Tennis spearheaded the rise of women’s sports. Now it wants to reclaim its legacy

Valerie Camillo was days into her new job when she had to make a decision that could define the future of women’s tennis.

As incoming chair of the WTA Tour, Camillo had inherited the terms of a potential merger with the men’s tour that her predecessor, Steve Simon, had spent two years negotiating.

It would allow the WTA and ATP Tours to sell sponsorship and media rights together, but it was hardly a merger of equals. The ATP was set to hold 80 percent of the company.

It was November 2025. Camillo, a seasoned sports executive who had worked in three of the biggest U.S. leagues, but never in tennis, had just over a week to decide whether to recommend the deal to her board — at an existential moment for the WTA.

It had lost its title sponsor. It was struggling to find new corporate partners, even as investment in women’s sports soared. A private equity cash infusion that had helped subsidize a North Star for women’s tennis — equal prize money at the biggest events in the sport outside the Grand Slams — would soon run low.

Staying on the same financial path could lead to ruin. A commercial merger with the ATP could help buy time to secure more sustainable revenue sources.

Still, Camillo wasn’t convinced. She thought that women’s tennis should control its own destiny. Going alone would bring plenty of risk, but perhaps exponentially more upside, too.

She made her decision. The merger was off.

A year later, women’s tennis is taking another big step down its new road. For the first time in over two decades, the WTA has taken operational control of its flagship event, the WTA Finals, which starts Sunday in Indian Wells, Calif.

As investment and interest in women’s sports continues to rise, Camillo, 53, wants to put tennis back at the forefront — to remind people that, in many ways, it has always been the tip of the spear for equality and ambition in sports.

With competition growing from less mature but rising leagues in soccer, basketball, hockey and volleyball, the WTA is taking its biggest and riskiest steps in decades, by also taking greater control of the sale of its most valuable asset, its media rights.

After a fallow period economically and culturally, it hopes to show the world that itcan still be the trailblazing venture that sets the standard for equality and star-making as nothing else can. Whether it works or it doesn’t, the stakes are existential.

“We have legacy. We’ve been at this for 50 years,” Camillo said during a recent interview in Washington, D.C.

“One of our greatest assets is our equal prize money, it was the foundation on which the WTA was built. And it is why the best women athletes in the world have chosen, and continue to choose, tennis.

“It’s very important that it continues into the future.”

Women’s sports is seeing unprecedented investment. Just three years ago, an expansion women’s soccer team in the NWSL for San Francisco, Bay City FC, sold for a then-unheard-of $53 million.

Now, expansion franchises are selling for more than $200 million.

In the WNBA, which has 15 teams, the Connecticut Sun sold for a record $300 million earlier this year. Unrivaled, a women’s three-on-three basketball league that runs during the WNBA off season, was recently valued at $650 million.

The WTA Tour missed out on much of this frenzy. $650 million is just $100 million less than the commercial arm of the tour, WTA Ventures, was valued three years ago, despite tennis having a half-century start. In 2024, the last year for which official figures are available, the tour collected $143 million in total revenue, up from $110 million in 2019.

Expenses rose faster. A $6.2 million profit in 2017 turned into a $4.9 million loss in 2024. In 2019, sponsorship revenue accounted for $36 million. Five years later, it was just $39 million, even though the WTA Tour features some of the world’s best-known female athletes, including six of the 10 highest earners in women’s sports.

Revenues from sponsorships and media rights are essential. The money helps pay for the operations and prize money at the more than 50 tournaments the tour and its partners hold each season. It also promotes the players and the tour itself, as it covers other centralized expenses that local tournaments do not.

As the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, the WTA Tour sold a 20 percent stake in its commercial arm, WTA Ventures, to private equity firm CVC. The ensuing $150 million infusion over five years has sustained its expenses, especially prize money, but it has done so somewhat artificially. The last instalment falls in 2027.

And while the WTA has similar expenses to the ATP, it has roughly half the revenues and about 20 percent of the the assets of the men’s tour.

Camillo believes that if the tour controls its high-profile events and its most valuable assets, such as its media rights, it can close that deficit. Ahead of this year’s Finals, it has announced merchandise partnerships with Hello Kitty and Togethxr, the brand behind the “everybody watches women’s sports” mantra.

It envisions its Finals as “the Super Bowl of women’s sports,” with a fan festival, a conference and other celebrations unfolding around a major competition that has behaved like a smaller one for decades. The tour hasn’t operated this way in decades, previously collecting licensing fees that lowered its risk and kept a modest stream of revenue flowing.

That strategy also capped much of its income and gave other entities more control of some of the most important assets in women’s tennis, including its marquee event.

