Women's tennis booms amidst the recession

During one of the most devastating years the world economy has ever endured, women's tennis seems to be booming. While many businesses hunker down or disappear, and while profits and wages are falling, the WTA Tour has acquired more prize money, more television, more spectators, and apparently more popularity.
The claim of the WTA's Chief Executive Officer Stacey Allaster, is: "It's a bright new horizon and we have defied the odds."
Allaster has been rewarded with a new contract which will place her in charge until 2017 and used a season-ending speech not just to repeat the assertion that tennis is the world's leading professional sport for women, but to show how it is bucking the trends.
The stats appear to support her view. Television viewing figures are up 73 percent and the number of broadcast hours up by 14 percent. Attendances are said to be up 12 percent at premier events.
"All this is partly because top player participation is up 24 percent at our premier events, while injuries are down 18 percent" - the result of WTA's Roadmap plan, the most comprehensive set of reforms in the association's history. These shortened the tour and lessened players' commitments, helping to prevent burn-outs, pull-outs, and disgruntled promoters and sponsors.
The fact that the world's top ten featured players are from ten different nations for the first time, increasing interest further afield, may involve an element of luck.
But the eight percent increase in total prize money, raising it to $90 million in such a difficult climate, does not. That is a consequence of business strategy.
Part of this means making China "the epicentre" of the global strategy, with the WTA having signed a six-year agreement with the Beijing Sports Bureau to keep the WTA's office there.
"It all means that in this world-wide recession women's tennis continues to move forwards by leaps and bounds," Allaster claimed. "I commit to all of you that we will continue to exceed your expectations."
If so, the success may no longer be based just around TV deals. The WTA is said to be "very close" to a four-year deal with Perform, a UK digital company, which could double the number of live matches which are produced and distributed. At the moment it is 250 a year; by 2013 it is expected to exceed 500.
This should give women's tennis the opportunity to promote its players to younger people who are not watching it on TV, but on smart-phones or tablets or other new media.
"In the future, there's no doubt this is going to be about multi-platform," Allaster claimed, referring to technological advances.
When Billie-Jean King and eight other players signed their famous pioneering contract in September 1970, it was for one dollar, and it said: "We can establish a women only WTA to be commercially successful."
The women's tour eventually began in 1973, with $300,000 of prize money and 14 events. It's now 53 events in 33 countries and the prize money is due to go up again, by another $6 million, to $96 million next year.
The prediction is that by 2013 the WTA Tour will break the $100 million prize money barrier. King was oh so right.