The WTA wants to turn the Finals into the “Super Bowl of women’s sports.” Starting in 2027, the tournament will be staged at Charlotte’s Spectrum Center, an NBA arena with more than 19,000 seats. It will come with nearly $20 million in public funding, and the WTA will take direct control of the event. The tour will also move its headquarters to the city.
But Charlotte arrives at a difficult moment. According to internal financial projections circulated during the US Open, the WTA could end 2026 with an operating loss of about $23 million and just $15 million in cash. Payments linked to its deal with CVC are also due to end in 2027.
The WTA had already thought it had solved the Finals problem with Shenzhen. In 2018, it signed a ten-year agreement that Steve Simon described as a billion-dollar commitment. Only one edition was ever played there. The pandemic wiped out the 2020 tournament and, after the Peng Shuai case and the WTA’s “Where is Peng Shuai?” campaign, it was the WTA itself that suspended tournaments in China.
Riyadh offered a different kind of solution. The money was there. The audience was not, or at least not in comparable measure. The WTA would have liked to extend the agreement, but the Saudis concluded that a new cycle did not make financial sense. Within a few years, the tour had lost first the Chinese model — enormous, but politically unworkable — and then the Saudi one — generous, but unable to create enough local demand.
Charlotte is an attempt to build something else. The WTA will run its most important event directly, take on a larger share of the risk and, if it works, keep a larger share of the revenue.
North Carolina has committed $14.4 million to bring the Finals to the city from 2027 through 2029; Charlotte and Mecklenburg County have added another $5 million. Part of the state funding comes from taxes on sports betting: another contradiction for a sport that fights match-fixing while having spent years monetizing the betting industry.
But the real point is what that money cannot buy.
In recent years, the WTA has found capital from CVC, Saudi Arabia, sponsors, commercial rights, data, and now public funding. All of it can finance the product, cover losses and make investment possible. None of it can replace demand indefinitely.
Because the real problem begins when the doors open.
In 2024, according to Form 990 filings in the United States, ATP Tour Inc. reported revenue of $293.7 million, compared with $142.6 million for WTA Tour Inc. A little more than twice as much. The ATP ended 2024 with a $52 million profit; the WTA with a loss of about $4.9 million.
The gap also shows up in commercial decisions. Since 2021, Roland Garros has sold a separate night session on Philippe-Chatrier built around a single match. It is the premium product of the day. And almost every time, that match has been a men’s match.
Before Sabalenka-Osaka in 2026, 33 consecutive night sessions had been assigned to the men’s draw. In 2024, all eleven went to the men; the same happened again in 2025. Part of the explanation is structural: a best-of-five match offers greater potential duration. But Amélie Mauresmo has also spoken about “appeal.”
And yet appeal, in another sense at least, does not seem to be the problem. In 2025, eight of the world’s ten highest-paid female athletes, according to Forbes, were tennis players. Gauff, Sabalenka and Świątek occupied the top three spots. Tennis produces some of the most marketable individual female athletes on the planet. The challenge is converting that individual value into value for the product itself.
The WTA argues, with some justification, that fewer premium slots also mean fewer opportunities to build visibility and viewing habits. But the commercial question remains: which match do you put in the time slot for which people are being asked to buy a separate ticket?
The Finals make the problem even clearer. In 2022, in Fort Worth, Jessica Pegula opened the tournament in front of only a few hundred spectators. When Coco Gauff played, attendance rose to around 4,500. The right player moved demand far more than the WTA Finals brand itself — unlike the ATP Finals, where the event has a stronger pull of its own.
In Riyadh in 2024, there were reports of days with barely 400 spectators in a 4,200-seat arena. Fort Worth had organizational problems, Cancún in 2023 was put together almost at the last minute, and Riyadh is a very particular market. No single example proves much on its own. Taken together, however, they reveal a recurring problem: the Finals do not automatically sell simply because they are the Finals.
We also know that they can work. In Singapore in 2017, the WTA announced total attendance of more than 130,000 over the course of the week. The audience for women’s tennis exists, and it can be huge. Serena Williams proved that for twenty years. Gauff can fill Arthur Ashe Stadium. Osaka has retained extraordinary commercial power even when her results have not matched the scale of her fame.
The question is not whether a women’s match can fill a stadium. It can. The question is how to turn interest in individual players into more stable demand.
Television tells a similar story. In 2026, the Australian Open women’s final averaged 2.14 million viewers in Australia, compared with 3.4 million for the men’s final; in the United States, Wimbledon drew 1.9 million for the women’s final versus 2.4 million for the men’s. Strong numbers, and growing ones. Not yet the same numbers.
