Men's tennis in 2026: The ATP players and storylines to watch this season
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Charlie Eccleshare and Matthew Futterman
The on- and off-court themes set to define men's tennis in 2026, as the new season draws ever closer.
In under three weeks’ time, the best men’s tennis players in the world will descend on Melbourne for the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam tournament of the season and the first tennis milestone for 2026.
After a dominant 2025 season, world No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz and world No. 2 Jannik Sinner have pulled away from their peers at the top of the ATP Tour. They split the four Grand Slam titles, and every tournament that both of them entered ended with one of them winning it.
The various groups of players hoping to usurp them enter 2026 from different angles. Novak Djokovic, now 38, reached the semifinals at all four majors last year, but has admitted that he no longer sees five-set tennis as a realistic forum for beating Alcaraz or Sinner. Injuries to younger challengers Jack Draper, Ben Shelton and Arthur Fils have complicated their bids to rise to the top, while the 1990s sandwich generation and its contemporaries have largely faded.
The Athletic’s tennis writers, Matthew Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, outline the biggest men’s tennis storylines for the 2026 season.
Can another man win a Grand Slam title?
It was over a year ago that a man other than Sinner and Alcaraz reached a Grand Slam final. World No. 3 Alexander Zverev did it at the Australian Open, where Sinner dispatched him in straight sets.
Since then, no one other than the runaway two best players in the world has got within a set of making a major final, with Sinner and Alcaraz finishing all four as the last men standing feeling increasingly inevitable. Even has done little to dim the belief that he will be at the sharp end of the biggest tournaments all year long.
Will that change this year? Djokovic, despite being 38, remains the most likely disruptor in terms of beating the competition, and he was the only player to beat one of the top two at a major last year. Were it not for the hamstring injury he suffered during his Australian Open quarterfinal win over Alcaraz, it might have been him taking on Sinner in the final instead of Zverev. Equally, the effect of that injury on Alcaraz’s state of mind during their match contributed heavily to the final outcome, and Djokovic has gone on record with his belief that beating Sinner or Alcaraz in a five-set match is no longer a reliable route to glory.
Elsewhere, Taylor Fritz appears to have the best shot. He was within a point of forcing a fifth set against Alcaraz in their Wimbledon semifinal. After a difficult year, Zverev, who took Alcaraz to five sets in the 2024 French Open final, appears far from doing so again, while there are major injury concerns and some stylistic ones over up-and-comers such as Shelton and Draper.
For Félix Auger-Aliassime, Alex de Minaur and Lorenzo Musetti, the other players in the top 10, a major final would represent uncharted territory. Of those three, Auger-Aliassime would appear to have the most momentum and self-belief after a strong end to 2025, but Musetti and de Minaur have shown plenty of commitment to maximizing wherever they can, even if it has so far proven pyrrhic against Sinner and Alcaraz.
So, what does 2026 have in store for Djokovic?
Followers of men’s tennis spent a lot of last year wondering how much longer Djokovic could tolerate losing matches he had become accustomed to winning. Surely reaching zero Grand Slam finals wasn’t going to be enough for the man with the most Grand Slam singles titles in history?
And then came his news conference after the fourth such defeat of the year, a straight-sets loss to Alcaraz at the U.S. Open. He explained that being able to beat everyone outside of the top two at 38 was actually pretty cool. Yes, the four losses stung. But there was also the front-court clinic to beat Zverev at the French Open, and the party-crashing win over Fritz on a raucous Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York. Neither of those won him trophies, but they meant something.
So, what about this year? What if his current semifinal ceiling at majors becomes a quarterfinal one, or lower? Would that still be enough? Will he indeed keep going until the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, as he has said he wants to do, in order to defend the gold medal he won at the 2024 Paris Games?
Or maybe he will just win a 25th Grand Slam title. With Djokovic, just about anything is possible.
How can the three injured challengers to Alcaraz and Sinner best manage this year?
