The 50+ Best Tennis Players Of 2024, Ranked By Fans

Navarro won just one Slam match, but she finished the year on the brink of the top 30 thanks to steadily awesome performances at minor events. She reached seven ITF finals (with five titles) and won 64 of a grueling 88 matches. She also beat two top-15 players, Maria Sakkari and Keys, in September. Her serve needs work, but Pegula might be the only American with a better return game.

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At this point, she’s taken home two WTA titles and currently ranking 18th in the world. The 24-time Grand Slam champion only has one Olympic medal, claiming bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games. Among men’s players with at least 20 Grand Slam titles, he is the only one to never stand atop the Olympic podium with gold around his neck. Rafael Nadal will compete in his third and final Olympics this summer at Roland-Garros, where he has won 14 French Open titles. He struggled in this year’s French Open, however, falling to defending Olympic gold medalist Alexander Zverev in the first round. Winners of the men’s singles and doubles at ATP 250 tournaments receive 250 points with the runner-up receiving 150 points.

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Currently the third-ranked player in the world, Daniil Medvedev is one of the most charismatic and outspoken individuals in tennis. Not afraid to get in a verbal altercation with the umpire over a ruling or even with members of the audience who aren’t seated during play, Daniil’s creativity on the court makes him one to watch. The 21-year-old from Spain has already won four Grand Slams and is coming off back-to-back major titles with triumphs at the French Open and Wimbledon. Djokovic and Nadal could play each other in the second round of the men’s singles event if they each win their first-round match.

Novak Djokovic

Open—and her follow-up with a doubles title at this year’s French Open—gave marketers one more reason to chase the young American star, who has pursued a steady strategy off the court but has still found herself among the sport’s best paid. At the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony in July, she served as Team USA’s flag-bearer, alongside LeBron James, and she will be appearing on a limited-edition box of Wheaties. The “open” in the US Open means the tournament is open for anyone to compete.

• He might have the best return game of any American, but at 6-foot-1 his service game isn’t nearly as big.
• Paul made the most of a favorable Australian Open draw to charge to the semis, then pulled off his best win of the season — a three-setter over Carlos Alcaraz — to reach the semifinals in Toronto.
• Novak Djokovic is the current world number 1 in the ATP rankings, with Novak currently holding the record for most weeks as the No.1 in men’s tennis.
• If the PTPA decides to bring a case, one sensitive area for both tours is their shared stance on exhibition events, such as the lucrative Six Kings Slam being played in Saudi Arabia in a fortnight’s time.
• Carlos Alcaraz is leading the charge of the younger generation of professional tennis players.
• As well as being one of Australia’s leading track athletes, Olympian Peter Bol reveals he is also a massive tennis fan in our Celebrity Match series.

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• The average age of male players in the top 100 is just under 27 years old with Luca Van Assche, Arthur Fils, and Alex Michelsen (19) the youngest players, and Stan Wawrinka (38), the oldest player in the top 100.
• “Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner put on such a great, entertaining show. To me, it’s up there with the absolute best sporting events ever.
• Currently the third-ranked player in the world, Daniil Medvedev is one of the most charismatic and outspoken individuals in tennis.
• “Only yesterday you had Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff playing in Beijing in what should be a celebrated match, but it’s late in the year and everyone’s already burned out.
• The petition is issued to the ATP (usually the CEO) and must be received within six months of his last tournament.
• They are calculated by taking a player’s best 19 tournament results to determine their ranking over the preceding 52 weeks.
• The 24-time Grand Slam champion only has one Olympic medal, claiming bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games.
• She played nine matches against top-20 opponents in 2023 and either beat them or took them to three sets five times.

Their mental capacity to do that and to be able to stay focused is unreal. That’s something I’d like to take from them, as well as being able to perform under all the pressure and circumstances they face on any given day. He created history at Tokyo 2020, becoming the first Australian in 53 years to qualify for an Olympic men’s 800-metre final. The players’ association founded by Novak Djokovic is weighing up a programme of legal challenges that could reshape the world game. In 2020, Kenin won the Australian Open and finished the year fourth in the world; she finished 2022 at 228th. After her career was derailed by injuries and vanishing form, Kenin stubbornly found herself again in 2023, beating Gauff at Wimbledon and Sabalenka in Rome and, in San Diego in September, reaching her first tour final since the 2020 French Open.

List of World Number 1s from 1973 to 2024

The best part of the game is probably how fast it is and watching it live, you can appreciate how good they are. You can follow it on television, but when you’re sitting courtside and trying to follow the ball it’s impossible. I had the chance to try and return one of Novak’s serves and that was impossible. Unusually for the incestuous world of tennis, the 44-year-old Nassar has worked at a high level in other sports, including the NFL. His mentor was David Stern – formerly the commissioner of the US’s biggest basketball league – and he brings Stern’s can-do attitude to his present post.