Then there is the question of the quality of the game. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of us hoped women’s tennis would become more like the men’s game. The problem is that, to a large extent, the opposite happened: men’s tennis became more like women’s tennis.
The women’s game has, of course, become vastly more powerful and athletic, but it has remained predominantly a baseline game. Meanwhile, the men’s game has lost a significant part of its repertoire: serve-and-volley has almost disappeared, net play has declined, and the one-handed backhand is becoming an exception. This is not an aesthetic argument. The point is that the game now has fewer dimensions. And in a version of tennis increasingly built around power, the women’s game inevitably offers less raw power. This similarity does not help women’s tennis.
It may not be a coincidence that several sports in which women’s competitions have developed large audiences of their own — volleyball, artistic gymnastics, athletics and a number of winter sports — have, in one way or another, differentiated the product or adapted some of its basic physical constraints. Volleyball lowers the net; athletics changes hurdle heights and implement weights; artistic gymnastics is built around different apparatus. This is obviously not a scientific law, and it does not apply everywhere. Nor is there any reason to romanticize the past. Women’s tennis in the 1980s and 1990s could often be considerably less intense and athletic than it is today. The problem is that, as the women’s game became more powerful and athletic, it also became progressively more similar to the men’s game without being able to reproduce the same physical output: less power, lower ball speed, less speed around the court and a less effective serve.
The result is that women’s tennis risks looking not like a different form of tennis, with its own technical identity, but like a less powerful version of the same one. It would have been fascinating to see a women’s tour develop around characteristics of its own — a world of many Martina Navratilovas, so to speak — rather than one populated by female versions of Sinner or Zverev: the same technical paradigm, the same pursuit of power and speed, but inevitably with less of both.
Whether I like that or not is irrelevant. What matters is how many people watch, buy a ticket, and come back to do it again. Perhaps I am simply the prototype of the lazy Westerner who grew up in a world where men’s tennis was the dominant model.
But perhaps that is exactly the point.
The WTA does not necessarily have to persuade people who learned to watch tennis through the men’s game. It can grow by finding audiences elsewhere: people who do not yet have an established tennis habit, and for whom the entry point into the sport is a player before it is a tour. In that sense, someone like Alex Eala may be a prototype for one possible future.
During the Washington tournament, Mark Ein said in a press conference, as Ben Rothenberg reported, that at least 80 percent of the inquiries the ticket office had received in the preceding weeks revolved around a single question: when would Eala play?
A few days later, in Toronto, Tennis Canada said about 3,100 tickets were sold after the evening session in which the Filipina would make her debut was announced, taking the session to a sellout.
Eala does not need to win a Slam to already have economic value. She brings people to tournaments who, in all likelihood, would not otherwise have gone. In that respect, she resembles João Fonseca. The difference is that the ATP can add Fonseca to a tour that already has Alcaraz and Sinner and generates far more revenue. For the WTA, finding more players capable of creating that kind of demand is more urgent.
Eala also points to another possibility. Some of the clearest examples of women’s tennis expanding its audience beyond established tennis fans have come from major Asian markets. Li Na transformed tennis in China. Naomi Osaka became one of the most commercially important athletes in the world. Sania Mirza reached a level of fame in India far beyond what would normally be associated with a doubles specialist. Now Eala is creating something similar in the Philippines.
China, Japan, India and the Philippines are far too different for a single cultural explanation to make much sense. The relevant point is simpler: when a player becomes a figure with whom an entire country identifies, women’s tennis can reach people who were not already part of the tour’s established audience.
Perhaps one thing those countries have in common is that elite-level tennis arrived without a deep-rooted tradition in which men’s tennis had already been established as the dominant model.
That is exactly the kind of audience the WTA needs.
And yet its calendar does not even align with the Asian Games…
The same issue comes up when prize money is discussed. According to financial figures reported in recent months, the WTA uses roughly £25 million a year from its own resources to top up prize money at combined events. Equal prize money can be a perfectly legitimate choice. But the amount of money distributed and the amount of money generated remain two different things.
Charlotte will have to be much more than a change of venue.
The WTA will have a major U.S. market — but is it the right one? — an NBA arena, public funding, direct control of the event, and the eight best players of the season. It will have almost everything that can be secured through contracts, investment and planning.
Then it will have to sell the tickets.
The economic debate around women’s tennis often begins with how value should be divided.
The WTA’s problem comes earlier: it has to generate more of it.
Because prize-money checks can be made equal by a decision.
An audience cannot.
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