RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The most lucrative competition in the history of women’s sports ended with Aryna Sabalenka, the tennis world No. 1, battling Elena Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion, to win the 2025 WTA Tour Finals.

Two players who have played some of the most riveting finals of the past three years, including the breathtaking 2023 Australian Open final, walked onto the court in Riyadh to round off a tournament of down-to-the-wire, high-profile matchups. Both semifinals went the distance, while rematches of this year’s French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open finals, variously featuring Sabalenka, Coco Gauff, Iga Świątek and Amanda Anisimova, served as intensifying preludes.

The action in Riyadh culminated with Rybakina sealing a near-flawless 6-3, 7-6(0) win, as Sabalenka once more struggled to find her best tennis in the biggest moments of the year. The 25-year-old Kazakh lifted the big shiny trophy and earned more than $ 5.2 million in the process, snuffing out a comeback just as it was gaining momentum.

“Incredible week,” Rybakina said when it was over.

This nail-biter of a match, and the days leading up to it, crystalized the bargain that the WTA struck when it decided to bring its flagship event to a tennis nation in a different league to every other financially, but still in the incipient stages of its adoption and understanding of the sport.

Unprecedented prize money, high-quality facilities, and a stable venue for an event that had been through years of uncertainty came at the price of another year in which millions of people who pay attention to the biggest tennis matches of the season likely missed this one, held in a kingdom that has used its financial might to acquire influence in the sport that far outstrips its status on its courts.

It’s a price sports authorities sometimes pay when they agree to let nations pay them huge sums to host their events, partly to improve the reputations of their governments, a practice that has come to be known as sportswashing.

For women’s tennis, it figures to stay this way for a while. Ahead of the match, Portia Archer, the chief executive of the WTA Tour, said she wants the organization to extend its three-year deal to hold the event in Riyadh, which expires after next year’s final.

“We’d actually enjoy being here for even longer,” Archer said in an interview ahead of the singles final. “It’s allowed us to make a really big impact in the community here across a number of dimensions.”

Archer added that there will come a time when the Tour Finals move somewhere else.

“We’ve also got to think about the longer term,” she said. “We can want to stay here a little longer than the three years that we’ve committed to and also be thinking about where we go after we leave.”

In coming to Saudi Arabia, the WTA indisputably made some gains. The kingdom offered stability for a tournament that had become nomadic during the Covid-19 pandemic. It disrupted its lucrative 10-year deal with China — before that was terminated altogether after the tour boycotted the country — when it failed to conduct what the WTA deemed to be an adequate investigation into the alleged sexual assault of one of its players, Peng Shuai, by a former top government official.

That sent the WTA Tour Finals into financial peril, and left the tour’s best players living through annual uncertainty over where they would end their seasons.

The WTA had to cut prize money nearly in half as it held a magically festive Tour Finals in Guadalajara, Mexico in 2021, a lifeless one in Fort Worth, Tex. in 2022, and a near-disastrous competition in Cancun, also in Mexico, in 2023. That year, the WTA had come close to signing a deal with Saudi Arabia, before it balked at criticism from former stars of its sport, including Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, and rushed to find an alternative.

Organizers built a stadium in a hotel resort parking lot in Cancun. Players said that the courts were dangerous and filled with dead spots, threatening not to play. Seasonal rain wreaked havoc with the schedule. Crowds were sparse. High winds made quality play nearly impossible. The stars rebelled. Sabalenka said she “felt disrespected” by her tour, which sent talking points to players, including suggested answers to questions about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and its treatment of women and the LGBTQIA+ community.

In a statement at the time, a WTA spokesperson said that “players have always been equal decision-makers to ensure a strong direction for women’s tennis.”

When Saudi Arabia offered to stage the event, it also guaranteed record prize money of $ 15 million, a 66 percent increase from 2023. With both Sabalenka and Rybakina entering this year’s final undefeated, they were playing for a record $ 5.23 million winner’s check, a signal of how the kingdom’s three-year deal has essentially reset the market for the tour’s premier event. Billie Jean King, a founder of the WTA, an icon of women’s tennis, and an entrepreneur, supported the deal, arguing that finding a partner to place a high value on women’s tennis and the event was too important to pass up, and that engagement could bring about change.

