First appeared in BOXSCORE
By Aron Solomon
For those of us who write, advocate, and fight for gender equity in sports, particularly those like me whose sports focus is professional tennis, this week began with a real news bang, which is summarized in one handy image:
I learned about all of this in an email from Valérie Tétreault, the new Tournament Director of the Montréal National Bank Open, For those of you unfamiliar with the event, it used to be commonly known as the Canadian Open and now has a fancy bank related name. The way it works is that the women play in Montreal this year for their 1000-level event, while the men are in Toronto. Next year it rotates, and so on.
So part of what we learned about on Monday is that Montreal/Toronto will follow the lead of other 1000-level events, such as Madrid and Rome, and become a two-week event. In the words of Tetreault:
Your contribution as fans is also one of the reasons why our tournament will feature a 12-day main draw format starting in 2025. Our event’s international standing and popularity have continued to grow and made the NBO a fixture in the tennis calendar. Now, we’re joining an even more elite group of professional tournaments with a structure that’s increasingly similar to that of the Grand Slams.
My thoughts on that are mixed at best. I’ve been advocating for months against extending these one-week 1000-level events because I think it provides a huge comparative and competitive disadvantage for players who either don’t qualify for the event or lose very early. This could mean that these players (often ranked from around 75 to 175) don’t have viable playing options not just for one week but for two weeks, which is never a good thing. Yes, the new plan is a little bit promising, pledging to build a deeper network of WTA 250-level events, which I have suggested for years, that can essentially act as a landing pad for people who need money and tour points.
I have for a while and continue to think about the expansion of these 1000-level events, and I just don’t think it’s a good idea on the whole. For one, they really aren’t two-week events. They are 12-day events where there’s really only about 10 to 11 days of action, which just makes for a slower pace and less of a vibe at these tournaments. The second thing is that these events piled on top of each other in a calendar year become exhausting. Everybody who is an ardent tennis fan knows how exhausting it is to follow (let alone play in) any of the Grand Slams. This is because these are big-stakes events and because they’re two weeks long. The last thing a lot of really ardent tennis fans want is to add that level of artificiality, even at a 1000-level to make it two weeks. Sure, there is always room for the odd exception, like an Indian Wells, which many of us prefer over several of the Grand Slams for several key reasons, including the vibe of the tournament, which I know is an amorphous thing to say, but you just get a better feeling for certain tournaments than for others (I’m looking at you, Australian Open).
What makes me the most uncomfortable and worried is that the WTA’s and Canadian releases both use language suggesting that we are still on a pathway to equity. The official release from Tennis Canada included:
The pathway to equal prize money will see a significant increase in earnings for the women’s event in the coming years.
As a legal analyst, I see these kinds of things every day. This is the kind of uncomfortable linguistic fungibility that you write when you don’t want to commit yourself to something because you know it might be practically and structurally unrealistic.
What the WTA is avoiding here is the new and omnipresent reality of the Saudi investment in the ATP. Let’s just get one thing entirely out of the way, which is that the Saudis have no interest in women’s tennis. That is literally as clear as day. So the Saudis want to continue their global sportswashing campaign by making a massive investment in men’s tennis, which I predict will totally change the game and results in a lot more exhibitions focusing on top 10 players. But, for today, that is neither here nor there.
The reason this week’s press release is not committing with more forceful and definite words that there will absolutely be pay equity in the long haul is that the WTA knows there’s no way they can get even close to pay equity if the Saudis put the kind of money into men’s tennis, that I sincerely believe they will. In my opinion, as someone who watches the business of tennis remarkably closely on a daily basis, this will be literally billions of dollars infused into the ATP and not a cent into the WTA. That makes for crushing math.
Not to invoke the hallowed name of Billie Jean King, but I’m going to go ahead invoke the hallowed name of Billie Jean King. She is someone who has been in the news a lot this week because of what, at least on its face, appeared to be very good news for women’s tennis. And in some ways, it absolutely is. But what is absolutely not good news is if the end result of what’s happening now in professional tennis is that women’s tennis can 3X their revenue while men’s tennis, where players are already paid a massive amount more than the women are, can 20X, their revenue. And while 20X might be a bit of an exaggeration, I can guarantee you that we’re going to land a lot closer to that number for the men than to 3X.
As someone who does not use ChatGPT to simply summarize and publish tennis press releases, I am not surprised that I have not received a response to the questions I sent immediately on Monday to the new Montreal tournament director and to the WTA on this news. I was specifically interested in how they felt the WTA could keep up with the men with this looming Saudi investment.
But the most important question that I sent Tetreault was whether this progression towards gender equity in women’s tennis – even in Canada in one 1000-level event – was a result of net new investments or increased investments by existing sponsors or some kind of combination of both. This, to me, is really the most interesting question because I and others have been saying for years now that absent creative ways to grow the totality of the sponsorship pot by upselling current sponsors and bringing in some great new ones who would be an excellent natural fit for the women’s game, the gender equity numbers can’t work.
So where this all leaves us today is where I said we should be for many years, recognizing that professional tennis is a fantastic and saleable product that has simply been badly mismanaged. The fact that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is choosing men’s tennis rather than another sport at the moment (and mark my words, they are going to – in months, not years – buy portions of NBA teams) is another indication that the game of professional tennis is not an illusion from the business model perspective.
But I can’t help shake the feeling this week that while the totality of this news is going to be a step forward for women, they are still going to have one massive entity in front of them on the horizon, and that is the men’s tennis industry.
About Aron Solomon
A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the Chief Legal Analyst for Esquire Digital and the Editor-in-Chief for Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Venture Beat, The Independent, Fortune China, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, YouTube, NewsBreak, and many other leading publications.
