The owners of the Mubadala World Tennis Championship in Abu Dhabi have confirmed plans are underway to make the event more balanced between men and women players in the future.
The exhibition event has been a regular fixture in the sport since 2009 but was unable to take place last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally starting as a men-only tournament, past winners include Andy Murray, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Both Murray and Nadal are playing in this year’s tournament which will begin on Thursday. It wasn’t until 2017 when women were included with one exhibition match taking place each year.
This year’s event features a total of eight players – six men and two women. John Lickrish is the CEO of Flash Entertainment who are the tournament owners. Speaking about his future plans, Lickrish confirmed that he hopes to increase the number of women participating so they are on level-footing with the men. Although organisers are still in the planning stages and various options are being considered.
“From the beginning we looked at it and thought, ‘how do we incorporate women into the tournament?’ There’s been some different proposals internally that we’ve looked at, also through bringing a female-only tournament as well,” Lickrish told The National newspaper.
“I’ve always thought it would be better to combine the two things. First of all, it’s really what we’re doing with budgets that we have, we’ve decided, and through some of our partners, we can bring women in. I didn’t want to do it as a one-off, I didn’t want to do it as a kitschy thing. Unfortunately Covid really interrupted our plans, we’re just kind of taking it easy this year.”
Organisers suffered a blow on Monday when it was confirmed that Emma Raducanu has been ruled out of the tournament after testing positive for COVID-19. The US Open champion was set to play Belinda Bencic who is still set to play. A replacement for Raducanu is set to be announced in due course.
“We want to incorporate more women into the tournament and get it up to equal standing as the men,” Lickrish continued. “That is the direction that I want to take the tournament.
“I think it’s important. It would come up here and there, oh let’s do this, and I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to do this once, you’ve got to make sure that we can do this every year’. So it’s been very important that there has been consistency.
“We’re looking to broaden that and we’ll have more players in the 2022 tournament, that’s kind of the plan, to slowly integrate this tournament, because we think it’s important.”
Whilst it is not a Tour event, there is still a lot of money at stake with the winner of the men’s tournament taking home $250,000. To put that into perspective at this year’s US Open players earned $265,000 for reaching the fourth round. Appearance fees concerning those playing at the Mubadala World Tennis Championship are not made public.
Provisional order of play
Thursday
4pm – Casper Ruud v Denis Shapovalov
NB6pm – Dominic Thiem v Andy Murray
NB8pm – TBC v Belinda Bencic
Friday
5pm – Andrey Rublev v Casper Ruud or Denis Shapovalov
NB7pm – Rafael Nadal v Dominic Thiem or Andy Murray
Saturday
5pm – 3rd Place Play-Off
NB7pm – Men’s Final
Note: all timings and players are subject to change