The WTA had received other offers, most notably from business leaders in the Czech Republic. But none had financial guarantees that could match the most lucrative on the table.

“Everybody now has a full understanding of the value of our finals,” Archer said. “You almost can’t sort of go back and not have it. Nobody wants that to be part of their brand.”

Saudi Arabia also promised to welcome all female players. At the first Riyadh edition in 2024, all the players were asked about the country’s perception. Only Gauff said that she would consider not coming back if she did not see change. In April that year, Daria Kasatkina, who would end up being an alternate at the event and who is gay, said she had received “assurances” over her wellbeing.

Saudi Arabia also promised to use the event to help promote sports and health among women and girls in the kingdom. It has brought this to the WTA Tour itself: its sovereign wealth fund, PIF, now sponsors a paid maternity program for players, as well as its world rankings. PIF has repeatedly declined to comment when asked about its ties to the kingdom’s rulers and the kingdom’s human rights record.

The WTA embraced a similar ethos of promotion in the face of criticism, arguing that using sports as a vehicle for social change was part of its groundbreaking core, dating back a half-century, and ultimately signed a deal that amounted to a series of tradeoffs. Two years in, its players are speaking in glowing terms about the social progress that they think they are part of. The tradeoffs are still there.

Saudi Arabia has an extremely limited tennis market. According to the numbers supplied to World Tennis (formerly the International Tennis Federation) by the Saudi Tennis Federation in 2024, there are 30,000 tennis players in the country, defined as people who have played at least once in the past year.

It’s possible to drive for miles in Riyadh, a city of roughly 8 million people, without seeing a tennis court.  The STF said it had 250 courts in 2024, up from 52 in 2019, when there were just 4,500 players per the WTF definition.

Officials with the Saudi Tennis Federation declined to comment.

The numbers have suddenly put the Saudis far closer to their neighbors in West Asia and North Africa. Tunisia, the home of three-time Grand Slam finalist Ons Jabeur, has 19,200 players, 12 million inhabitants and 200 courts, according to the World Tennis report.

Jabeur, who was a major supporter of bringing the WTA Tour Finals to Riyadh, was on site all week, hosting events.

“I understand here in this region what it means to have an event like this, and I will keep pushing to have more,” she said. “I would have loved to attend it, an event to see, my idols playing before me.”

Other West Asian countries, such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have built tennis cultures over the last several decades. They have hosted women’s tournaments, small and large. Singapore and China, two previous hosts of the WTA Tour Finals, did the same.

Tunisia’s growth as a tennis nation, in part thanks to Jabeur’s rise to a career high of world No. 2, saw it go from hosting World Tennis events to a WTA 250, which was partly introduced to offset the loss of events in China arising from the WTA’s boycott. The Jasmin Open lasted three editions on the calendar, from 2022 to 2024.

Saudi Arabia had never held any kind of WTA Tour or women’s World Tennis event before it landed the biggest one in women’s tennis outside of the four Grand Slams. It got the Next Gen ATP Finals, for the best men’s players in the world aged 20 and under, without having held an ATP or men’s World Tennis event. As early as 2028, Saudi Arabia will host an ATP Masters 1000 tournament, one rung below the Grand Slams. This year’s edition of the Next Gen ATP Finals will be the last in Jeddah, at least for now.

“They kind of go big or go home,” Jessica Pegula said during an interview following her round-robin win over Jasmine Paolini Thursday night.

Still, the lack of any tour-level women’s tennis history limited the number of tickets organizers could sell, as well as the size of the stadium. The WTA Tour Finals takes place in a mostly temporary venue inside the larger King Saud University Stadium. The venue seats 4,200 people, about half the capacity of the Riyadh venue where the top men played an exhibition, the Six Kings Slam, last month. It is less than a third of the size of the venue for the ATP Tour Finals, the Inalpi Arena in Turin, Italy.

