Men's tennis season review: The best ATP matches, players and moments of 2025
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:The Athletic Tennis Staff
The best matches, biggest surprises, and most important storylines of 2025 on the ATP Tour.
As tennis prepares for the 2026 season — which is, for once, starting in the year for which it is named — here is a spirited lookback at the past year on the ATP Tour. It is not designed to be entirely complete, and your views on the categories in the speed run at the bottom are one of the most exciting things about such an exercise. This is about what first springs to mind, after a year of men’s tennis in which two players rose to another plane and the others started to work out how to try to join them there.
Best match
Charlie Eccleshare, Matt Futterman: Jannik Sinner (1) vs. Carlos Alcaraz (2), French Open final
Eccleshare: The best match of the year and probably the best match I’ve ever seen live.
Like any five-set match, there were a few dips in Alcaraz’s win over Sinner, but given the five-and-a-half-hour length they were remarkably infrequent — and the highs were staggeringly high. Alcaraz saving those three championship points and then going supersonic in the match tiebreak are moments that will never leave me.
Futterman: I’m going to violate my anti-five sets on this one. The best match has to be the French Open final, even though I had to take a walk in the middle of it and at times I was annoyed that I might not get my last portion of chocolate mousse from Le Tilleul, the go-to tournament restaurant. As it turned out, Le Tilleul stayed open late, Alcaraz played the tiebreak of his life so far, and they both played a match that will be talked about 50 years from now, and many years after that.
James Hansen: Flavio Cobolli (24) vs. Jenson Brooksby, U.S. Open second round
I mean, I have to pick something else. With a word for Cobolli vs. Zizou Bergs at the Davis Cup, Hubert Hurkacz vs. Taylor Fritz at the United Cup, João Fonseca vs. Alex de Minaur at the Miami Open, Jannik Sinner vs. Novak Djokovic at the French Open, every match Daniil Medvedev and Learner Tien played and Tommy Paul vs. Alexander Bublik at the U.S. Open. this takes it. Cobolli and Brooksby both did the single thing that makes a tennis match great, for basically all of it: They responded to adversity and pressure with quality.
Down 4-5 in the fifth set, Brooksby saved one match point that he could have lost three times over with implausible defense; he saved another with a return winner. Then Cobolli, after the disappointment of losing his serve with victory in his grasp, produced his version of the Alcaraz tiebreak surge to steal it back.
Favorite match
Eccleshare: Novak Djokovic (7) vs. Carlos Alcaraz (3), Australian Open quarterfinal
: Despite not even reaching the final, Novak Djokovic exhibited serious main character energy at the Australian Open, and it culminated in a . Despite suffering a serious hamstring injury in the first set — which forced him to retire from his semifinal — Djokovic got so inside his opponent’s head that Alcaraz was unable to produce anything like his best tennis.
Djokovic fell short at the next three majors, to either Sinner or Alcaraz, but at 37 he spent plenty of time reminding everyone that he can absolutely be the alpha dog on the ATP Tour.
Futterman: Karen Khachanov (11) vs. Ben Shelton (4), Canadian Open final
This was an incredible final, with a third set that went to 7-6 and saw Shelton hit the afterburners down the stretch, winning 14 consecutive points on his serve. It was a guy stepping up and taking advantage of an opportunity in a way a player like the young American should. Khachanov was the ultimate gentleman in the trophy ceremony, talking about how much respect he had for Shelton and his dad, Bryan, and recalling a conversation they had three years prior, when he encouraged Ben to turn pro.
Hansen: Jaume Munar vs. Arthur Fils (14), French Open second round
In hindsight, this is also a least-favorite match, because it effectively ended Fils’ season after he had spent so long building himself into a force to be reckoned with at the top of the sport. But for sheer drama, tenacity and spectacle it feels hard to beat, conducted in front of 10,000 fans on Court Suzanne-Lenglen who were a painkiller for Fils and a second opponent for Munar.
The look and shrug that Fils gave Munar after the Spaniard had given Fils a plaintive glance, imploring him to get his faithful to stop saying “ssssssshhhhhhh” as Munar waited to hit a serve two points from defeat, was one of the moments of the year. So too was the 4-4 game in the fifth set, in which Fils missed two overheads that were so identical it was spooky, but produced a cavalcade of forehand winners to stay alive.
Most memorable shot
Eccleshare: Carlos Alcaraz (2) vs. Jannik Sinner (1), French Open final
The point that showed that Alcaraz finally had the French Open final won. A drop shot, followed by a volleyed crosscourt forehand passing shot, opened up a 4-0 lead in the final set tiebreak that proved to be unassailable.
Futterman: Ben Shelton (6) vs. Adrian Mannarino, U.S. Open third round
Shelton was about a dozen feet behind the baseline, and right in front of where I was sitting, when he lunged for a desperate forehand against Mannarino, up set point in the third set of their third-round duel. It’s a miracle that he got his strings to hit the ball, and beyond belief that he floated that ball all the way down the line from almost in the crowd, flummoxing Mannarino into losing a point he had already won.
Shelton appeared on his way to the fourth round, but the shot was memorable for another reason. That fall may have done some damage to Shelton’s shoulder, which was in severe pain minutes later. Shelton retired from the match after losing the fourth set, and left the court in tears in one of the defining images of the tournament.
