WTA open to ‘Premium Tour’ revolution that offers equal pay
Four slams will join up to 14 other events on elite circuit ATP’S Gaudenzi has rival plan to counter any Saudi threat
Billie Jean King’s dream of equal pay for men and women across the whole tennis calendar will be realised if plans for a new “Premium Tour” are put into place by the four majors.
The project – which would see somewhere between 11 and 14 combined events join the grand slams in a new circuit – has made progress over the past fortnight as Tennis Australia chief Craig Tiley and his American equivalent Stacey Allaster gave briefings to leading players in Melbourne.
This is a difficult concept for the tours – the Women’s Tennis Association and the Association of Tennis Professionals – to support because it involves splitting their tournaments into two groups. High-profile events such as Indian Wells, Cincinnati and Rome would step up onto the Premium Tour, while less prestigious cousins would effectively be downgraded onto a so-called Development Tour.
Yet Telegraph Sport understands that WTA chief Steve Simon is open to the Premium Tour idea, as it provides a rare opportunity for female players to receive equal pay and billing. After financial pressures recently led Simon and his board to sell 20 per cent of the WTA’S commercial rights to the venture capital firm CVC Partners, he may never receive a better offer.
Simon and his board are also coming under pressure not to sell their finals event to Saudi Arabia, after legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova spoke out against the kingdom’s treatment of women in a Washington Post editorial. A vote on this decision was expected in the past few days, but appears to have been postponed.
The ATP, by contrast, is in a stronger financial position, and is less keen to see its leading tournaments migrate to a new tour. Andrea Gaudenzi, the ATP chairman, has had a somewhat frosty relationship with Tiley. The two men found themselves at odds last year when Gaudenzi floated the idea of a new Masters 1000 event in Saudi Arabia in week one of the calendar – the same slot now occupied by Tennis Australia’s United Cup.
Uniquely among tennis’s power brokers, Gaudenzi did not travel to Melbourne during the Australian Open. He cited an untimely bout of Covid as the explanation. Gaudenzi and his board already have their own plans to streamline the tennis itinerary, which go under the brand name of Onevision. Part of this concept became clearer in September, when Telegraph Sport revealed that the ATP had reached out to the WTA to suggest a commercial merger.
Both of these models need further development. The slams have already invested millions of dollars on consultancy fees and polling data, and they are now setting up a any guarantees [that the plan will be adopted].”
As Tiley suggests, tennis has been looking to thin out its calendar for years, only for the resulting suggestions to be placed in the “too difficult” box by the sport’s disparate governing bodies. So what has changed?
For one thing, the cautionary tale of LIV Golf has eroded any sense of complacency, as tennis’s uncoordinated model looks ripe for a similar challenge. For another, relations between the two tours and the four slams have never fully recovered from the decision to strip ranking points from Wimbledon in 2022, the year that Russian and Belarusian players were excluded.
The majors pulled together after that toxic row, and their newfound unity lies at the heart of the Premium Tour concept. But there is still a long way to go. This sort of project can lose momentum quickly. If nothing is agreed by the late summer, tennis could slip back into its familiar, chaotic status quo.
“I’ve always said that the pain of change is greater than the pain of losing,” Tiley said. “That’s why most people choose to lose. As a sport, we need to be prepared to change. There’s no crisis. The sport is very healthy. But there’s also an opportunity here to have a mega impact in the world of global sport and entertainment by being more aligned.” Premium Tour working group that is due to report back at the next Masters 1000 event in Indian Wells in six weeks’ time. The ATP has delayed its annual tournament meeting, which would normally happen in Miami in late March, until Madrid in early May.
Tiley said yesterday: “All the stakeholders in tennis have been working on a solution for the game. It’s a journey to get to that point. The slams are very united in their resolve, but it’s a complex problem to solve. If it wasn’t complicated, it would have been solved already.
“These ideas aren’t new, but what may be new is the motivation to give it a go, and to see if there’s that opportunity. But there’s never