WTA Chair Believes She Has Roadmap Out of Financial Hole

The WTA, the governing body behind women’s tennis, is standing on extremely shaky financial ground.

At the year-end WTA Finals in Indian Wells this week, WTA chair Valerie Camillo admitted that current players and tennis legends have been stopping her to ask if they should be concerned about the future of the organization. 

“The answer to that is a full-stop no,” she told Front Office Sports.

In September, The Telegraph reported that the WTA was on track to record a $23 million loss in 2026, and exhaust its cash reserves by mid-2027. Indeed, recent years have been rough for the organization. 

In 2018, in an attempt to cash in on growing interest in China, the WTA sold 10-year rights to Chinese firm Gemdale to host the Tour Finals in Shenzhen. The fee was undisclosed. However, it suspended all tournaments in China in 2021, following the public disappearance of a leading Chinese player, Peng Shuai. (In November that year, Peng accused a former senior government official of sexual assault in a swiftly deleted social media post.) 

Seeking a new deep-pocketed host, the WTA pivoted to Saudi Arabia. In 2024, it struck a three-year deal to send the Tour Finals to Riyadh, with $15 million prize money. But crowds were embarrassingly small for an event the WTA bills as a fifth Grand Slam. Amid backlash from within the sport about Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record and a deterioration in the regional security situation, the two parties cut the deal short in mid-2026.

Tennis’s Slams—which are run independently of the tours—and its top players have done a better job than the WTA of monetizing interest in the sport. 

According to sports economist Nikola Vuković, the men’s tour saw its revenue rise from $144 million to $294 million between 2018 and 2024. In the same period, the WTA grew from $103 million to $143 million. The end of the Saudi deal means that the WTA expects revenue to fall to $112 million in 2026. At a time when interest in women’s sports is soaring, particularly in the U.S., the WTA has struggled to capitalize on the boom.

Costs are also rising—and players’ fight for equal pay puts the WTA in an awkward spot. The WTA was founded as a breakaway organization in 1973 to close the gap between men’s and women’s prize money. In 2023, the WTA committed to equal prize pots with the ATP at its biggest events by 2027, and at every competition by 2033. 

While the debate on equal pay within tennis has been settled, the gap is one that the WTA has had issues funding. It agreed to pay out the same value of prize money as the ATP from a revenue base that is less than half the size.

The WTA has levers it can pull. Soon after Camillo took control in 2025, the WTA withdrew from negotiations on a merger with the ATP, which was built on an 80–20 revenue split. “Conversations [with the ATP] have continued on and off across my tenure”, she told FOS. “I still believe the ambition remains correct. It is a matter of timing, of the deal terms, and of making sure that when the WTA negotiates, it is doing so from a position of strength.”

She is, however, unequivocal about the prospect of selling off more of its commercial revenue. 

In 2023, the WTA created a new entity for its commercial rights, WTA Ventures. It sold a 20% stake in that entity to private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners for $150 million. CVC will hand over its final $30 million payment in 2027. The absence of this income from 2028 onwards will become another strain on the balance sheet. Seeking further outside investment would provide short-term financial relief, but at the cost of handing over a larger share of future income.

“We have not had, nor do we have, any plan to sell additional stakes in the WTA,” Camillo told FOS. 

Instead, the WTA is focusing on “the standard belt-tightening common to any organization,” as well as new sponsorships. Dairy brand Fage has been announced as the title sponsor of the Tour Finals for the next four years. Retail is another area of focus, beginning with tie-ups with Hello Kitty and TOGETHXR.

After its failed experiments in China and Saudi Arabia, the WTA is also hoping to rebuild the stature of its Tour Finals event. This year’s competition in Indian Wells is a stepping stone ahead of a longer-term move to Charlotte starting next year. Camillo wants a fan fest at the city’s convention center to accompany matches at the 20,000-capacity Spectrum Center, mirroring the ancillary events at the US Open and Australian Open in recent years.

Perhaps most importantly, the WTA is retaining operational control of the event. It will remain on the hook for the event’s costs, but will also be the beneficiary if it is able to turn it into a cash cow. Camillo is confident that the Finals “will generate a larger profit than what we had in Saudi Arabia or China,” and that it will form the basis of a “balanced budget” for 2027.

“We’re on a trajectory to get to $300 million in revenue in the near future,” she said, but without providing a timeline or a detailed breakdown. Hitting this target, even by the end of the decade, would represent a dramatic—and sorely needed—recovery for the WTA’s financial fortunes.