Saudi Arabia launch tennis takeover with $2bn take-it-or-leave-it offer
Exclusive: Saudi offer to merge men’s and women’s tours is apparently time-sensitive, with a 90-day expiration period if it is not accepted
Simon Briggs,
TENNIS CORRESPONDENT
12 March 2024 • 5:04pm
Saudi Arabia has made its move for tennis, Telegraph Sport can reveal, with a $2 billion take-it-or-leave-it offer to merge the men’s and women’s tours.
Sources say that after the Premium Tour discussions in Indian Wells last Saturday, ATP chairman Andrea Gaudenzi asked the Masters tournaments to stay behind once the four grand slams had left the room. Gaudenzi then briefed them on an offer from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). The deal is said to be time-sensitive, with a 90-day expiration period if it is not accepted. As things stand, the four grand slams would not be part of this PIF offer.
The biggest upside for PIF would be a Masters 1000 tournament in the first week of the season – which was what the Saudis have wanted all along – and is something Gaudenzi has been pushing for since last summer. However, this idea was strongly opposed by Tennis Australia boss Craig Tiley, who has established the United Cup team event in the same slot in the calendar. The resulting animosity between Tiley and Gaudenzi started the slams down the road to their so-called Premium Tour model last year.
It now seems all the more significant that Gaudenzi did not attend January’s Australian Open along with all the other tennis stakeholders, but instead travelled to Riyadh to negotiate with PIF. A small sponsorship deal was announced last month, putting PIF branding on the ATP rankings, but that was clearly only a starting point.
This development has the potential to cause further tension between the two tours and the four slams, especially as United States Tennis Association chief revenue officer Lew Sherr insisted the ATP and WTA chairmen should be invited to Saturday’s Premium Tour meetings as a point of courtesy.
Now it emerges that Gaudenzi had his own unifying model up his sleeve, in which he would ascend to become a tennis commissioner for the two tours.
The ATP had already put their annual tournament meetings back from Miami next week to Madrid in early May, which is where the decision on the PIF offer is likely to be taken.
In a proposed new model, a Saudi Masters event would kickstart the year, and it is an open secret the WTA have already been planning to run their finals in Riyadh in early November. The new-look tennis calendar – rebranded as the PIF Tour – would now be topped and tailed by visits to the Kingdom.
More combined events would surely be a priority, while the next lot of TV and data rights would also be a unified offering, leaving only the slams to one side. Part of the reason why this has not happened to date is that the WTA are considerably less commercially successful than the ATP, with their last known annual revenues standing at just under £90million in 2022 to the ATP’s £238million.
An equal-parts merger is a hard sell to male players, as they would fear the dilution of their own market value. But a huge cash sweetener from PIF can solve that awkward dilemma.
Gaudenzi has certainly come up with a dramatic response to the Premium Tour model, which threatens to downgrade the status of the ATP and WTA Tours. It is a characteristic move from a man with a reputation for pulling off audacious deals.
Gaudenzi is a 50-year-old Italian with a strong sporting background, having reached the ATP Tour’s top 20 in the mid-1990s. His relations with the slams have grown somewhat frosty since the ATP voted to strip rankings points from Wimbledon in 2022 over its exclusion of Russian and Belarusian players. Last year’s run-in with Tiley over the season’s first week only worsened matters.
As for the PIF, this bid continues the trend of Saudi involvement in sport, which has already ripped apart the golf establishment through the creation of the LIV Tour, while also attracting the biggest boxing bouts to Riyadh. In the UK, the sovereign wealth fund effectively owns Newcastle United.
The rival Premium Tour model has not yet shown any signs of involvement with Saudi Arabia. In the parallel discussions held earlier on Saturday in Indian Wells, 10 tournaments were identified as the framework surrounding the four slams, and none of them were to be staged there.
It’s also worth noting that, as part of last month’s ATP sponsorship deal, Queen’s was offered a significant sum to promote PIF in its courtside branding, but turned the offer down. Although the decision was taken by the Lawn Tennis Association, most insiders suspect the All England Club were consulted. In other words, Wimbledon seems to be rather more squeamish about getting into bed with the Saudis than the ATP.
In effect, the tournaments and players who make up the tours now have two different models to choose from. The Gaudenzi gambit offers immediate Saudi cash, while the Premium Tour model requires stakeholders to believe that a streamlined, slam-led calendar would be more profitable than the status quo.
It seems likely, in the long term, the Premium Tour might be a better solution. Yet there is also a strong chance the PIF bid will win out for reasons of expediency.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2024 ... und-offer/
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