Ten Things To Look Forward To In Tennis In 2026

After reviewing 2025, Martin Keady, our resident tennis historian, looks ahead to 2026.

Ten Things To Look Forward To In Tennis In 2026

1.The Great Calendar Slam Campaign

No fewer than three players have the chance to complete a Career Grand Slam in 2026 by winning the one Major that they have not yet won throughout their career: Carlos Alcaraz; Iga Swiatek; and Jannik Sinner. Indeed, Alcaraz and Swiatek have the chance to make it a “Calendar Slam Double” in Melbourne next month, when they will both be trying to win their first Australian OpeElena Rybakina 2025 Season Review – A strong finish for a top playern title. By contrast, Jannik Sinner will have to wait until Paris in the Spring to see if he can win his first French Open, having gone so close in 2025 in probably the greatest men’s final in the tournament’s history.

If Alcaraz should complete the Career Grand Slam in a few weeks’ time, he will become the youngest man ever to do so (beating his compatriot Rafael Nadal by a matter of months) and only the 19^th player of either gender to achieve the feat since the invention or codification of tennis at the end of the 19^th century. The fact that in nearly 150 years only 10 women and eight men have won all four Majors throughout their career is probably the ultimate testament to how great an achievement it is. And if all three of Alcaraz, Swiatek and Sinner were to achieve a Career Slam in 2026, it would be the first time that even two players, let alone three, have achieved it in the same year.

1. Amanda Anisimova Winning a Major

In the blizzard of statistics that threatens to engulf 21^st-century society, including 21^st-century sport, it is only really the “killer stats” – those that are so revelatory that they really illuminate a subject – that stand out. One such “killer stat” emerged at the end of the US Open last September, when it was revealed that Amanada Anisimova’s average backhand speed was faster than that of either Carlos Alcaraz or Jannik Sinner. Here, surely, was proof that Anisimova’s backhand is not just the finest in women’s tennis but the finest in all of tennis.

In 2025, Anisimova finally learned how to wield this most stunning of strokes and, alongside other improvements in the game (notably on the mental side), it was good enough to take her to two Major Singles finals in succession, at Wimbledon and Flushing Meadows.

She lost them both, the first in excruciating fashion as she succumbed 6-0 6-0 to Iga Swiatek at Wimbledon. However, unlike Jasmine Paolini, who reached the same two Major finals in 2024 but was unable to match that achievement let alone improve upon it in 2025, there is every chance that Anisimova will claim her maiden Major title in 2026. The improvements in her game have been so great, and that backhand remains so remarkable (it is probably the best single shot in tennis full-stop), that it seems likely that she will finally win the Major she has been tipped to win since her teenage years.

1. Jannik Sinner’s Attempt At A “Three-Peat” in Melbourne

The last man to win a hat-trick of Australian Open titles was Novak Djokovic between 2019 and 2021. In fact, it could be argued that Djokovic actually won four Aussie Open titles in a row because, after being banned from competing in 2022 because of his covid vaccination status (or lack of it), he promptly won the tournament again in 2023. Three years on from that, it will be Jannik Sinner’s turn to try and “threepeat” in Melbourne.

Winning even a single Major title is hard enough, but to win three in a row at the same Grand Slam event is truly incredible. Indeed, it is a feat reserved only for the greatest of players, who can dominate a tournament for a sustained period, in the process resisting not only their rivals but illness and injury.

Proof of how hard a “threepeat” is to achieve came twice in 2025, as Aryna Sabalenka failed to win a third title in a row in Melbourne (losing in the final to Madison Keys) and Carlos Alcaraz failed to achieve a hat-trick of Wimbledon titles (as Sinner gained a modicum of revenge for losing their French Open classic a few weeks earlier).

Nevertheless, Sinner will be determined to maintain his hardcourt dominance generally and in Australia in particular. And the recent announcement that Alcaraz and coach Juan-Carlos Ferrero are parting, just a month before the 2026 Australian Open starts, will surely only have helped his chances.