Phil di Picciotto, the co-founder and president of Octagon, the sports marketing conglomerate that is a major player in tennis, especially the WTA Tour, said he believes it’s the right move.

“I am very confident of the direction the WTA Tour is taking, more so than in recent history,” De Picciotto said in an interview last month. “At times, the tour has not had as strong a front foot with regard to establishing a positive roadmap for themselves.”

During the first months of 2026, Camillo and the tour faced another hinge moment. Saudi Arabia’s Tennis Federation, which for the previous two years had financed and organized the WTA Finals in Riyadh, had told Camillo’s team that their three-year deal would not be extended.

Women’s tennis had outlived its usefulness to the kingdom’s ambitions, according to two sources briefed on the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

In February, the U.S. and Israel launched air strikes on Iran. Iran retaliated with strikes on neighboring nations, including Saudi Arabia.

Waiting and then canceling the third and final WTA Finals in Riyadh at the last moment wasn’t an option. Acting earlier would mean forgoing the nearly $25 million it cost Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Sports to stage the event each year, including more than $15 million in prize money.

Acting earlier also allowed the WTA to unwind itself from a familiar pattern for the WTA Finals the past 20 years: Moving into a market keen to be seen supporting women’s sports, with serious investment, at the cost of core fandom and exposure.

For 21 years, from 1979-2000, the tour culminated with the season-ending finals in one of the world’s preeminent entertainment venues: New York’s Madison Square Garden.

In 2003, sports executive Larry Scott left the ATP to take over the WTA Tour. By then, the signature event was in decline. Scott took over a year after the Finals had moved to the gleaming Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles for what would be a four-year stint during what was supposed to be the heart of the careers of the Williams sisters, who had grown up in nearby Compton.

It didn’t quite work, with low daytime attendance and fraught sponsorship guarantees. Scott struck a deal to hold it in Madrid for two years. And then, for the next 15, he and his successors tried to find a solution that always centered on accepting financial support in exchange for ownership.

From 2008 to 2024, the WTA Finals was held across five countries, all of them with either governments practicing authoritarianism or laws that effectively make women second-class citizens, according to human rights organizations.

In return, the event saw financial commitments that it had never seen before. Its deals for events in Qatar, Turkey, Singapore, China, and Saudi Arabia were essentially all-encompassing licensing agreements, in which the WTA Tour accepted the fee and the local organizers took care of everything else.

Prize money jumped from $3 million to $4.55 million in Doha, Qatar from 2008 to 2010. Istanbul and Turkey’s government pushed it to $4.9 million in 2011 and 2012, and then to $6 million in 2013. Then Singapore came along and raised it to $7 million for the next five years.

Then there was China, looking to capitalize on a tennis boom following the success of Li Na, the wildly popular star who was the first player from the country to win a Grand Slam.

A consortium of public and private investors led by Gemdale Corp., one of China’s largest real estate developers, went all-in. It signed a 10-year, roughly $1 billion deal that included a commitment to build an arena for the event in Shenzhen and pay $14 million in annual prize money.

There was no arguing with the payday. It was unprecedented, and finally put the prize money for the women’s Tour Finals on par with the men’s. It seemed too that it would allow the tour to become more globally visible, letting fans outside of core markets see the stars of the sport.

That came at the cost of another kind of visibility. While the ATP was turning its Tour Finals into a London-based juggernaut, luring major sponsors, entertaining clients with luxury hospitality and beaming men’s tennis into living rooms at prime time in Europe and the middle of the day in the United States, the WTA’s event was losing eyeballs in its most lucrative markets.

Then COVID-19 happened. It hit every sport hard, but it nearly decimated women’s tennis. By 2020, the WTA had nine events in China, including the Finals.

Just months before the 2021 event, it had to find a new location. It landed in Guadalajara, with fans craving live sport but a drop in prize money to $5 million. In the wider picture, tour revenues plummeted from $110 million in 2019 to $38 million in 2020.

That was far worse than the ATP, where revenues dropped from $159 million to $94 million in the same period.

Then came Peng Shuai. On Nov. 2, 2021, the two-time Grand Slam doubles champion accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier in the Chinese government, of sexual assault in a post on social network Weibo.

Her post was scrubbed from social media within minutes, and Peng soon disappeared from public life.

Simon demanded an investigation. Then the WTA suspended all business in China, until the government could provide assurances about Peng. She gave controlled interviews in which she later described the situation as a “misunderstanding.” But Simon, who did not return messages seeking comment for this story, had overestimated the WTA Tour’s leverage. He ended the boycott 16 months later, citing financial necessities, but China terminated its deal for the WTA Finals.

