Mubadala World Tennis Championship keen on balancing the event with more WTA players

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 around since 2009 with the only exception being last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally known as a men-only tournament, it shifted focus since then to include a WTA match as well. The first one was held in 2017 and every event has had one since then. Past ATP winners include Andy Murray, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic.

The WTA match this year was supposed to be a spectacular one with Olympic champion Belinda Bencic taking on US Open Emma Raducanu yet the Brit tested positive for COVID-19 and will be replaced by Ons Jabeur. John Lickrish is the CEO of Flash Entertainment who are the tournament owners and he said about the future:

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“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. 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.”

Asked about the motivation for including more women, Lickrish said:

“We want to incorporate more women into the tournament and get it up to equal standing as the men. 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."