Speaking of Shelton and Draper, what of the injured challengers? Both players won their first ATP Masters 1000 titles last year, and briefly looked like being Sinner and Alcaraz’s most likely sustained rivals. Both then suffered serious injuries — Shelton to his left shoulder; Draper to his left elbow — and both of them are yet to return to top form. Draper is yet to return to the court at all, after pulling out of the U.S. Open in the second round.
Arthur Fils, another exciting youngster, has been out even longer. An electrifying win over Jaume Munar at the French Open in May also brought a stress fracture in his back, which has been a problem area for the Frenchman since childhood. Like Draper, the current priority for Fils is getting back and competing, rather than thinking about toppling Sinner and Alcaraz. He has entered the Hong Kong Tennis Open, which begins Jan. 4.
The trio of injuries was a big blow for the ATP Tour at large. Men’s tennis is desperate for a third man to at least discomfort its two biggest talents, and there were high hopes for the Shelton-Fils-Draper trio, with all of them in their early-to-mid 20s and brimming with talent and personality. The former may be ready to go deep at the Australian Open, but for all three, patience will be a watchword in 2026.
Jack Draper won his biggest title to date in early 2025, but an elbow injury has slowed his progress since. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
How will tennis politics – and a lawsuit – play out across the sport?
The key off-court moment of 2025 came in March, when the Professional Tennis Players Association, the still-developing players’ group that Novak Djokovic co-founded, sued the men’s and women’s tours, World Tennis, and the International Tennis Integrity Agency, which oversees anti-doping and anti-corruption. The Grand Slams, initially named as co-conspirators, were added to the list of defendants in the antitrust suit in September, when World Tennis and the ITIA were removed.
The legal process could be slow next year, but the pressure on the sport’s leaders to create a schedule that is more remunerative and less taxing for the players will only ratchet up. In addition to the PTPA, a group of top men’s and women’s players has banded together to pressure the Grand Slams to pay them more than the roughly 18 percent of revenues they currently receive, and consult them more on key decisions. In March and July, they sent letters to the majors demanding change, to no direct avail so far, though meetings have taken place.
Expect this to be a central theme at the Australian Open and further into 2026, with players looking to use their platform to increase the pressure on the Slams — especially at the one that has now even more firmly positioned itself as most open to change and willing to listen to the players.
— Charlie Eccleshare
After a year of maximizing for some and decline for others, what of the 1990s crew?
After Sinner, Alcaraz and Djokovic, the grand theme of 2025 was two groups of similar players going in opposite directions: the maximizers and the tumblers.
Zverev, Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitsipas, the three members of the sandwich generation who have all achieved great things in the sport, but who wanted so much more, spent 2025 missing expectations, most notably their own.
At first glance, Zverev looks like he had a good season after finishing at No. 3. But he had a realistic chance to rise to No. 1 when Sinner was serving his anti-doping ban. Instead, he lost early at most of the tournaments that he played, before a first-round defeat at Wimbledon prompted the admission that he was “lacking joy in everything I do.” At the U.S. Open, where he lost in the third round, he said he had sought professional advice to help with the impact of the sport on his mental health.
On the court, he looked increasingly impotent against players such as Auger-Aliassime and Fritz, and also Sinner and Alcaraz, though everyone did against them.
Medvedev lost in the second round of the Australian Open and in the first round at the other three majors, going out of the U.S. Open in a surreal rage and then splitting with his longtime coach. Tsitsipas won a title early in the year after a change of racket, but that change brought injuries, and like Medvedev, he didn’t go past the second round of a major.
Meanwhile, Fritz, de Minaur and Musetti spent the year eking everything they could out of their games, including within matches against Alcaraz and Sinner. Auger-Aliassime surged in the second half of the year, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina went on the rise, and one of the most mercurial players on the tour, Alexander Bublik, rose to the cusp of the top 10 after some sustained winning to go with the flashes of brilliance.
Will these trains pass or pivot in 2026? Or will they keep heading in their respective directions?
Can rising talents build on a big year?
For everyone who was disappointed because João Fonseca and Jakub Menšík did not become massive world-beaters in 2025, please chill.
Fonseca is 19 and coming off his first tour season. At this point in his career, he is about where Alcaraz and Sinner were at this point in their careers. That’s a pretty good trajectory.
