How Saudi Organizers Filled an Empty Tennis Arena: By Paying People to Attend
Uncovering proof of the stagecraft and artifice shaping tennis in Saudi Arabia.
One of the great journalistic opportunities (and responsibilities) that comes with writing about difficult subjects is that when you establish yourself as someone willing to write about these topics, you’ll often get contacted by new sources and whistleblowers who entrust you with investigating and sharing new and information and untold stories.
Ergo, after I wrote days ago about how Saudi billionaire Turki Alalshikh arranged for the biggest stars in men’s tennis to perform at his Riyadh Season event last week, I was contacted by someone in Saudi Arabia who was able to shed new light on the previous big Saudi tennis event, and the extraordinary steps that some organizers had used to make it look like more of a success.
Before I get into the details of this new information, I want to again encourage everyone to subscribe to support the work I’m doing here at Bounces so that I can keep doing it, by subscribing either at a free or paid level. This piece is unpaywalled as a demonstration of what I can do as an investigative journalist, but most similar pieces going forward will be paywalled, for subscribers only.
And also if you have your own information about untold stories in the world of tennis that you’d like for me to investigate, please do get in touch.
Setting the Saudi Stage
The first officially-sanctioned tennis tournament ever held in Saudi Arabia was last year’s NextGen ATP Finals in Jeddah, where the eight-player tournament relocated for the first of a planned five-year stint after five successful editions in Milan. The NextGen ATP Finals, an annual exhibition event for male players 20-and-under which was first held in 2017, has previously been used as a proving ground for federations: after successfully hosting the NextGen event in Milan, the Federation of Italian Tennis (FIT) was awarded a five-year-contract to host the elite ATP Finals in Turin, the ATP’s biggest property.
Despite featuring a field that lacks established stars by design, crowds had been reliably robust in Milan across the event’s entire existence, both for matches featuring the bumper crop of rising Italian stars and for matches with foreign players.
But when the curtain was rising on the first Saudi Tennis Federation (STF) edition of the NextGen ATP Finals last November, the scene looked starkly different:
The arena in Jeddah’s King Abdullah Sports City complex looked slick and modern, bathed a bold red lighting scheme. It also looked cavernously empty, and it stayed that way, more or less, for the round-robin stages of the tournament. Crowds were so meager that sometimes it almost looked like a closed-off mid-pandemic event with only the players immediate support entourages in attendance.
Organizers in Jeddah made an immediate fix: adjusting the lighting so that instead of glowing red, the stands were cloaked in pitch black darkness to obscure how empty they were.
But by the time the inaugural Jeddah edition of the tournament reached its fifth and final day in Jeddah, the red lights were back on, showing a nearly-full arena.
So how did the Saudi organizers pull off this remarkable transformation in the optics of their event? Thanks to a source, I recently learned how.
Bringing in Paid Spectators by the Busload
Seeing the dramatic change in attendance had raised my suspicions about the crowds in Jeddah as I followed the event last year, and earlier this week those suspicions were validated by a source who contacted me with documentation of his experience.
This source—who I am going to call “Fahd” since it is one of the most common men’s names in Saudi Arabia—lives and works in Jeddah with his family. Like about 42 percent of the Saudi population, Fahd does not hold Saudi citizenship, which greatly limits his earning opportunities. “I am looking for any job,” he told me.
Then, on December 2nd of last year, a friend forwarded Fahd an offer via WhatsApp.
On the last day of the 2023 NextGen ATP Finals, Fahd was one of around 700 local laborers who joined a WhatsApp group that offered a work proposition: 100 Saudi riyals (about US $27) for four hours of attendance at a tennis match later that day.
Invitees were first sent a Google Form questionnaire (which is still online) to confirm their acceptance of the offer (and to provide their personal details, including confirmation that they did not have “any chronic or infectious diseases”). There were several WhatsApp groups like the one to which Fahd was added, so recruits were directed to “please note that there is more than one group for the same match. Please make sure that you are in one group only.”
The exact number of recruits is not clear, but organizers said that they were looking for big participation and did not expect to have to select applicants via lottery, as they might otherwise: “The required number is a large number because the work will be to rage a tifo [a big banner or artwork most commonly seen in the stands of soccer stadiums] of encouragement.”
Participants who signed up were then sent instructions for their task by recruiters: at an appointed time before the NextGen ATP Finals final, they were to meet in one of the sports complex’s parking lots where they would board buses for the arena. They were instructed to wear closed shoes, and to follow tennis etiquette by staying quiet at appropriate times: “One of the important conditions is complete silence in the stands. It is very important to remain calm.” Non-compliance with these instructions, participants were warned, would lead to a deduction of pay.
The recruitment for attendees in Fahd’s WhatsApp group was done by a Saudi company called “Triple P Events,” which advertises its ability to provide “Planners, equipments and people!” in their social media profiles.
I have contacted Triple P Events about their involvement in this project but have not heard back as of publication time. Triple P Events did not publicly post—at least in posts still visible on their Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok pages—about their involvement in the 2023 ATP NextGen Finals.
Fahd said that being hired through an intermediary company like Triple P Events was common in his experience. “When the government does not want to get its hands dirty, it hires a company to bring in employees,” Fahd told me. “If a mistake occurs, it quickly fires the employee and replaces him.”
What It Was Like to Be Paid to Watch Tennis
Fahd took the offer. “I came with a group of people in buses, about 10 large buses, and they dropped us off in the closed stadium square to attend the event,” Fahd told me.
