Thomas believes the pressure will also work backward, increasing demand on ball- and player-tracking systems to collect even more data. Between the ball and positions of both players, Hawk-Eye captures and sends exact X, Y, and Z data points not just to the ELC system but out to clients as well. Hannah Preece, tennis technical manager at Hawk-Eye, told me, “The betting market is very much around the speed of delivery — the quicker they can get it, the better.” For micro betting, the key is not just the volume of information but the velocity it can be received. Odds need to update on the fly. In fact, all betting streams are around 30 seconds ahead of what is broadcast on TV.
Sportradar itself does not collect bets but sells betting products to sports books. That could be an app, like FanDuel or DraftKings, or an online casino. Part of its offerings also entails providing more data not just to its clients, but also statistics and visualizations to the clients’ bettors. Giving people more information makes them feel more empowered in their decisions and, thus, more likely to put down money.
Habits are regional. In Europe, where the sports variety has been legal for longer, betting takes more old-school forms; but in the US, restrictions only recently loosened up after a 2018 Supreme Court decision overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had made sports betting illegal in most places. Now, the action takes a more modern outlet: as apps. The user behavior, then, is different: more of a second-screen experience, with more opportunities for those precious micro bets. What better way to compete with TikTok than on the same device, just a push notification away?
Gambling is, of course, addictive, and those addictive qualities are only exacerbated by the frictionless nature of the internet and the ubiquity of one’s phone. Recently in Defector, Corbin Smith wrote about how there are ways to come out on top of a sportsbook, through strenuous research, number crunching, and risk diversification. “Sports gambling apps do not want people to gamble like that,” he said, writing about the impulse-driven nature of same-game parlays. “The sports and internet sportsbook industries are determined to cultivate and profit not just from gambling but from gambling addictions; that’s where the money is.” It could be argued the most engaged fan is, after all, a gambling addict.
Consider the pipeline: ELC firms like Hawk-Eye collect data on the court, rightsholders like TDI license it to companies like Sportradar, Sportradar in turn packages for sports books, and sportsbooks make those odds available to bettors on their phones, often by push notification. Every time Coco Gauff swings her racket, it becomes a data point for a system that eventually turns into an opportunity for a new gambler, making a number of entities very wealthy in the process and, according to the organizing bodies of the sport, ensuring a future full of engaged tennis fans.
Stephen Marche, writing for The Atlantic, described gambling as a way of “avoiding the future.” I’d argue that making a big bet is a cynical attempt to control it, to imagine that somewhere in the future there is more money or, at least, the potential of money. I think that’s a narrow view of the world, but I also understand why many people, companies, and nations feel this way. After all, gambling takes uncertainty and makes it a game; it recasts anxiety as entertainment. Like sports, betting simplifies the world into a binary of winners and losers and asks you which one you’d rather be.
Throughout the match, Hawk-Eye data is collected. The exact X, Y, and Z position of the ball and player tracked at every single frame during a match — billions of data points throughout the year.
Tennis Data Innovations, the betting arm of the ATP, licenses that data. These agreements have become as lucrative as the organization’s broadcasting deals.
An illustrated collage of a tennis player, ball-tracking data, and computer files, suggesting all three things are connected.
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Jeddah is best known as the port city on the way to Mecca. But the Kingdom is desperate to make it a tourist destination for the non-observant as well. During the week I was there last November, I found plenty to do. Tennis at King Abdullah Sports City, of course. Meanwhile, the Formula 1 track was hosting Ferrari Night, featuring the team’s two beloved drivers, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz. Also going on: the preliminary regatta for the America’s Cup, the world’s oldest sailing yacht competition. For non-sports fans, an amusement park called Little Asia was celebrating its grand opening.
Whether the city can spend its way to becoming a destination is unclear. Each day during Next Gen, the shuttle bus passed the Jeddah Superdome, a massive structure illuminated by green lights emerging from the horizon like the world’s biggest egg. It is technically the planet’s largest geodesic dome, and as far as I can tell from its website, no events have been held there since 2022.