Menšík, 20, maybe didn’t perform as well as he might have liked in the Grand Slams in 2025, but he did win the Miami Open when he was 19, just about the same age Alcaraz was when he won his first ATP Masters 1000 title, which was also in Miami, in 2022.
The question now is whether they can build on those successes and climb up the rankings, win more tournaments, and get to the business end of majors. Menšík’s massive serve should get him through the first week more often than not, as long as he can improve his nerve management and make his forehand a less attackable weakness. Fonseca probably needs to make some more progress with his footwork and rally tolerance to get where he wants to go.
They’ve got time, though, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.
Learner Tien, who joined Fonseca and Menšík in the top 30, has a slightly different challenge. His individual wins in 2025 were as eyecatching as Fonseca and Menšík’s, and he got a few more of them against higher-ranked players, as well as ending 2025 with the Next Gen ATP Finals title.
He has added some speed to his serve; he covers and uses the tennis court’s geometry better than most. He’s also the kind of opponent that higher-ranked players who lose to him once can quickly adjust for and beat. With the surprise factor wearing off this year, he may ironically have to find some more predictable ways of producing surprising results.
And will the ATP Masters 1000 in Saudi Arabia get a date without resistance?
The tennis calendar has made a dramatic shift in recent years, and not in the way players want it to.
Grand Slams have essentially become three-week events instead of two. Most 1000-level tournaments, the rung below the four Grand Slams, have gone from one week to 12 days. That makes for a lot of grinding and several more weeks on the road for a lot of players.
It also makes for a lot of complaining. The last thing a sport needs is players showing up at big events and griping about what a drag those events have become.
There’s no fast cure, with a review of the tournament format not set to occur until 2030. And then there is the new, non-mandatory ATP Masters 1000 that will start in Saudi Arabia, as soon as 2028 — likely in February. It’s a one-week tournament, and the prize money will be serious, so players may be more drawn to it, but it needs space in the calendar and that means other tournaments losing their licenses. There has already been resistance to the event from the United Arab Emirates, which hosts key tournaments in February. There may yet be more from the tournaments the ATP would like to move out of the way to make room.
There should be some sort of breaking point with all this, either by rule or by deed, with players opting to blow off more big tournaments the way Alcaraz and Sinner did with this past summer’s Canadian Open.
That seems to have been a good plan, considering they wound up in the U.S. Open final.
Three players outside the top 100 to watch on the ATP Tour in 2026
Alexander Blockx, 20, Belgium: World No. 117
One of two players in this section who made the 2025 Next Gen ATP Finals, Blockx was the most exciting player at the event before Tien’s higher-level experience proved too much for him in the final. The 2023 Australian Open boys’ champion moves fluidly from the back to the front of the court and has the control to finish points at the net when required, as well as the power to do damage from the baseline. He went from just outside the top 200 to just outside the top 100 in 2025, and with more qualifying opportunities at big events, looks ready to assume a two-digit ranking in 2026.
Rafael Jodar, 19, Spain: World No. 168
Jodar’s tennis is more destructive than Blockx’s game, and he used that power — and some mental toughness when down match points — to stun Tien in his first round-robin match at the Next Gen ATP Finals. The Spaniard won two out of three matches, only just missing out on the semifinals, and he has been the talk of the ATP Challenger Tour in 2025. Expect to hear his name around bigger venues in 2026, as he has foregone his remaining eligibility for college tennis at the University of Virginia to pursue his pro career.
Shang Juncheng, 20, China: World No. 253
Shang Juncheng, who goes by “Jerry,” played 14 matches in 2025 after foot surgery ruled him out of the beginning and middle of the season. In 2024, he rose from No. 183 to a high of No. 47, winning his first ATP Tour title in Chengdu, China and showing off his exciting left-handed game, so this year has been a hard one. But he is now back fit, and his last win of 2025 came against then No. 10 in the world Karen Khachanov at the Shanghai Masters. An exciting talent who needs a full season of opportunity to get back to where he was.
