A few days ago I informed you that the WTA was about to align its tournament classification with the ATP’s system. The change is now official and we’ll review in detail what it implies, but the WTA also surprised with a complete rebranding which includes a new logo and marketing campaign.
New logo
Ten years after its previous redesign, the WTA is back to featuring a silhouette of a female tennis player in the logo. Letters W, T and A are also incorporated, with a tennis ball functioning as the crossbar of the A.
Since every point in tennis starts with the serve and it is a shot absolutely controlled by the server, the serve action pictured in the logo symbolizes the fearless initiative taken by the WTA’s early founders to put women’s tennis on the map and make it as influential as it is today.
The circle around the pictured athlete makes subtle references to the global nature of tennis.
Marketing Campaign: WTA For The Game
The rebranding also includes a new WTA For The Game campaign, aimed at creating deeper fan connections through the players’ personal stories. The WTA website has a special page dedicated to this campaign, so you can see all the details here.
Petra Kvitova, Simona Halep, Elina Svitolina, Carla Suarez Navarro, Donna Vekic, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and many others have already launched the campaign on social media, saying: “Welcome to the new era of the WTA. I play for the game and something much bigger than myself. I play for the fight.”
Welcome to the new era of the @WTA. I play for the game and something much bigger than myself. I play for the Fight. #WTAForTheGame pic.twitter.com/8LufaWTvLW
— Petra Kvitova (@Petra_Kvitova) December 2, 2020
New tournament levels
Starting in 2021, the WTA tournament structure will be the same as that of the ATP. This will create consistency across professional tennis and make it easier for fans to understand the tournament system.
- Premier Mandatory and Premier 5 tournaments –> WTA 1000
- Premier –> WTA 500
- International –> WTA 250
- 125K Series –> WTA 125
The big question was whether the numbers in the tournament nomenclature will be tied to the ranking points, and, as I understand, the answer is “no”. The ranking points and prize money for each tournament will stay the same as they are now. Here’s is the WTA quote:
The revised nomenclature is not tied to specific ranking points (which stay the same) or prize money, it is a categorical system to help define WTA tournament levels.
This makes no sense tbh, what’s the point of changing the tournament categories if the prize money and the points given will be the same
Melxir, just to make the tournament tiers more understandable and to align with the ATP, to unify the tennis world in that respect.
The purple is hideous. It’s about the worst colour in the entire spectrum. Also the whole logo looks quite old fashioned with that colour and the fiddly image and the weird font on the WTA. I think a more stylised image would have been better and a less eyeball-grating colour and more modern type. I quite like the new web design with the photos and white borders but it’s spoilt by that horrible colour.
CLT, I like the image and the font is good, but I agree with you about the color. Even though purple is my favorite color, this shade is not ideal, IMO, they should have chosen a darker one, like we had in the previous logo.