1. The Full Return of Zheng Quinwen

China’s Zheng Quinwen enjoyed a stellar 2024, reaching the Australian Open final, winning Olympic Singles gold at Roland Garros and ending the year by narrowly losing to Coco Gauff in the final of the WTA Tour Finals event, which was arguably the greatest women’s tennis match of that year. Consequently, going into 2025, she was full of confidence that she could build on that breakout season by going even further and winning a Major. Unfortunately, as is so often the case in professional sport, injury intervened.

After a generally tricky first half of the 2025 season, in which she failed to reach the heights she had scaled in 2024, Zheng finally underwent elbow surgery in July and ended up missing most of the second half of the season, barring a brief comeback in her home country in September at the China Open in Beijing. It can only be hoped, for Zheng in particular and for women’s tennis in general, that she has finally fully recovered from surgery and the subsequent rehabilitation, and so will be able to add to the current ultra-competitiveness at the top of women’s tennis.

1. The Full Return of Arthur Fils

For Zheng Quinwen on the women’s side of the game, read Arthur Fils on the men’s side. Having enjoyed probably the best half-season of his career in the first half of 2025, which took him to a career-high ranking of No.14 by April, Fils looked set to finally make inroads at his home Slam in Paris, especially after an epic first-round five-set victory over Spain’s Jaime Munar that was his first ever win at Roland Garros. Unfortunately, the back injury that he sustained towards the end of that match not only prevented him from playing again at the French Open in 2025 but effectively brought his entire 2025 season to a halt.

As with Zheng Quinwen, it will obviously not be easy for Fils to get back to his best after nearly six months off tour. However, just like Zheng Quinwen, he has already shown enough in his short career to suggest that he can ultimately compete for the biggest prizes in tennis. After the failure of France’s previous “Golden Generation” (Monfils, Gasquet, Tsonga et al) to win a Major and thus end the country’s long wait for a male Grand Slam champion (which now stands at more than 40 years, after Yannick Noah’s 1983 French Open triumph), Fils continues to look the best bet to become the Major-winner that the most tennis-mad nation on Earth craves.

1. The Full Emergence of Joao Fonseca

A year ago, it seemed as if tennis had finally found “The Third Man” it yearned for: another young male player who could challenge the duopoly of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. That was Brazil’s Joao Fonseca, who followed up winning the 2024 Next Gen Finals by beating ninth seed Andrey Rublev in the first round of the Australian Open. When Fonseca duly won his first ATP Tournament in Buenos Aires in February, it seemed as if he was capable of the kind of rapid rise up the rankings that both Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, themselves previous winners of the Next Gen Finals, had made since 2020.

Then, reality intruded, rather rudely. First, Fonseca was virtually blown off court by Jack Draper on the Briton’s run to the Indian Wells title in March. Then, he failed to make the kind of progress during the European clay-court season that many experts (including David Law of The Tennis Podcast) had predicted. Ultimately, by mid-summer it was apparent that, like other winners of the Next Gen Finals in recent years (notably the 2023 champion Hamad Medjedovic) he would not immediately be able to translate Next Gen success into ATP Tour triumph.

However, Fonseca recovered his early-season and late 2024 form towards the end of 2025, culminating in his victory in Basel, Roger Federer’s home town. That offers hope that he will eventually be able to follow in the footsteps of Alcaraz and Sinner, even if it takes him a little longer than they did to scale the world rankings and challenge for Major titles.

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect for Fonseca is that he is still only 19, and so is nearly four years younger than Alcaraz and nearly six years younger than Sinner. That age gap alone offers encouragement that he will one day match their achievements and become Brazil’s second male Major-winner after Gustavo Kuerten, nearly a quarter of a century ago.

1. The Continuing Emergence of Alexander Blockx

Fonseca is still young enough to have competed in the Next Gen Finals in 2025 and would have done so but for an injury that necessitated his withdrawal. In his absence, it was the man he beat in the 2024 Next Gen final, the USA’s Learner Tien, who won in Jeddah last weekend. Arguably, however, it was the young man Tien beat in the final, Belgium’s Alexander Blockx, who not only had the better all-round tournament but has the most promising future of the two.

