The Girls’s Tennis Affiliation has introduced a long-term partnership with Mercedes-Benz which has the potential to be the most important in girls’s sport.
The German automobile producer will change into the premier companion of the WTA and pour $50m (£37.5m) per yr into girls’s tennis for as much as 10 years.
The deal has been described because the “most important” within the WTA’s historical past, and will finally be value as much as half a billion {dollars} (£375m).
The Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League in America signed a $240m (£180m) four-year media rights deal in November 2023, whereas Nike has invested $350m (£262m) throughout a number of girls’s soccer leagues.
Introduced on Wednesday, the WTA deal will assist with the tour’s dedication to have equal prize cash at occasions the place each women and men characteristic by 2027 and at non-combined occasions by 2033.
Equal prize cash was one of many key targets when the WTA was based in 1973.
American tennis nice Billie Jean King, who based the WTA and was its first president, mentioned the deal exhibits the tour “continues to prepared the ground in girls’s sport”.
“Girls are making their mark now and it is simply starting,” she instructed BBC Sport.
“Equal prize cash is so vital and sends a extremely robust message.
“Are you able to think about being a child as we speak, all of the totally different alternatives?”