Jannik Sinner confident of avoiding doping ban

This year, the players have found themselves busier than ever, thanks to the inclusion of the Olympic tennis event on the schedule and the fact that matches are running longer and longer. Meanwhile the ATP have extended Masters 1000 tournaments to two weeks and the WTA have bumped up the number of mandatory events from four to 10. 2023 has been an amazing year in tennis, complete with record-setting performances on both the men’s and women’s sides. From Novak Djokovic putting his 24th grand slam title in the record books to Coco Gauff’s US Open finals three-set stunner, fans were treated to moments that will go down in history. Winners of the men’s singles and doubles grand slam tournaments receive 2,000 points with the runner-up receiving 1,300 points.

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16 spots of the 128-person field are reserved for professionals or amateurs who win three matches in the qualifying tournament. No qualifier entry has ever gone on to win the US Open until 2021 when 18-year-old Emma Raducanu did just that, claiming the Grand Slam title in dominating fashion without dropping a set the entire tournament. Since then, Radacanu has fallen out of the top 200, but she’s planning her return next year. Ben Shelton is a rising star who brings power, agility, and fearlessness to the game. Shelton’s elite serve speeds—which have hit as high as 149 mph during tournament play—draw gasps from the audience and racket claps from opponents.

Alcaraz: Jannik Sinner and I are not close friends

She was nearly upset-proof, but she was struggling to break through to a top-five level. “I think we both respect each other a lot, as a player, as a person, but once we are on tour travelling, during tournaments when we are on site, we are with our team on our own, so we don’t speak too much. Canelo Álvarez, Devin Booker, Carli Lloyd and the Cavinder twins. He has also reported on industry trends such as the tech revolution in trading cards, Las Vegas’ rise as a sports town and the American-led investments in Italian soccer. Knight joined Forbes in 2017 and previously served as the assistant managing editor for contributors—overseeing the website’s network of nearly 3,000 freelance writers and the editors working with them—and as the deputy business editor.

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A player can use a protected ranking for the first nine tournaments they compete in using the Entry Protection or for up to nine months, beginning with the first tennis event that the player competes in, whichever happens first. This excludes wild cards and entries as a Direct Acceptance, should the true ranking allow this. In her past four Slams, Brady has won 15 matches and reached two semifinals and one final. Unfortunately, those four events have come in a more than three-year span.

Current ATP Rankings – Men’s Singles

The World Tennis League on Friday unveiled a star-studded lineup of players, featuring two Olympic gold medallists and five Grand Slam champions for its third season. The protected ranking gives a player a spot in the rankings determined by the player’s average ATP Rankings position during the first three months of his injury. With 2024 NFL training camps on the horizon, the league’s true insiders made their voices heard.

• Rublev, known for his explosive power and hard-shot baseline games, constantly delivers electrifying performances that leave fans in awe.
• I met Nick Kyrgios during the summer and I’m a massive fan of his.
• When 52 weeks have passed since the points were acquired, they are dropped, and new points are added.
• Below is a breakdown of the points awarded to players at ATP 250, 500, 1000, and grand slam tournaments in 2024.
• But no matter how many titles he won, he never ranked higher than No. 2 on the list of the sport’s highest-paid players—until Roger Federer’s retirement in 2022.
• The former Texas Longhorns player cracked the top 200 in January, the top 100 in April and the top 50 in September.

His runner-up finish in Melbourne also gave him records for the most sets played at a Grand Slam tournament (31) and the most time spent on court (24 hours 17 minutes). An avid gamer, Medvedev has partnerships with HyperX gaming headsets and game makers EA Sports and Ubisoft, and he joined the ownership group of esports organization M80 last year. Since turning pro in 2003, Novak Djokovic has piled up a record 24 Grand Slam singles titles, staking his claim as tennis’ greatest of all time. But no matter how many titles he won, he never ranked higher than No. 2 on the list of the sport’s highest-paid players—until Roger Federer’s retirement in 2022. The following year, Djokovic finally seized the top spot, with a combined $38.4 million in on-court and estimated off-court earnings.

India’s Sumit Nagal, world-ranked 83, will also return to the tournament. Meanwhile, Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev, who were part of the WTL 2023 title-winning team PBG Eagles, will compete again at the competition, along with 2024 US Open runner-up Taylor Fritz, Hubert Hurkacz and Casper Ruud. Protected rankings cannot be used for seeding purposes or Lucky Loser consideration, nor can they be used for a top eight player to qualify for the Nitto ATP Finals. Rankings work on a rolling 52-week period and take into account a player’s best results in 19 tournaments for the ATP and 16 for the WTA.

