The tennis season is winding down, and what a ride it’s been! Four Grand Slams, multiple 500s, and nine Masters on the calendar. The Slams are done, with just a handful of 500s left and one last Masters showdown in Paris. The players have given it everything. Some hit new heights, others, like Carlos Alcaraz and Jack Draper, have spoken openly about the fatigue from nonstop schedules. Now, the ATP is making moves with Saudi Arabia, a plan first hinted at two years ago!

Men’s tennis gets a new event!

The ATP just dropped a major twist: a brand-new Masters 1000 tournament is heading to Saudi Arabia. The timing couldn’t be more intriguing, as even ATP Chairman Andrea Gaudenzi admits he’s pushing to shorten the calendar, the tour’s adding another marquee stop. As reported by The Times’ Stuart Fraser on October 23, Gaudenzi said his goal is “to reduce the total number of tournaments and have a longer off-season, but it’s clearly complex in a sport with a fractured governance.” Complex or not, tennis isn’t hitting the brakes anytime soon.

Nearly two years after the first whispered talks surfaced in late 2023, the deal is now official, and the tenth Masters event will debut in 2028. The ATP and SURJ Sports Investments, a branch of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, have sealed a £400 million blockbuster. For men’s tennis, it’s a huge expansion; for the Kingdom, a prestige win that cements its growing presence in the sport’s top tier.

Set for February on hard courts beside Doha and Dubai, the Saudi Masters will feature a 56-player draw, a £5.5 million purse, and a £1 million champion’s cheque: no appearance fees, just like Monte Carlo. “This marks a new era for our sport. Saudi Arabia has shown long-term vision and ambition to grow tennis globally,” Gaudenzi said. SURJ Sports CEO Danny Townsend added that the event aligns with Vision 2030, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to diversify the economy through sport.

So, while this is the current idea for the future Masters event, when will it kick off?

Timeline for the Saudi Arabia Masters with the tennis schedule

The Masters 1000 season already runs full tilt from March to November, kicking off in the desert sun of Indian Wells and Miami, rolling onto clay in Monte Carlo, Madrid, and Rome, then sweeping through the hard-court heat of Toronto or Montreal and Cincinnati before looping east to Shanghai and finishing under the lights in Paris. So the question is: Can the ATP really squeeze in one more Masters?

For now, it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll trim the calendar. What’s clear is that ATP chief Andrea Gaudenzi wants players to breathe a little by season’s end. The 2025 season wraps on November 23, barely 40 days before 2026 begins on January 2. “I do agree that the off-season is too short,” Gaudenzi said. “I don’t think it’s just too short for the players because they need more time to rest, build their bodies and train for the following season, but I also think it’s too short for the fans that at some point need a break from our sport. You need to create that demand in wanting to start the new season in Australia and wanting to be willing to watch sport.”

Still, Gaudenzi isn’t revealing when the 2028 Saudi Masters will land. The initial proposal, slotting it as a season opener, set off alarms in Australia, where officials worried it could steal the spotlight from the year’s first Grand Slam. The latest thinking is to stage it in February alongside Dubai and Doha, sparing South America’s “Golden Swing” and trimming a couple of indoor events in Europe and the U.S.

However it lands, the Saudi stop is being wedged into a stuffed calendar. It’s the first new Masters license since the series debuted in 1990, joining icons like Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, Madrid, Rome, Toronto or Montreal, Cincinnati, Shanghai, and Paris. Saudi Arabia may be new on the main ATP stage, but it’s wasting no time making noise.

The WTA Finals now anchor there in late November. Jeddah has hosted the Next Gen ATP Finals since 2023, and prize money continues to soar. Just last week, the Six Kings Slam returned, where Jannik Sinner pocketed $6 million, and every participant took home $1.5 million. The Middle East has long been tennis territory, but Saudi Arabia’s ambitious drive is shifting the narrative, and its timing couldn’t be more provocative, with players calling for rest.

Players lament the hectic tennis tour

The 2025 season has been one long game of survival. Between injuries, withdrawals, and late pullouts, players are feeling the squeeze like never before. “I think that the schedule is really tight. They have to do something with the schedule. I think there are too many mandatory tournaments, too many in a row,” said Alcaraz. Especially after Holger Rune’s frightening injury at the Nordic Open, his mother Aneke called tennis a “relentless treadmill.” Draper vented on X, “Injuries are going to happen… we are pushing our bodies to do things they aren’t supposed to in elite sport.” Taylor Fritz chimed in, “Facts, also seeing more injuries and burnout now than ever before because balls, courts, conditions have slowed down a lot, making the weekly grind even more physically demanding and tough on the body.”

Frances Tiafoe has been just as candid about the grind. In a 2024 vlog by skater Natalia Zabiiako and WTA pro Daria Kasatkina, filmed before Brisbane, Tiafoe’s complaints hit home. “I hate leaving on Christmas Day. I think it’s a joke. But the fact that the tournament can start on Sunday, it’s crazy to, like, I love, I love being away from tennis,” he said. The American admitted he’d rather spend the holidays at home with “friends, family, cousins,” calling himself “a very normal guy.”

Trying to calm the chaos, ATP Chairman Andrea Gaudenzi confirmed that the new Saudi Masters will be non-mandatory and capped at one week instead of stretching to 12 days. “We will go through a process of calendar optimization with a goal also of reducing the number of total events,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to design the ideal product when you have different entities, with different stakeholders.” He called the situation “extremely complex” but added, “It’s also a hard conversation with the players to say that we play too much when ultimately, in reality, they choose when and where to play.”

With the launch still two years away, there’s hope that things might shift before then — but tennis has a lot of untangling to do first. What’s your take on it?