The Overlooked Greatness of Marin Cilic

Marin Cilic entered the top 100 in October 2007. As of 2026, he is still there. That means two decades inside the world’s hundred best tennis players, which is a feat so rare that it barely needs any other context to make the point. And yet, somehow, it is exactly the kind of detail that gets lost when people talk about Cilic. A lot of things do.

His career has unfolded in a way that was never quite expected and never quite celebrated the way it deserved. That is the central tension of Marin Cilic’s story: a player whose achievements are genuinely remarkable, but who has spent most of his career standing in the shadows of a generation that cast very long ones.

The Overlooked Greatness of Marin Cilic

From Medjugorje to the World Stage

Cilic was born in Medjugorje, a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina that most people, if they know it at all, know for one thing. Since 1981, the town has been associated with reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and while the Catholic Church has never officially recognized the claims, the resulting wave of pilgrims transformed the region economically. That influx of visitors brought infrastructure and development, and, in 1991, the town’s first tennis court.

It was on that court that a young Marin Cilic first picked up a racket. His father understood early on that the boy had something and was fully committed to nurturing it, making sure he had access to every available resource. By the age of 15, Cilic had outgrown what the region could offer him and moved to San Remo, Italy, to continue his development. It is a detail that speaks to both the sacrifice involved and the seriousness with which Cilic approached his craft from the very beginning. He was never handed anything.

Building a Career

The results began to arrive in 2008, when Cilic won his first ATP title in Connecticut. The following year signaled this was no one-off, as he reached four more finals and won two. He was still a teenager, yet he was already collecting hardware. Over the years that followed, he continued to climb steadily, peaking at world number three in 2018 and spending long stretches of his career inside the top ten.

By 2026, Cilic has accumulated 21 titles, including a Masters 1000 and, most significantly, a Grand Slam. The 2014 US Open remains the defining chapter. He dismantled a struggling Roger Federer in the semifinals and then faced Kei Nishikori in the final. It was a match that Nishikori, despite being a formidable player, was unable to win.

Cilic was simply too powerful that fortnight as his serve and forehand were operating at a level that nobody could handle. He would reach one more Grand Slam final, at Wimbledon in 2017, where Federer proved a different proposition entirely.

His achievements extend beyond singles. Cilic was a cornerstone of the Croatian Davis Cup team for well over a decade, reaching three finals and lifting the trophy once in a run that meant a great deal to his country.

He also claimed a silver medal for Croatia at the Tokyo Olympics. And with over 600 career wins, he belongs to a club whose membership list reads as a who’s who of the sport’s modern era.

The Things Nobody Mentions

For all of that, Cilic remains a relatively peripheral figure in the conversation about the best players of the post-2000 era. Some of that is simply the era in which he played. Playing during the reign of Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray meant that virtually every other player was operating in permanent soft focus, with their achievements visible only if you looked closely enough. Cilic battled those men for two decades and still managed a career that most professionals could only dream of.

But the oversight goes beyond just the rankings and the trophies. Cilic has done considerable work off the court, but it rarely receives the attention it warrants. He is a private person by nature, someone who does not seek the spotlight for its own sake, and that reticence has meant his charitable and developmental work has gone largely unnoticed.

He has invested heavily in growing tennis in his hometown and his country, sponsoring development programs and supporting infrastructure for young players who might otherwise never get the opportunity he had. Medjugorje made him who he is in many ways, and he has not forgotten that.

There is also something to be said for the way he has conducted himself throughout a very long career. He has not been a headline-grabber, nor has he courted controversy. He has simply shown up, competed at the highest level, and treated the sport with a consistency of professionalism that is itself undervalued.

What Cilic Deserves

Cilic is a Hall of Famer. That should not be a debatable.

A Grand Slam title, two Slam finals, a Masters title, three Davis Cup final appearances, Olympic silver, 600 wins, and twenty years inside the top 100 of the most competitive sport in the world is a body of work that speaks entirely for itself. That he achieved it during an era when three of the greatest players in history were consuming most of the available oxygen makes it even more impressive.

There is a version of tennis history in which the draw falls slightly differently, in which Cilic meets a depleted field at Wimbledon rather than a very strong Federer, and the conversation around him is entirely different. But tennis does not deal in alternate histories, and Cilic himself has never seemed interested in that kind of retrospective grievance. He put his head down and played.

That might be precisely why he is so easy to overlook. The players who demand recognition tend to get it. The ones who simply keep performing, year after year, in the same professional way, often have to wait for someone to come along and make the case on their behalf.

Consider this case.