Tennis gold medalists from Tokyo Olympics

Shortly before that, both Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz and British No 1 Jack Draper had separately attacked the sport’s packed schedule, with Alcaraz saying “it’s going to kill us in some way”, and Draper calling the status quo “mental”. “It’s a weird thing, but I think tennis is different than other sports because of it,” Alcaraz said of their shared commute. “Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner put on such a great, entertaining show. To me, it’s up there with the absolute best sporting events ever. The 37-year-old Serbian superstar’s next great rival, 21-year-old Carlos Alcaraz of Spain, has jumped to No. 1 this year with an estimated $42.3 million before taxes and agent’s fees over the last 12 months, dating to the 2023 U.S.

For Jannik Sinner and the sport he dominates, this is a nightmare spiralling out of control

Taylor Fritz basically ended the year where he started from a rankings standpoint and couldn’t turn a top-10 ranking into sustained threats in Grand Slams. Frances Tiafoe dipped his toe into the ATP top 10 but suffered a major funk at the end of the year. Sebastian Korda seemed primed for a breakthrough but missed months with an injury. Jenson Brooksby was suspended for 18 https://zanzibet.org/login/ months for missed drug tests. In another promising sign for the state of tennis, the average age of this year’s top 10 is 26, with only Djokovic and 38-year-old Rafael Nadal (No. 6, $23.3 million) outside their 20s. Monastir champion Sonay Kartal and Guadalajara finalist Olivia Gadecki have become the 15th and 16th players to break the Top 100 for the first time in 2024.

Naomi Osaka

As Nassar told Telegraph Sport, tennis’s ongoing inertia is a far bigger problem for the players than it is for the various powerbrokers – most of whom are too busy with day-to-day firefighting to look at the sport as a whole. It might be presumptuous putting the teenager here instead of more established players such as Mackenzie McDonald or Marcos Giron. The big-serving, 6-foot-4 Michelsen took down both McDonald and John Isner on his way to the Newport finals in July. Success on the challenger and futures circuits bumped him into the top 100 and earned him a spot in the year-end NextGen finals. We talk a lot about ceilings in a piece like this, and for a while it felt as if Gauff had found hers. She spent most of a year ranked either seventh or eighth in the world, and from August 2021 through May 2023, she went just 3-15 against top-10 opponents.

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• Rafael Nadal will compete in his third and final Olympics this summer at Roland-Garros, where he has won 14 French Open titles.
• But Alcaraz’s $42.3 million is the best total by a player not named Federer, Djokovic, Naomi Osaka or Nadal in the 17 years that Forbes has compiled a tennis earnings ranking.
• While he did sit out the Paris Olympics because of tonsillitis and has been hampered by a hip injury, his season has taken him to new heights as well.
• Follow Knight for deep dives into the dollars driving the sports world.
• Canelo Álvarez, Devin Booker, Carli Lloyd and the Cavinder twins.

When 52 weeks have passed since the points were acquired, they are dropped, and new points are added. If you match your performance from 52 weeks ago, you have a net gain/loss of zero points. You’ll gain points if you better your performance, but if you perform worse, you’ll lose points.

Winners of the men’s singles and doubles at ATP 500 tournaments receive 500 points with the runner-up receiving 330 points. Winners of the men’s singles and doubles at mandatory Masters 1000 tournaments receive 1,000 points with the runner-up receiving 650 points. However, this does not mean that players who play the most tournaments will be ranked the highest as there is a max of 19 tournaments that goes into the calculation of a player’s ranking. The first are the official world rankings updated weekly on Mondays when points from the previous 52 weeks have dropped.

After prevailing at the French Open for a fourth time in June, Swiatek earned a bronze medal at the Paris Olympics, securing a $50,000 bonus from her native Poland on top of nearly $11.7 million in prize money over the last 12 months. Only Novak Djokovic tops that figure, and by less than $300,000—no small feat considering that the prize money available to women still lags behind the men’s at some tournaments beyond the four majors. “Obviously it’s not our decision, but for sure I think we have too many tournaments in the season,” she said in an on-court interview at the Cincinnati Open this month. “It’s not going to end well.” Swiatek stays busy off the court, too, signing partner deals this year with Lego and Lancôme.

The average age of male players in the top 100 is just under 27 years old with Luca Van Assche, Arthur Fils, and Alex Michelsen (19) the youngest players, and Stan Wawrinka (38), the oldest player in the top 100. The ATP Rankings are not to be confused with the ATP Live Rankings. For example, a player can be first in the Live Race but lower in the ATP Rankings because he has enjoyed more success in the current season. I met Nick Kyrgios during the summer and I’m a massive fan of his. He’s doing amazing things off the court and we’ve got some of the same interests, like basketball, so hopefully I’ll get the chance to meet him a few more times. I think I was more nervous to have a run with him than I would be in an Olympic final.