WTA Finals Will Move to China for Next 10 Years

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MELBOURNE, Australia — The WTA Finals, the elite season-ending event on the women’s tennis tour, will leave Singapore after this year and begin a 10-year run in Shenzhen, China from 2019 through 2028.

The lucrative and surprisingly long-term deal — announced by the WTA on Thursday — deepens the tour’s emphasis on China, a crucial market. It will also increase the total prize money at the Finals to $14 million in 2019, double the current purse of $7 million and significantly more than the $8 million awarded at the ATP World Tour Finals, the equivalent men’s event in London.

According to the WTA, the Shenzhen organizers have committed to building a new facility in the downtown area of Shenzhen at a cost of approximately $450 million. The facility will include an indoor stadium with a capacity of 12,000.

“When you factor in the commitment to prize money and the commitments to the WTA, and you factor in the stadium build and real-estate elements, it’s over a $1 billion dollar commitment they have made to the WTA Finals and the WTA,” Steve Simon, the chief executive and chairman of the WTA, said in an interview on Thursday.

Simon declined to divulge the amount of the WTA’s rights fee but said it was a major increase on the existing five-year deal with Singapore, which reportedly paid more than $14 million per year to stage the tournament, which includes the top eight singles players and top eight doubles teams of the season.

“It’s a huge opportunity for us,” Simon said. “It’s going to allow us to do some things as a tour and invest with a long-term vision and planning, and we haven’t had that opportunity before.”

The move to Shenzhen was clearly driven by economics. Stacey Allaster, the former head of the WTA Tour, once said the existing five-year deal with Singapore provided “35 to 40 percent” of the tour’s net operating revenue.

Simon said the percentage was no longer that high, because of increased revenue from other sources. But while he called the Shenzhen agreement “a huge deal,” he also argued that it was not simply a case of chasing the highest offer. He said the move also had to make sense strategically.

“I think Shenzhen and the Delta region down there is the new Silicon Valley of Asia,” he said, referring to the Pearl River Delta, which is now one of the world’s biggest urban areas and includes Guangzhou and Hong Kong. “It’s a growing region and growing area, and we’re excited to be a part of that growth.”

Shenzhen, whose population has exploded from less than 100,000 in 1980 to over 10 million today, already stages an ATP event in September and a WTA event in January.

A WTA spokesperson said it was unclear whether the Shenzhen Open would continue to exist with the arrival of the WTA Finals. But the region is now particularly well served by women’s tennis.

There are eight WTA tournaments in China this season, including the China Open in Beijing, one of the tour’s four top-tier premier mandatory events. The Pearl River Delta region has four tournaments, including events in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Zhuhai.

The WTA Elite Trophy event in Zhuahi, near Hong Kong, is a second-tier, season-ending event for players outside the top eight. It currently is the final event on the WTA calendar, an anticlimactic state of affairs that Simon expects to be corrected in 2019 by moving Zhuhai forward on the schedule. That would allow the Finals in Shenzhen to be the last event.

Simon said he and the WTA board of directors were committed to anchoring the Finals in one venue for an extended run, hoping to mirror the success of the ATP Finals, which have been in London since 2009.

“I think it takes time to build the traditions, and if it’s long term, people are going to invest behind it to build it,” he said.

Though staying in Singapore, a major financial hub and prosperous modern city, would certainly have allowed the chance to build those traditions more quickly.

“That’s a fair statement,” Simon said.

There also have been concerns about attendance at WTA events in China, a situation that was not helped by the sudden retirement in 2014 of Li Na, the first Chinese player to win a Grand Slam singles title.

But Simon said attendance was increasing at events in China, specifically citing tournaments in Wuhan, Tianjin and Shenzhen.

“And I think in Shenzhen we have a tremendous opportunity,” he said, “because the new stadium coming with this deal is actually going to be built in the downtown district rather on the outskirts, where a lot of the stadiums are being built. So now we are in the heart of an area of 68 million people, and I think we’ll have a great opportunity to draw well.”

Singapore, where attendance has been strong, clearly could not match Shenzhen’s offer, although Simon did confirm that Singapore was one of five finalists in the bidding.

That group included Prague, Manchester in England and St. Petersburg in Russia. Simon said there were no North American finalists.

But the decision to keep the Finals in Asia in a difficult window for the North American television market will continue to create challenges in generating interest for the event in the United States, one of the traditional hubs of the sport and one that has produced more major women’s tennis stars than any other with a talented new generation on the rise that includes Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys.

The tournament was staged at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1977 and again from 1979 through 2000.