Do we really need the Six Slam Kings?

On Wednesday, the Six Slam Kings exhibition tournament will begin in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where the most representative tennis players of this season and Holger Rune will face off. In the exclusive Saudi setting, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic, Rafa Nadal, Daniil Medvedev, and Rune will be the protagonists of a draw that seems to have been designed to create the most storylines and narratives, as well as the most spectacular and challenging matches possible. The tournament is strongly desired by the PIF, the Saudi sovereign fund that also owns Newcastle United in the world of soccer, which has put forth an irresistible economic offer to have the best tennis players in the world on their courts. The six players will each receive 1.5 million dollars just for participating, while the winner will be awarded a first-place prize that is expected to reach 6 million dollars. To give an idea, when Carlos Alcaraz triumphed at Wimbledon, he earned 2.7 million pounds, while Jannik Sinner's victory at the US Open was worth approximately 3.6 million dollars.

The Six Slam Kings, therefore, offers sums that are unattainable in today's tennis, especially considering that the effort required of the players is only a few days compared to the marathons that await them during a two-week Slam. It represents one of the last opportunities to see the protagonists of a great tennis season together, from the winners of the four seasonal Slams to the Olympic medalist of Paris 2024, Nole Djokovic, and one of Rafa Nadal's last exhibitions, as he announced his retirement after the November Davis Cup. To put it in perspective, the video with which they were announced has a higher budget than the prize money of various Masters 1000 tournaments around the world. In the short film of over five minutes, which condenses more CGI than a Marvel movie, Alcaraz looks like he's from DUNE, Sinner plays Michelangelo, Rune is a Viking, Medvedev rides a brown bear, Nadal is a giant of red clay, and Nole is a character from Assassin's Creed. All six of them want to conquer the Game of Thrones, created in the middle of the Saudi desert, along with the substantial cash prize that comes with it.

Inserted into the Riyadh Season, the series of sports and cultural events created to promote Saudi Vision 2030, the Six Kings Slam is the main sports attraction in Saudi Arabia this year. After last year's test with the double challenge between Djokovic and Alcaraz among the men and Sabalenka and Jabeur among the women, this year the PIF has decided to heavily invest in tennis just as the sport's popularity is growing in the Middle East. But in such a dense and stressful calendar for the players, is there really room for an event like this that marks a further divide between a part of the circuit and the various top players? Just a few weeks ago, Alcaraz publicly complained about the number of matches during the season at the Laver Cup, stating that "they are trying to kill us in some way". However, fatigue did not prevent him from responding to the Six Kings Slam, just a few days after finishing his Chinese tour.

Even without considering the well-known and dramatic problems of exploitation and labor slavery in Saudi Arabia, highlighted in view of the Italian and Spanish Super Cups that will be played at the beginning of 2025 in Riyadh, the Six Kings Slam, like the Netflix Slam played at the beginning of the season, pursues the path of increasingly blurring the lines between competition and performance. And how every tournament organized on the Arabian Peninsula dangerously resembles a parallel circuit that flattens every sport to pure and simple promotion of regional sovereignty, with the most important athletes reduced to voiceless testimonials and glorified in their egos through super-heroic representations. Furthermore, the absence of a women's tournament is grotesque, guilty of not having the star system of the men's circuit and of paying the usual interference towards the role of women by theocratic sovereignties. A complete humiliation for the aristocratic and traditionalist world of tennis, which, however, seems to have taken in good stride being the center of a sportwashing operation in the Arabian desert.