Physically, Blockx has the build and movement of an AI hybrid of the young Andy Murray and the young Dominic Thiem, but his game style bears little comparison to either of them.  At 6 ft 4, he already has the classic 21^st-century male tennis player’s “BSBF” (Big Serve, Big Forehand) game, but he is also capable of applying exquisite touch. In truth, he probably froze in the 2025 Next Gen Final against Tien, who of course had the experience of the 2024 final to draw upon. However, he has 2026 and the rest of his career to unfreeze, and if he can develop the big-match mentality to go with his big-match game, he could in time become Belgium’s first ever male Major Singles champion.

1. The 40^th Anniversary of Boris Becker’s First Wimbledon Win

For all the talk of “young stars” such as Fonseca and Blockx, it is worth remembering that 2025 will be the 40^th anniversary of probably the greatest ever performance by a genuine wunderkind in the history of tennis, namely Boris Becker’s 1985 Wimbledon victory, which came when the German was only 17 years old.

In the four decades since then, Becker has probably led the most “storied” life of any professional tennis player, male or female. He won another five Major Singles titles (including two more Wimbledon titles), became one of the wealthiest and most famous sportspeople in the world, and then ultimately lost it all in a bizarre series of custody battles and bankruptcies that eventually led to imprisonment.

The much older and wiser Becker told the BBC late in 2025 that he now “regrets winning Wimbledon at 17”, because it put too much pressure on him for the rest of his career. Given everything that has happened to him since his truly historic triumph, that is not an unreasonable position to adopt. For the rest of us, however, 2025 will provide an opportunity to look back at the original “Boom Boom” Becker, who thrilled not just the tennis world but the whole world with his Herculean achievement.

1. Challenges to Italy’s Dominance of Team Tennis

When Italy won both the Davis Cup and the Fed Cup at the end of 2024, it seemed that the country had mastered the art of “Total Tennis”, or at least Total Team Tennis, in the same way that the great Dutch football team had mastered “Total Football” half a century earlier. And of course Italy retained both titles in 2025, even winning the Davis Cup in the absence not just of Jannik Sinner but their second most highly ranked player, Lorenzo Musetti.

In 2026, the odds will still be in favour of Italy maintaining its dominance of international team tennis, particularly in the Davis Cup, which will continue to be staged in Bologna until at least 2027. However, no empire lasts forever, either in life or in sport, and it is likely that new challengers to Italian dominance will emerge.

On the men’s side, it might be the hotly-tipped Czech side, featuring Jakub Mensik, Jiri Lehecka and Tomáš Macháč, who surprisingly lost to Spain in the quarter-final in 2025. And in the Fed Cup, surely at some point the USA team will be able to field all of its biggest stars (Gauff, Keys, Anisimova et al), and then they will be a match for anyone, even Jasmine Paolini’s Italy.

1. The Possible Beginning of Novak Djokovic’s Farewell To Tennis

Finally, there has been no official announcement as yet, but it is possible that 2026 will finally see the beginning of the end of Novak Djokovic’s utterly singular career. The statistical GOAT of men’s tennis still harbours hopes of winning the 25^th Major that would see him become the statistical GOAT of all professional tennis, male and female. However, after two successive seasons of =disappointment at the Majors, during which time he has invariably lost to either Carlos Alcaraz or Jannik Sinner, 2026 might just be the last full season of his career.

If it is, it will be fascinating to see how it plays out. Djokovic never enjoyed the near-universal adulation that both his great rivals, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, luxuriated in throughout their career, not least because he came along after them, by which time most tennis fans had already become either “FedHeds” or “Rafaelites”. Indeed, Djokovic has often admitted that he used his relative lack of popularity as fuel for his career, even imagining that the cheers for Roger or Rafa were actually cheers for him.

Now, or whenever he finally decides to call time on his career, Djokovic is likely to be drowned out by real cheers. Federer and Nadal have long departed the sport, leaving him as the last man standing from the greatest generation in tennis. And even if he never wins a full quarter-century of Major Singles titles, he has still proven himself beyond doubt to be the player who, at his best, you would most like to play for your life. That is obviously not an official title, but it is also the most important title that any player could ever possess. And Djokovic, whenever he retires, should be celebrated as such.