How Saudi Arabia, ATP Tour will reshape tennis calendar with hundreds of millions of dollars

A shopping spree designed to reshape the calendar of the men’s tennis tour is intensifying.

After ATP Tour-funded buybacks and reacquisitions of licenses for four of its smaller tournaments, SURJ, the sports arm of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, is funding further possible reacquisitions. Both processes are designed to create a longer off-season and increase the focus on a major new event in the kingdom, starting in 2028.

The ATP Tour has also approved one tournament’s transfer from one owner to another. Taken together, the deals would constitute one of the most significant alterations of the sport’s ever-evolving calendar in years, as the ATP attempts to condense its schedule and with it put greater spotlight on a smaller coterie of tournaments.

The effort represents another admission that the tennis schedule has become too unwieldy — an 11-month globe-trotting slog that is confusing, bad for business, and excessively taxing on the players that define the sport.

According to four sources briefed on the transactions and negotiations, one of whom is directly involved, the tour last year reacquired the licenses to the Chengdu Open and Hong Kong Open, two tournaments held in China during the fall. They are ATP 250 events — the smallest category on the main tour and named for the number of rankings points awarded to the winners.

The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to do so publicly.

The ATP also took back the licenses for two more fall 250-level events, the Moselle Open in the French city of Metz and the Kremlin Cup in Moscow (the latter has not been played since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022). All four deals were funded by the ATP.

The tour has also approved the sale of the European Open, currently staged in Brussels, Belgium, and owned by Tennium, to Italy’s tennis federation, the FITP, on the condition that it moves that event from the end of the season to the middle, and change the surface on which it’s played from hard courts to grass, two of the sources said. A third said that the deal is yet to be finalized, but is close.

Further deals are planned, with the ATP in talks to reacquire the licenses for the Argentina Open (250), held in Buenos Aires, and the Mexican Open (500) in Acapulco, also according to two of the sources. Those deals, and any future ones, are to be funded by SURJ, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) sports investment arm, two of the sources said.

Both events are played in February, when the ATP and SURJ want to stage its new ATP Masters 1000 event, designed to attract the top players in the world.

The acquisitions will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, with the final prices for the 500-level tournaments expected to significantly exceed the tour’s initial offers to license-holders. They started at around $15 to 20 million per license for the 250s and $35 to 45 million for the 500s.

SURJ first communicated its intentions for buying back licenses from tournaments beyond the four already purchased in a letter to all the 250- and 500-level tournaments late last year, but some organizers have declined to enter negotiations.

SURJ declined to comment. In a statement, an ATP Tour spokesperson said that the ATP “has been clear about its ongoing work to optimize the Tour calendar, a long-term process aimed at building a stronger and more balanced schedule from 2028 onward. This work remains ongoing and forms part of the ATP’s broader strategic vision for the Tour.

“As part of this process, SURJ is deploying capital toward calendar optimization, including the strategic buy-out and relinquishment of tournament memberships. Tournament participation in this process is entirely voluntary, and while we are not able to comment on the value or status of individual transactions, we believe it represents an important step toward greater balance and stability across the ATP Tour calendar.

“More broadly, the strong demand and longterm value associated with ATP Tour tournament memberships reflect the overall health of the Tour.

“Our approach to growth is consistent with the principles of OneVision, including strengthening the premium product of the Tour. We believe a strong product starts with the best players competing at the best events, and the continued development of the Masters 1000 category is part of that strategy, alongside efforts to expand our reach and improve player compensation through enhanced bonus pools and tournament profit-sharing.

“At the same time, ATP 250 and 500 events remain vital to the strength and depth of the Tour and will continue to play a key role in the calendar. Player welfare remains an ongoing priority, and we are very conscious that the demands of the global calendar remain one of the sport’s biggest challenges. A key objective of this process is to shorten the season over time and expand the off-season for players, while creating a more streamlined and balanced calendar that strengthens the Tour’s product for all stakeholders.”

The ATP Tour wants its schedule to be led by the four Grand Slams and then 10 Masters 1000 events. Seven of these will be mandatory and the better part of two weeks long, with no other events held concurrently. One is one-week long and mandatory; the other two will be one-week non-mandatory events, all with the same exclusivity.