That left the WTA scrambling to find a location for its most prestigious event just months from first ball, again. In 2022, it went to Fort Worth, Tex. The decision was delayed enough that ticket sales and marketing were challenging.

For 2023, Simon discussed a partnership with Saudi Arabia. The kingdom was willing to sign a licensing agreement worth roughly $30 million. It would have brought prize money up from $5 million in 2022 and 2023 to $15 million for 2024 — commensurate with the ATP.

Members of Simon’s leadership team — and some legends of women’s tennis — pushed back, arguing the deal would make the WTA Tour appear hypocritical because of the kingdom’s human rights record. The tour instead took the finals to Cancun, Mexico, with little more than two months’ notice. It had to build a temporary court and stadium in a hotel parking lot. It was a disaster. Wind howled. The court was full of dead spots. Players said it was unsafe.

In April 2024, Simon announced a three-year agreement with the Saudi Tennis Federation, complete with the $15 million prize money. The Saudis hailed it, but an arena with a capacity of just 3,500 was rarely full.

During the second edition, where Elena Rybakina collected the largest winner’s check in women’s sports history, then-WTA chief executive Portia Archer said she wanted to extend the deal, but by then Saudi Arabia had decided it did not need women’s tennis anymore. Then, thanks to the war in Iran, the planned three editions became two.

As Camillo brings the Finals out of that era, she wants the players to have it all: equal prize money to the men and autonomy for the event.

She sees this as key to unlocking the unrealized value of the WTA Tour. If she can make the Finals feel like a true tentpole of the sport, everything else will fall into place. Betting that by holding nearly all the risk, the WTA Tour will reap the biggest reward might have been impossible 10 years ago, before the boom in women’s sports, Camillo said — even though women’s tennis has possessed cultural and financial capital beyond most other leagues for decades.

“These are the biggest stars in the world. Shouldn’t their championships feel really big? “Shouldn’t they be playing in the best venues with the highest quality sound system and digital boards and match presentation? And shouldn’t they have a fan experience going on around it that elevates their narrative and elevates the sport? Shouldn’t they have cool retail? Shouldn’t they have all of that stuff?

“I’m like, yeah. We should have all that. We’re gonna do all that.”

To do all that, Camillo wanted to be in the United States, where most investment in women’s sports was happening, the biggest, most important sponsors are based, and where fans had all but forgotten this event existed. An interim year at Indian Wells was a useful stepping stone.

“The United States is the core commercial market in the world, it just is,” Camillo said. “This moment in women’s sports, yes, it’s happening globally, it’s certainly happening in Europe and other places, but here, it’s clear. The money is here.”

Charlotte, N.C., the home of NASCAR, teams in the NBA, NHL and MLS, as well as one of the more powerful conferences in college sports, is the next venue for the WTA Finals. It had been trying to get into tennis for years, most recently with a 2023 proposal to move the combined WTA and ATP 1000 event, the Cincinnati Open, to Charlotte.

To seal the deal, Camillo and Billie Jean King went to the statehouse to speak with North Carolina’s governor, and work the hallways.

“It was like walking through an airport with a rock star,” Camillo said.

From 2027, the Finals will spend at least three years at the Spectrum Center, home to the NBA’s Hornets. The WTA plans to host a fan fest nearby.

The WTA Tour will also relocate its headquarters from Florida to Charlotte and provide a path for the city to host a WTA 500-tournament, a second-tier event on the tour’s three-rung structure, after 2029.

Unlike previous hosts, Charlotte isn’t fronting prize money. That’s on Camillo and the WTA to raise.

At the start of the year, it announced Mercedes-Benz as its leading corporate partner, in a deal worth around $500 million, including the company’s marketing investments, over the next 10 years. According to people briefed on the WTA Tour’s finances, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss them publicly, sponsorship revenue has doubled during the past two years, to nearly $80 million this year, from just under $40 million in 2024.

Add in media rights and data, and revenues are expected to triple in the coming years, to more than $300 million by 2029. That should push overall tour revenues to roughly $400 million by the end of the decade, compared with $142 million in 2024, the last year for which financial figures are available.

In the immediate term, a recent title sponsorship deal with yogurt brand Fage for the WTA Finals has put the organization within striking distance of having the same prize money at the event next year as the men do for the ATP Finals.

But this year, prize money is $10 million, a 35.5 percent decrease on the prize pool in Riyadh.

For now, women’s tennis appears in position to reverse its financial decline by capitalizing once again on its unique cultural ascendance.When the next hinge moment arrives, the WTA will be more exposed than it has been in recent years. It will also be in more control of how it responds.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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