Battle of the Sexes is the sequel no one wanted. Why is the BBC indulging such an ugly spectacle?

The tennis season may be over but silly season is in full swing, and the last match of 2025 is likely to be its worst. Sunday will stage the ‘Battle of the Sexes’, an exhibition – in all senses of the word – between the women’s world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka and part-time tennis player, full-time attention seeker Nick Kyrgios.

In case you’ve been living under a rock – in which case, I envy you – here’s how it works. The pair will play a three-set match, with a 10-point deciding tiebreak if required, and only one serve per point, in Dubai (Yes, the irony of holding this event, a giant leap backwards for womankind, in the repressive state that is the UAE, is overwhelming).

It harks back to 1973’s original, now iconic, Battle of the Sexes, when the best women’s player in the world, Billie Jean King, saw off 55-year-old retiree Bobby Riggs in straight sets. But the basic format – brilliant woman vs mediocre man – is about all the two have in common.

Let’s start with the obvious. The original Battle of the Sexes had a point to prove. It pitted possibly the biggest trailblazer in women’s sport against an open misogynist, a man who self-identified as a “male chauvinist pig” and crowed about the women’s game being “inferior”.

It was about finally getting women’s tennis to be taken seriously, and came in the same year that King and the Original Ninefounded the WTA. The battle for fair pay and fair treatment went hand in hand with the women’s rights movement.

King said later: “I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match. It would ruin the women’s tour and affect all women’s self-esteem.” She told the BBC this month she played Riggs for a shot at “societal change”.

Depressingly, perhaps it’s only fitting that we should end up with a twisted version of that in 2025, the era of the Trump administration, the ‘tradwife’, the reactionary forces pulling us back into the last century.

This week’s match has none of the same gravitas. It doesn’t aim to achieve anything. It isn’t even billed as a celebration of tennis. It doesn’t claim any higher purpose beyond naked profit-making, a lucrative knockabout for one player who really should know better and another who relies on being in the limelight for his sense of self-worth. It’s the sequel no one wanted.

Sabalenka’s side of the court will be nine per cent smaller than Kyrgios’s, because the boffins at Evolve – the agency that houses both players, and is organising the match – say that women move on average nine per cent slower than men. Does this serve any purpose other than further gamifying what is already a total gimmick, and providing Kyrgios with an early excuse should he lose? Of course not.

The unfortunate truth is that, regardless of the result, Kyrgios and others of his ilk will spin it as a success. A win on the court would inflate his already sizeable ego and provide further ammunition for trolls, misogynists and incels to argue that women’s tennis is inferior, and that women’s worth comes from how they measure up to men.

A loss would no doubt be shrugged off as a blip, while still keeping his name in the headlines, where he likes to be (King hit winners on 68 per cent of her shots against Riggs, and still had to endure suggestions he deliberately threw the match. A headline at the time read: ‘Women Ecstatic, Men Make Excuses’. Will history repeat itself?).

There is, surely, a way to do this concept well, perhaps as a tribute to King and her achievements. That would require different players. Sabalenka is a popular, entertaining personality, but calling her an ambassador for the women’s game would be an enormous stretch; she was forced to row back on comments saying men’s tennis was “more interesting” and that she preferred not to watch the women’s game.

As for her opponent, Kyrgios hasn’t played a competitive match since March and has slipped to 673rd in the world, with his run to the Wimbledon final in 2022 a distant memory. He is more notorious for poor behaviour than famous for his tennis prowess; he admitted assaulting an ex-girlfriend in 2021 but avoided a conviction for it, and liked a post by Andrew Tate last year before being forced to distance himself from the far-right influencer.

He has since told the BBC he is a “different person” now, but his protestations are unlikely to hold back the tide of misogynistic abuse that his winning would generate online. Nor is he what you’d describe as a brilliant advert for newcomers to the sport, the people this match is hoping to attract.

And now the BBC is broadcasting this tripe, getting themselves involved in the cesspit that is modern-day gender politics and the battle for clicks over an actual spectacle of sport. This feels like yet another misstep which could, and should, have been avoided. It’s another disappointment in a story where no one comes out well.

The event organisers are encouraging viewers to “pick a side”, bastardising the original concept – when anyone with a moral compass would have rooted for King – into an explicitly gendered battle of personalities. Poor Clare Balding and Andrew Cotter have been enlisted to try to give this a sheen of respectability, but it’s a waste of their talents.

You might say it’s just a game, something to fill the five minutes that is the tennis off-season; yet more content for the already overloaded attention economy. But it represents something much bigger and much darker than just a tennis match.

King vs Riggs wasn’t the only time this concept has been played out. The Wimbledon men’s and women’s singles champions have faced off several times, as far back as 1888. Ilie Nastase – another notorious for his conduct towards women – faced Evonne Goolagong wearing a dress, yet again affirming that these matches are, if not explicitly designed to, always hijacked to diminish women’s sport. Over the years, the wins have been fairly evenly shared between the sexes, with some matches featuring handicaps for the men.

But the reason King’s Battle of the Sexes has had the staying power, the grip on sporting culture that it has, is because the stakes were so high. There was a higher purpose to it. This one will fade into obscurity over time, probably almost as soon as it happens. But the damage will have been done.