The mandatory tournaments are the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, the Miami Open, the Madrid Open, the Italian Open, the Canadian Open, the Cincinnati Open, the Shanghai Masters. The Paris Masters is mandatory, but one-week long, while the non-mandatory ones are the Monte Carlo Masters and the to-be-arranged event in Saudi Arabia, which does not yet have a host city attached.

Below that tier, up to 16 500-level events will be held across eight exclusive weeks, with two tournaments running simultaneously in each. Those will be augmented by about 24 250-level events, played across 10 weeks spread throughout the season.

The overall goal, two of the sources said, is to create a schedule that allows the best players to focus on the biggest events, and fans to more easily discern which are the important weeks in the calendar, as well as limiting situations when bigger tournaments are competing with smaller ones for attention and sponsors.

It is also the next stage of a four-year push from the Saudi government to become a major player in professional tennis, which is reshaping the influence of the sport worldwide.

That effort began at an opportune time for the ATP, as tennis emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. Events were canceled or played in empty arenas, and both revenues and prize money plummeted.

In 2024, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund proposed more than $1 billion of investments in professional tennis. Some of that money has found its way into the tour via sponsorships of the men’s and women’s rankings and the women’s season-ending Tour Finals, which will be held in Riyadh, Saudi’s capital city, until at least the end of next year.

But Saudi Arabia’s goal was to host top-level, full-length men’s and women’s events, which it and the ATP presented as the keystone of that $1 billion proposal. Since then, its ambition — and spending — has contracted. The kingdom has been unable to reach a deal with the WTA Tour, which is already fully stocked with 1,000-level events, but last year it secured a license from the ATP to host a non-mandatory 56-player competition.

That needs a place in the calendar, though.

When initial discussions took place nearly two years ago, SURJ wanted its tournament to take over the January swing, before the Australian Open. Tennis Australia put the brakes on that, and tried to launch a rival “Premier Tour” calendar proposal, similar to that now envisioned by the ATP and led by the four Grand Slams.

The sport — including the WTA, which these calendar shifts would not really impact — agrees on the kind of calendar that needs to be introduced, but disagrees over the details. Last year, the two tours sent a proposal to the Grand Slams that was very similar to the basic layout of the Premier Tour, but the majors shot it down.

So to February, an especially crowded time in men’s tennis, with players in both the ATP and WTA ranks already making complaints about the grinding schedule, which the tours say has brought the increased prize money they also wanted.

Initially, ATP chairman Andrea Gaudenzi liked the idea of a dual swing, with tournaments running concurrently on different surfaces in South America (clay) and Western Asia (hard), and the new tournament in Saudi Arabia leading into the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, California, at the start of March — ATP 1000 into ATP 1000.

But existing tournament neighbors to Saudi Arabia, in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, declined to give up their licenses, according to two sources briefed on discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly about them.

The Dubai Tennis Championships, an ATP 500, occupies the last week of February, along with the Santiago Open in Chile, a 250. Those events could slide ahead in the calendar, along with the Qatar Open, also a 500, but that would affect the Central and South American tournaments, including the Mexican Open and the Rio de Janeiro Open in Brazil, another 500-level event.

So the tour has alighted on clearing out some fall events. This offers the potential of a longer offseason for most players, and the possibility of moving some other tournaments from February toward the end of the season. For the license-holders of some of those competitions, which do not earn revenue close to the offers being made by the tour, selling is not a complex decision, two of the sources said.

Any scheduling permutation will fundamentally alter the landscape of tennis in South America, a continent with a rich history in the sport but without the financial muscle to stake a commensurate place in its calendar.

It will also give the ATP Tour the showcase it wants for its new, shiny and expensive Saudi tournament, while giving the players the longer off-season they want.

Or so the theory goes.

In professional tennis the past few years, discussions like these too often reach a familiar conclusion: Nothing changes, and nobody cares.

This time, the ATP, SURJ and the tournaments want change to happen. But it is going to cost.

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