Hansen: Carlos Alcaraz (2) vs. Jannik Sinner (1), French Open final
There were plenty of incredible shots across the ATP Tour in 2025, and plenty of them came from Alcaraz’s racket. But it’s this one, in the last gasp of adversity he would face during the French Open final, that has stuck in my mind. Serving at 5-6, 30-30 in the fifth set, on a second serve, he sends the ball in and Sinner crushes a forehand return that pulls Alcaraz wide to his right. He is off-balance, and either a safe scramble, or worse, a miss, will give Sinner match point — again.
Instead, he squash-shots the ball back deep enough to reset the point, with enough angle of his own to give himself time to recover, and with enough speed to rush Sinner’s own shot. The point flips, Sinner’s next ball comes up short, and Alcaraz crushes it into the open court to move one point from the tiebreak during which he would ascend to a higher plane.
Story of the year
Eccleshare: To win an ATP Masters 1000 title as a qualifier would have been absurd. To beat Djokovic in the semifinals would have been ludicrous. To beat your first cousin in the final … Beyond any human comprehension.
Well, at the Shanghai Masters, world No. 204 Valentin Vacherot did it all. His run, and his win over Arthur Rinderknech in the final, was an uplifting story in a season that was generally dominated by the top two.
Futterman: Jannik Sinner’s season. Another Australian Open title, followed by a three-month anti-doping ban. A heartbreaking Grand Slam final defeat at the French Open, followed by redemption at Wimbledon, followed by another painful defeat in New York, and then an ATP Tour Finals win, all over his nearest rival on the tour.
Most don’t have careers as interesting as that year.
Hansen: Between last year’s U.S. Open and ATP Tour Finals, the players looking to usurp Alcaraz and Sinner who are not from their generation, and are not Djokovic, were mostly mired in self-pity. In various news conferences, they lamented how Alcaraz and Sinner’s reconfiguration of tennis into a hyper-aggressive game of chicken had shredded the style of tennis they grew up playing.
In 2025, the sandwich generation, of Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitsipas; the maximizers, in Taylor Fritz and Alex de Minaur; and the perennial not-quite men, Casper Ruud (who should have his three Grand Slam final appearances mentioned more often) and Andrey Rublev, all went on fascinating journeys. Zverev stayed at world No. 3 but produced some of his most insipid tennis of his career. He admitted in a Wimbledon news conference that he was “lacking joy,” before saying at the U.S. Open that he had sought professional help. By the end of the year, he was closer to the world No. 1000 than the world No. 2, on points anyway.
Medvedev found himself whaling his racket into the net in the middle of nearly losing to a qualifier at the Australian Open, before losing for real to Learner Tien in an epic that presaged the greatest tentacular, sweaty, mind-boggling head-to-head of the year. Tsitsipas started badly, changed racket, won a title, looked reborn, picked up injuries because of the racket, had a brief coaching dalliance with Goran Ivanišević, rehired his father and plummeted down the rankings, still injured.
Fritz produced three of the best performances of his career against Alcaraz, and won the one that mattered the least and lost the two that mattered the most. De Minaur continued his interminable losing streak to Sinner, went through some dark nights of the soul by contriving to lose matches he should have won, and then qualified for the ATP Tour Finals.
Ruud finally won his first ATP Masters 1000 title at the Madrid Open with a wonderful performance against Jack Draper, but otherwise looked to be treading water; Rublev’s results were similarly middling, but he found the ability to divorce his self-esteem from his performances after so many incidents of self-flagelation in 2024.
Medvedev saved the match point, won the set, but still lost the match, before being fined $42,500 for his conduct.
Futterman: The Laver Cup news conference when Pat Rafter, Team World vice-captain, asked Reilly Opelka if it was normal for Ruud to serve as well as he did. Rafter surfs a lot and doesn’t watch much tennis, but showing it with cameras rolling was another story.
Cristian Garín and Zizou Bergs produced one of the strangest tennis moments of 2025. (Benoit Doppagne / AFP via Associated Press)
Worst moment
Eccleshare: Tennis’ relentless schedule has made a serious injury to a leading player feel inevitable, but that didn’t make Holger Rune’s tears any less difficult to watch.
Futterman: Shelton’s injury against Mannarino at the U.S. Open. It’s the worst pain he’s ever felt, he tells Bryan, his father but also his coach, who is sitting courtside. It’s the sort of injury that can wreck a career built around a cannon serve and magical athleticism. Who knows what 2026 will hold for Shelton, who has not been the same since that match.
Hansen: The various injuries to Fils, Jack Draper and Shelton that left so many “what if” questions not just about this season, but for their future careers. Tennis players get injured. The lower back, playing elbow and playing shoulder respectively are just about the three places they really don’t want to get injured, along with the playing wrist.
Best quote
Eccleshare: “I’m not a machine, you know. I also struggle sometimes.” — Jannik Sinner during a news conference at the U.S. Open.
Futterman: Yannick Noah’s response to my question at Laver Cup about how much tennis he watches these days: “Not much,” he said.
Hansen: “A team around a player is like an engine — a complex machine that drives forward. When it runs at full power, you go fast. At some point, the engine stops, but you don’t see it because the boat continues gliding. After a while, that energy is gone, and you’re stuck mid-sea, trying to restart that engine.” — Gilles Cervara, Medvedev’s longtime coach, in an interview with Tennis Majors following their split.
