Why Saudi Arabia’s tennis rally is just getting started

Missed out on Manchester United? Left hanging by Liverpool? Fear not, your chance to buy into a Premier League club has come around again.

This week Tottenham Hotspur chair Daniel Levy revealed that the north London club is on the hunt for new investment, and is already holding talks with prospective shareholders.

A stake in Spurs adds to the growing menu of available options for those looking for a slice of top flight English football. Elsewhere in London, Brentford is for sale, as is a slice of West Ham United. Meanwhile Everton’s takeover by 777 Partners has still not gone through – more on that down in this week’s highlights.

Those pitching to investors will have looked gratefully (or enviously) on earnings this week from Brighton & Hove Albion. The south coast club reported profits from last season of £123mn thanks to a bumper year for player sales. In fact, the figure marked a record annual profit for any English club, , beating the £113mn generated by Tottenham in 2017-18.

Brighton’s financial success offers a glimpse of what is possible when a club find the sweet spot in the transfer market supply chain. But it remains a real outlier in a league, and a sport, where most teams lose money most of time.

This week’s we’re looking into Saudi Arabia’s latest push in tennis, and we explain why women’s college basketball is thriving in the US. Do read on – Josh Noble, sports editor

Saudi Arabia’s tennis rally

The WTA Finals are supposed to be the grand finale on the women’s tennis tour. But the organisation of last year’s event drew a wave of criticism from players.

Problems ranged from insufficient practice time before the tournament to windy conditions in Cancún, the Mexican resort that was selected less than two months before the start date, despite talks between the Women’s Tennis Association and Saudi Arabia.

So it came as little surprise this week when the WTA confirmed that Riyadh will host the next three editions of the finals. The deal with the Saudi tennis federation means that prize money will leap to a record $15.25mn this year from $9mn in Mexico.

Prize money aside, the WTA says that Saudi Arabia is best placed to “deliver and fund a world-class event” and grow the women’s game.

But the real question is whether SRJ Sports Investments, which was set up by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund last year, can convince either the WTA, the men’s ATP Tour (or both) to allow it to buy into in the game’s commercial future.

The PIF struck a strategic partnership with the men’s ATP Tour just over a month ago, but that deal revolved around naming rights, events and strategy.

Against that backdrop, the WTA and the men’s ATP Tour are in talks to merge their media and commercial rights into a single entity.

It would appear that CVC Capital Partners, the former owner of the Formula One car racing series, played a smart move last year when it took a 20 per cent stake in WTA Ventures, the tour’s own commercial arm, for $150mn.

The private equity firm’s shareholding and board seats look like a canny deal at a strategically significant juncture in the future of tennis.

As for the Saudis, the question is whether a potential merger between the women’s and men’s tours can open up a gap for another investor to join the future of the tennis business.

However, the WTA and ATP have stressed that their talks were at a preliminary stage. In the meantime, buying into tournaments is another route for Saudi to expand its footprint in tennis.

A more viable target for Saudi could be winning the right to host a new ATP Masters 1000 tournament, a series featuring top-ranked male players, according to people familiar with proceedings.

As ATP Tour chair Andrea Gaudenzi told the FT last year, any outside investors must “stick to respecting the history of the sport and the product, working with the current stakeholder rather than against”.

Following the golf wars, in which the US PGA Tour fought Saudi-backed LIV Golf until a shock truce last year, Gaudenzi was keen to ensure that his new suitors wanted to work with the tours.

So far, courtesy of the strategic partnership with the ATP Tour and the deal to host the WTA Finals, it looks like the Saudis are playing ball.

But can they score a bigger prize down the line?

What the NBA can learn from Caitlin Clark

There is a ubiquitous national television advert airing around the US in recent weeks. It features Iowa Hawkeyes women’s college basketball icon Caitlin Clark alongside NBA Championships finalist Jimmy Butler, selling car insurance for State Farm.

Clark, as you may have heard and can read all about here, is the record-setting supernova of women’s hoops. She holds the all-time scoring mark in college basketball for men and women. Her penchant for deep three-pointers and theatrical trash talk has earned her bona-fide celebrity, selling out stadiums and sending television viewership skyrocketing wherever the Hawkeyes play. Butler is a six-time NBA All-Star and the charismatic anchor of the Miami Heat, the defending Eastern Conference champions.

Their participation in the same commercial draws a line between their popularity and national resonance; they are on the same level of fame, the same millionaire-status level of endorsement utility. But Clark and Butler represent the sharply diverging trajectories of women’s and men’s basketball.

On Monday, a game between Iowa and defending college champion Louisiana State University set the record for the most-watched university women’s hoops game of all time. A staggering 12.3mn people tuned in to ESPN to watch Clark take revenge against her arch-rival, Angel Reese (another brilliant athlete with endorsements and fame to match). 

To put that figure in context: more people watched a fourth-round women’s college basketball tournament game on Monday, on cable, than watched any NBA (or MLB, or NHL) game in all of the last year, except one. The fifth and final game of the 2023 NBA Finals, in which Butler’s Heat lost to the Denver Nuggets, drew 13.1mn viewers on free-to-air ABC.

Why is this happening? For one thing, women’s hoops is thriving for reasons that the men’s professional game is lagging. Clark, Reese, and their peers are developing rivalries and playing in nearly every game for the (much shorter) college season, nurturing passionate fanbases. Butler, who has missed 20 games this season and averaged missing 20 games each of the past four years, is a symbol of the NBA’s “load management” issue of resting otherwise healthy stars for longevity into the playoffs. Butler’s nickname, “Playoff Jimmy”, both highlights and skewers his tendency to turn on the jets primarily in springtime.

The league is actively trying to raise the stakes and foster more consequential, head-to-head competition over the course of its 82-game season. Last autumn, the NBA introduced a new In-Season Tournament, contested from October through December; the games averaged 4.58mn viewers and contributed towards an overall 16 per cent year on year ratings boost on ESPN and ABC.

Both the NBA and WNBA, its professional women’s counterpart, are due to sign new broadcast rights agreements in the coming months; the leagues’ current deals expire in 2025. Clark and Reese have both declared for the WNBA draft on April 15. Like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson in the 1970s and ‘80s, the two women are now set to bring excitement and rivalry to the W.

Expect that to translate to the league’s marketplace value.

Highlights

• Public sector workers in France are threatening to go on strike during this summer’s Olympic Games unless they receive bonuses, overtime pay and extra childcare. Museums, public transport and hospitals could all be effected if an agreement is not reached.

• Private equity firm Silver Lake has agreed to take Endeavor private in a $13bn deal, opening a new chapter for the owner of sports agency IMG.

• Liberty Media hopes to run its successful Formula One playbook with MotoGP after buying the motorcycle series for €4.2bn. Liberty CEO Greg Maffei told the FT that his priority was to boost MotoGP’s profile in the US.

• Ajax said it plans to sack its chief executive following allegations of insider trading related to the Dutch football club’s listed shares. Alex Kroes has only been in the job for a few weeks.

• US regulators have told a group of insurers to cut their exposure to 777 Partners, the Miami-based investment firm that is awaiting approval to buy Premier League football club Everton.

• Joe Lewis, the British billionaire whose family owns Tottenham Hotspur football club, said he was “ashamed” and “sorry” as he avoided prison for insider trading. A federal judge sentenced the 87-year-old to a $5mn fine and three years of probation.

Final Whistle

But the bloopers can be just as watchable, albeit through gritted teeth.

Just take a look at this clip from Hibernian’s match last week against Rangers, in an unfortunate advert for Scottish football. Duck!