Let’s see how many of those who marched, posted, and protested for human rights in Palestine will be sitting comfortably in front of Netflix when the Six Kings Slam kicks off in Riyadh.
Brisbane. Daria Kasatkina, now representing Australia, doesn’t try to sugar-coat it: when tennis chooses to open up (or deepen) channels with Saudi Arabia, the players are not sitting at the table. They absorb the decisions, then they are the ones who have to make them workable, week after week, in front of cameras and sponsors.
“As players, we don’t have much voice in questions like that. Our organizations want to do business, and we, unfortunately, don’t have a say,” Kasatkina says.
It’s a line that carries more weight than many official statements. Not because it is sensational, but because it explains the mechanism: governance and contracts on one side, labour and reputation on the other. In the middle are players expected to answer for issues that go beyond the court, while the decisions move elsewhere, in places where their influence is minimal.
Riyadh isn’t an episode: it’s a direction of travel. The point isn’t one trip. The point is the trajectory. The WTA has awarded the Finals to Riyadh for the 2024 to 2026 cycle, with a significant increase in prize money and an institutional narrative about global growth and investment in the product. In 2024 came a multi-year partnership with the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which became the naming partner of the WTA rankings and a cross-tour partner spanning the men’s and women’s circuits.
Within that context, Kasatkina’s position sounds less like a comment and more like a statement of the balance of power.
“We are players, we want to play tennis, we need to earn money and provide for our families, so I would say we’re somewhere in the middle. We are the ones who have to go there and play, it’s our job, and we are pretty limited in terms of where we can go and where we can’t go,” she adds.
This is the core of the piece. Not an abstract moral judgement, but the material reality of the circuit: rankings, points, scheduling, sponsorship contracts, implicit obligations, competitive pressure. The debate about “whether” collides with the question of “how”: how do you, in practice, opt out when the calendar takes you there and the tour’s economic structure is moving in that direction?
The “Saudi Arabia problem” isn’t neutral. The issue remains inevitably political because the host country is not a neutral backdrop. International human-rights organisations describe a system that maintains forms of legal and social discrimination, particularly towards women, and a repressive environment for LGBTQ people, with public space for expression severely constrained.
It is on this fault line that the Finals, and more broadly Saudi Arabia’s advance into tennis, becomes a case. Because the operation is not only about the location of a tournament; it is about the tour’s image, its identity, the consistency between declared values and commercial choices.
Kasatkina, as an athlete who over the years has built a public profile attentive to these themes, does not pretend the contradiction does not exist. She calls it by name, without rhetoric. She says: we don’t decide, and yet it falls to us to carry the show.
The most delicate line: looking for meaning inside a decision already taken. Then Kasatkina makes a move that wrong-foots anyone who wants “clean”, manifesto-style positions. She tries to find a useful argument, not a celebratory one, within a framework she does not control. She does it by shifting the focus to Saudi girls, to those growing up in a country where women’s sport has narrower margins.
“For me, the good thing here is if we can come to a country like that and show young girls who are there, trying to play tennis or practise other sports, that it’s actually possible, that it’s not that far away,” she explains.
It is a pragmatic line of reasoning: if the machine is already moving, then at least you can try to let something positive through, an image, a contact, an idea of possibility. But Kasatkina does not sell it as a solution; she puts it forward as a foothold.
And she doubles down, warning against the opposite temptation, the clean cut that leaves everything as it is:
“If we just cut off the opportunity, they’re not going to move forward for sure… But if we can support those girls and show them that their opportunities are actually not that far away, for me that’s a good thing… I try to think that way.”
This is also where the risk in her position lies: the idea that international presence produces change is controversial and often contested. Yet Kasatkina does not use it as an alibi to absolve the system. She uses it, rather, to stop the discussion collapsing into moral cheerleading, while the contracts get signed anyway.
An indictment of the top, not of her peers. There is another element that makes her words interesting: she does not offload responsibility onto the players who go, nor does she build an ethical hierarchy between those who participate and those who don’t. She aims higher. “Our organizations want to do business.” That is where she places the decision, and there she implicitly demands transparency: what criteria, what guarantees, what voice for those who have to step on court?
Because in the end this is the point, and Kasatkina says it without ornament. Tennis is turning Saudi Arabia from a “controversial question” into operational normality. The players, however, remain the system’s front office: they are the ones answering questions about rights, safety, freedom, consistency. And when one of the tour’s most exposed figures says “we don’t have a say”, she is saying that normalisation is proceeding without a mandate.
In an era in which women’s tennis claims voice and centrality, Kasatkina puts an uncomfortable truth on the table: when it comes to the big calls that actually matter, that voice doesn’t always show up.
