LONDON — Saudi Arabia will host the lads’s tennis tour’s Next Gen ATP Finals in Jedda via 2027 below an settlement introduced Thursday, the most recent foray into sports by the dominion.
The end-of-season match for the ATP’s main 21-and-under gamers will likely be held this yr on the King Abdullah Sports City on an indoor arduous court docket from Nov. 28 to Dec. 2.
The occasion’s prize cash will rise to $2 million, a leap of greater than 40% from the $1.4 million handed out in 2022, when the final of 5 editions was held in Milan.
It is the primary time an official ATP occasion will likely be held in Saudi Arabia and a part of a current pattern involving varied sports linking with the dominion’s sovereign wealth fund that claims belongings of about $700 billion.
The PGA Tour, European Tour and Saudi-funded LIV Golf introduced a collaboration final month. Formula One put a race in Saudi Arabia in 2021, the identical yr the dominion purchased English soccer membership Newcastle United. Saudi soccer groups have been signing big-name gamers.
WTA Chairman Steve Simon visited the dominion with tennis gamers in February, and he acknowledged shortly earlier than Wimbledon that his tour will “continue to have conversations” with the Saudis.
In current years, Saudi Arabia has enacted wide-ranging social reforms, together with granting ladies the precise to drive and largely dismantling male guardianship legal guidelines that had allowed husbands and male family to manage many points of girls’s lives. Men and girls are nonetheless required to decorate modestly, however the guidelines have been loosened and the once-feared spiritual police have been sidelined.
Same-sex relations are punishable by loss of life or flogging, though prosecutions are uncommon. Authorities ban all types of LGBTQ+ advocacy, even confiscating rainbow-colored toys and clothes.
Even as the federal government has enacted top-down reforms, it has severely cracked down on any type of political dissent, arresting ladies’s rights activists and different critics and sentencing them to lengthy jail phrases and journey bans, generally on the premise of some tweets.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has labored to get himself out of worldwide isolation because the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. He additionally clearly needs to diversify Saudi Arabia’s economic system and cut back its reliance on oil.
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