Garbiñe Muguruza, the former Wimbledon champion who is the tournament director, said during an interview that she made two trips to the kingdom earlier this year to promote the sport and the tournament, especially to women and girls.

“Tennis here is not probably as popular as in other countries, so I think it’s a great challenge, you know, to create new fans, create an event that people will come and enjoy and get to know more about tennis, how it works, who are the players,” she said in an interview Friday, noting that attendance and the energy level in the stadium has improved.

“Fans and the crowd are way more involved.”

Pegula said as much, though she and the rest of the field were grading on a curve.

“Last year, they had no idea, like when to cheer, how to cheer, like what do we do?” she said. “I definitely noticed from the first match a big difference with that, which I think is great to see: when you see fans actually not just here, but engaged.”

Players raved about the atmosphere all week, helped by news-conference questions from people working with the tournament, or the Saudi Tennis Federation, asking them how they felt about the legacy they were creating.

Gauff, who won the title and just under $ 5 million last year, was sounding that note. The American, who is known for keeping up with current events, said she had not paid attention to Saudi politics since last year, but said that as she moved around Riyadh, the sight of so many foreigners encouraged her.

“It’s an evolving country,” she said in her news conference.

“I don’t think this region has had a lot of female representation when it comes to sports and athletes actually playing here. So to have us here be the first to do that, I’m really looking forward to maybe one day there’s a Saudi girl playing on tour.”

During an interview at a business summit in England in September, Daniel Townsend, the chief executive of Saudi sports investment vehicle SURJ, said that having a top-10 player was part of its long-term strategy. He added that the route to that goal had to include “driving participation and engagement, which just isn’t there.”

Saturday afternoon, Ann Austin, executive director of the WTA Foundation, said players demanded that the tour make a significant impact on the community as part of coming to Saudi Arabia. Austin said she comes four times a year, to hold programs on tennis, financial literacy and women’s health, sometimes with Judy Murray, the mother and first coach of Andy Murray and his brother Jamie.

“We’re helping open those doors because that’s how the country is trying to progress and so we’re here to help with being that voice and resource and platform,” Austin said.

Granting hosting rights to the tour’s marquee event without holding a small one first still comes at a cost to the sport.

Compared with other top events, and given the matchups between boldface names with layers of history between them, the atmosphere inside the stadium was flat for long stretches. Even during the semifinals, there were wide swaths of empty seats, especially on the side of the court with the pricy hospitality and most exclusive seats.  A small courtyard outside the arena, which had food trucks and piped-in music, was quiet for much of the week.

“We’re in a region of the world where we don’t yet have the fandom that we have in some other parts of the world, so that’s one of the tradeoffs,” Archer said.

“If you’re not able to access that fandom, it’s a little harder to create an event around it, but that is certainly something that we would like to see for our finals moving forward, whether that’s here or otherwise.”

Riyadh is also eight hours ahead of the East Coast of the United States and 11 hours ahead of the West Coast, making the matches pretty unwatchable for most people in the U.S., arguably the most important market, given the WTA Tour’s push to gain more sponsors.

In Europe, another very important market, much of the competition took place during the workday or the dinner hour. That’s better than in the U.S., but not exactly ideal.

Fans missed some high-octane tennis from start to finish Saturday. Rybakina relentlessly attacked Sabalenka, displaying the smooth power that is peerless in the sport when she is truly on. Sabalenka clung on and had two chances to force a deciding set, but Rybakina held on and then played a perfect tiebreak, winning seven points out of seven to dismantle the world No. 1 in the format that she has dominated this season.

When Sabalenka sent a return wide to conclude a season that featured five different winners of the five biggest tournaments, the WTA Tour Finals ended as every tennis match does, and as its decision to be here has played out. Something won, alongside something lost.

— Dan Sheldon contributed reporting.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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