Fahd said that paid attendees like himself were divided into subgroups of 15 to 20 people, with a supervisor monitoring each subgroup. The exterior of the arena featured various activations and promotions for attendees to enjoy, but Fahd said that people in his group weren’t allowed to join in the festivities. “We were forbidden from playing, drinking and eating as well, so as not to disturb the people who paid to attend,” he told me.
Fahd’s group entered the arena close to the start of the match. The group was fast-tracked past usual security checks, which made Fahd think that perhaps the government had pre-cleared the paid recruits for expedited entry.
Fahd said that most of his fellow attendees knew nothing about the sport they were watching. “I can assure you they have no idea about tennis or anything,” he told me. “[But], you know, a little money and a good time doesn't hurt.”
The planned tifo was never raised, Fahd said. Fahd said that, despite the recruitment efforts, the arena from his vantage point inside was far from full. “Stands were empty even though they said that the tickets were sold out, lol,” he said.
Before the match ended—a win for Hamad Medjedovic over Arthur Fils—his groups were ushered out of the arena so that “the people who paid the tickets [would not] feel the crowd” when they were exiting.
“Then we returned to the buses, took 100 riyals, and they sent us back from where we came,” Fahd concluded.
After the final had ended and all the recruited spectators had been paid and released, organizers sent the paid participants a note of thanks and encouraged them to fill out another Google Form (which is also still available online) so that they could be considered for future staffing opportunities with Triple P Events.
An obvious disclaimer: I don’t definitively know what percentage of the crowd at the final in Jeddah last year was paid to attend like Fahd. Many tournaments will have a natural uptick in attendance for the final, both because it’s the climactic moment of the event and because it’s (usually) on a weekend. But the change in attendance fortunes in Jeddah was far steeper than normal, and there is clearly documented proof above that it was significantly juiced by paying seat fillers.
I reached out to an ATP spokesperson seeking comment on this reporting; the ATP replied denying knowledge of the venture which Fahd participated in, both from the ATP and from organizers on the ground in Saudi Arabia.
Here is the ATP’s statement:
“We’re aware that the local tournament organisers run community outreach programmes that help bring various groups from the Jeddah community to the event. This can include helping provide transportation to and from the arena. We are not aware however of anyone being paid to attend – a claim that the tournament organisers also deny.”
Why Does This Matter?
It’s not news that Saudi Arabia isn’t a hotbed of eager tennis fans who will organically pack the stands whenever the tennis comes to town.
An earlier exhibition event in Riyadh, the 2022 Diriyah Tennis Cup, had dismal attendance throughout despite shelling out big money for a raft of top ATP stars—Daniil Medvedev, Alexander Zverev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Taylor Fritz, Stan Wawrinka, Andrey Rublev, Nick Kyrgios, Matteo Berrettini, etc.—to participate.
But despite this lack of interest from ticket buyers or television rightsholders, which guarantees daunting losses of money on their ventures, Saudi authorities continue pursuing and paying for premium tennis events. Following on the heels of the recent Six Kings Slam, tennis will return to Saudi Arabia in weeks ahead for the WTA Finals in Riyadh and the next edition of the NextGen ATP Finals in Jeddah.
If the Saudi tennis events aren’t to satiate an appetite from an audience or to make a profit, what are they for? Those supportive of the Saudi ambitions will often cite the transformative power that the infusion of Western events could have on Saudi society—particularly on women when regarding the WTA. Tennis, they say, could prove to be a rocket fuel-like accelerant on Saudi modernization.
Such impact is impossible to assess, of course, at least so far. What we do have currently is a recent pattern of various Saudi-hosted tennis ventures at a quantity and quality that seem to outpace demand significantly.
How does this wonky math add up? Let’s go back to a recent example, and think about what Turki Alalshikh gained last week from his Six Kings equation. He and his organization would have lost considerable money in paying out somewhere north of $10 million in prize money and appearance fees for the six star players he brought to Saudi Arabia.
In Saudi Arabia, Tennis' "Kings" Bent the Knee
At the Six Kings Slam, The One Who Ruled Them All wasn't swinging a racquet.
But what Alalshikh gained for all his spending was the names, images, and likenesses of these global stars, both in the official promotional photos and videos for Riyadh Season, as well as getting them all to pose with him for his personal Instagram account. By buying their images for his own gain, Alalshikh lays a groundwork in hopes that more well-thought-of celebrities will follow the tennis stars to Saudi Arabia and further gloss the country’s often patchy outward appearance.
Such visuals are the main payoff of these spendy Saudi sports ventures. Though the athletes on the court may be actually competing against one another, the productions as a whole are currently best understood foremost as stagecraft—“It's a set, Ru, it's not real…it's a cardboard set, darling”—rather than sports. Fahd and the other hundreds who were paid to attend the NextGen ATP Finals are perhaps best understood as paid background extras, like in a movie production, creating a false crowd for the purposes of illustrating a fictional world of Saudi Arabia’s creation.
This is the skepticism that, until proven otherwise, sports in Saudi Arabia have earned.
As I was starting to write this piece, I received a tweet responding to my last article that suggested that the side-eyeing might go both ways: a Saudi was skeptical of me, too.
I appreciate ABF_binfahad’s pity for my status in the lowly working class of Western journalists! And if you’d like to support my “working class” journalism, which would help to nurture more reporting like this, please do subscribe.
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