WTA, CVC launch partnership to extend ladies’s tennis revenues

The ladies’s skilled tennis tour launched a business enterprise with CVC Capital Companions on Tuesday to extend revenues for the game, with the funding supervisor contributing $150 million for a 20% stake in what can be often called WTA Ventures LLC.

“Clearly, the ambition is to materially develop ladies’s skilled tennis. Develop our profile, its worth, the prize cash,” WTA Chairman and CEO Steve Simon mentioned. “This association is definitely going to offer for us to create extra funding alternative to our gamers and our tournaments.”

He mentioned the brand new entity is totally separate from St. Petersburg, Florida-based WTA Inc., which oversees the tour itself, and can handle all the sport’s business actions, together with rights for broadcast, knowledge, gaming, sponsorship, licensing and NFTs.

“We will start, hopefully, gaining extra viewers and extra engaged followers,” Simon mentioned. “That may then drive the asset worth of every of these properties by means of the expansion of the viewers.”

In late 2021, Simon introduced that the WTA could be suspending all of its tournaments — together with the season-ending WTA Finals — that had been held in China due to issues over the protection of former participant Peng Shuai, costing the tour tens of millions of {dollars}. That ban on competitors in China stays in place; Simon mentioned there can be a call about the place to carry this season’s WTA Finals by the top of March.

He known as the CVC funding “utterly unattached from any of these points.”

Simon additionally mentioned the settlement introduced Tuesday “does not prohibit, in any means, from us persevering with to have discussions with the ATP (males’s tennis tour) and probably doing an even bigger cope with the ATP concerned.”

CVC says on its web site that it’s a “world different funding supervisor” with greater than 137 billion euros ($145 billion) in property beneath administration.

It has labored with Components One, European soccer leagues, rugby, volleyball and different sports activities.

The WTA-CVC partnership has been within the works for some time, from the preliminary idea to the work to finish the deal over the previous 12 months.

“It has been an extended journey,” Simon mentioned.