One morning, I visited the Red Sea Mall, after an unusually aggressive recommendation from an Uber driver, and discovered a shopping center that looked like it could be anywhere else in the Western world. Another day, I wandered the UNESCO-protected neighborhood of Old Town. It was a gorgeous assortment of homes and mosques, all slightly akilter, much of it covered in scaffolding, like corrective dentistry clamped to a neighborhood of charmingly crooked teeth. Even the old things were being made new.
Saudi Arabia is in a moment of controversial reinvention, using the great wealth of its Public Investment Fund to diversify its revenue streams from oil, wracked with the existential anxiety that the world’s energy consumption will move away from fossil fuels, from which the country makes 40 percent of its GDP. The Kingdom has poured money into not just tennis but also soccer, cricket, mixed martial arts, horse racing, and golf — going as far as launching a $2 billion rival league and poaching competitors from the PGA. Sports and the PFI make for fitting bedfellows then, as both extremely profitable monoliths that are worried what the future might hold.
By the end of that week, Medjedovic, the Serbian player, had won $500,000 — more than he’d made in total throughout his career. The finals had much better attendance numbers. Over half the tickets had been sold, and the ATP would give away the remaining seats. The organizing bodies of tennis might worry that future generations could lose interest in the sport; meanwhile, the Saudis are investing their own future in it. The four subsequent years of Next Gen in Jeddah should prove if it’s working or not.
Still, I was confused: all of tennis’s big bets for the future seemed incongruous with events in the policies of Saudi Arabia itself. Gambling is illegal. Alcohol — the revenue driver of any live sports event — is illegal. The women’s half of tennis — the part that is growing quickly — has players expressing concerns of their safety in a country where homosexuality is illegal. As recently as 2018, Saudi women were not allowed to play sports; they couldn’t watch them, either.
You could argue that women’s tennis is, by some metrics, the most progressive sport in the world, especially when it comes to leveling itself with the men’s side. Players are vocal about their values, speaking openly on issues of mental health, LGBTQ rights, and racial discrimination. The top-paid female athletes in the world are all tennis players, and Billie Jean King, one of the sport’s greatest players and ambassadors, has been a vocal and successful advocate of equal pay.
In 2019, the WTA struck a 10-year deal to host the Finals in Shenzhen, China. One tournament was held that year, while the 2020 event was canceled because of the pandemic. In 2021, Peng Shuai, a former number one ranked doubles player, accused a former government official of sexual assault. The Chinese government scrubbed mentions of the allegations from its news media and kept the WTA from speaking to Shuai directly. In response, the WTA took a stance: all tournaments in China would be suspended until further notice, including the Finals.
“If powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug, then the basis on which the WTA was founded — equality for women — would suffer an immense setback,” CEO and chairman Steve Simon said in a statement. “I will not and cannot let that happen to the WTA and its players.”
Human rights groups lauded the WTA’s position. But with the China deal having fallen through — which represented a third of the WTA’s annual revenue — the organization posted eight-figure losses in 2020 and 2021. It also meant the WTA Finals didn’t have a permanent home, then bouncing from Guadalajara to Fort Worth. Rumors surfaced that the event might move to Saudi Arabia. But how would it look to play there just years after taking a stand on China?
Last spring, rumors swirled again that the WTA Finals might come to Saudi Arabia. “This is entirely incompatible with the spirit and purpose of women’s tennis and the WTA itself,” wrote tennis legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in a dissenting op-ed for The Washington Post.
Instead, last year’s tournament came together in the eleventh hour when the WTA struck a deal to stage the tournament in Cancun. The outdoor event was hosted in the thick of hurricane season, impeding play with rain and flooding. At one point, the wind was so strong it destroyed Gauff’s umbrella. The Independent declared it the “Fyre Festival of tennis tournaments.”
A couple months later, the WTA announced it had struck a deal to host the next three years’ finals in Riyadh. The prize money — $15 million — will be a record. The human rights concerns that had been raised? “We’re sensitive to those,” Simon said to The Athletic. “We do have assurances that everyone’s going to be welcome at the finals and I don’t anticipate anything more than positive experiences.” More prescient, in late 2023, King said heading to Saudi Arabia was already inevitable. “There’s a lot of money, which is very important to keep having money to help the players, but also help run the WTA, run the ATP and all that.”
The message was clear. The money was, apparently, too good to pass up.
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