The 2022 WTA Finals will be special in the sense that it will be the first time in history that only one Grand Slam champion will be playing at the event.
The WTA Finals are supposed to be the celebration of women’s tennis. The event features a field of eight players who have been the best in the past 12 months. Players have to earn the right to participate.
The eight players with the highest amount of points in the calendar year get to play at the event, which is a simple, but rewarding concept. The better they play, the more points they earn, and the more likely the players are to play at the event.
It’s usually been a bulletproof concept because Grand Slam champions compete at the event regularly as a result. The winner of a Grand Slam gets 2,000 points. That’s a lot of points, and mostly enough to qualify, but this year, it didn’t quite work out that way.
Iga Swiatek will be the only Grand Slam champion that will participate this year, which is the first time in history that something like that will happen at the year-end championship.
Generally, there have been at least two of the major winners. Last year there was Swiatek, Garbine Muguruza, and Barbora Krejcikova.
This year, the field consists of Swiatek, who won one, alongside Ons Jabeur, who played in two finals. Coco Gauff, who played in one, and also Aryna Sabalenka, Maria Sakkari, Daria Kasatkina, and Jessica Pegula, who didn’t even make the final of a major.
Ashleigh Barty won the Australian Open and retired shortly after. Elena Rybakina won Wimbledon but didn’t qualify for the event, as there were no points awarded for that event, with Swiatek winning Roland Garros and the US Open, meaning that she’ll be the only Grand Slam winner at the WTA Finals.
It has never happened in the 52-year-old history of the WTA Finals, with the 2022 edition being the first time with only one Grand Slam champion; however, there are some circumstances that contributed to this happening for the first time ever.