Current ATP Top 10 Tiebreak Win % vs. Tiebreaks Played in 2025
Notes: with ben and taylor tussling in their match, it made me think 🤔 who plays the most tiebreaks. was going to use current data but when i thought of this, some matches were still ongoing and i didn't want to #wait LMAO so 2025 data it is.
unsurprisingly, ben played the most tiebreaks (48) but taylor is not too far behind (47) and felix and rat (both 46).
jannik sinner: address me (he played only 19 with the win rate being 84.20%). unfortunately those 3 losses are from the last two sets of the rg final and the first set of the rome final. #ohOkay
as for ben shelton, the tournament with most tiebreaks played is the australian open (8). way to start the season truly!
hi, i'm dying to know more about this italian tennis crisis/thesis, if you haven't spoken about it already? i feel like i don't know enough yet/i'm supremely new (i saw iga at wimbledon and fell in love and now i guess i like the guys too kinda). so for italian tennis, i just know jannik and jasmine, what's going on with the rest of them?
so the first thing you have to know is that there is a material, real answer to "why is italian tennis so good now?" and it's the result of a project that has taken ten years to implement, and also that the football is shit.
this is a good overview of the project. key points: over the course of the last decade, the italian tennis federation has expanded the number of junior's and low level events (itf/challengers) hugely, meaning players could start early and step into the low level tennis grind without having to travel; starting in 2010 they quadrupled the number of hard courts in the country, so players on the rise could learn a less specialized/limited style; and they expanded the scope of resources available to players outside the federation.
The Italian method, then, is less a “system” than a platform with three legs: the expertise, support and financial clout of the FIT, a network of federation affiliated clubs that run training programs, and abundant access to at-home competition—prep school for the ATP and WTA.
all this starts seeing payoff around the same time the nationally load-bearing football is, again, shit, so there's a vacuum at the top of sports coverage begging for filling and particularly a 'young men need a new kind of athlete to look up to' vacuum of national inspiration. i flag this because there's a clear resource and narrative tilt towards the men. now, this is an even bigger testament to the grand high truth that jasmine is the most special and important person in italian tennis because there is actually not a secret reason she became amazing at age 29. she is a beloved miracle, i have not given up hope for her slam win, and i hope she plays doubles with terrifying bird of prey controversially older gf sara errani forever. however, you asked about tension. and the tension exists on the atp side, where present talent—and story—comes in plurality.
prologue: berrettini
the italian tennis of the present is about the 2000s boys. the tennis of the present, point blank, is about the 2000s boys. fairly or unfairly, sometimes the tennis skips a generation, and the 90s boys were denied theirs. fine. that's so many other posts. nonetheless, we can't talk about italian tennis breaking through in the atp without talking about matteo. matteo got close so many times: semis in australia and us, quarters in france, and, heartbreakingly, finals in wimbledon. he was the first-ever italian man to reach the wimbledon final; he was the first point blank to reach a major final since the 70s (panatta, on clay). it was a big deal contextually that it wasn't clay. which in the modern perspective remains treasured as a national surface but in some ways is seen as less special in its victories—where italian tennis has been good in the past, it's been good on clay. the point of the project was to despecialize italian tennis, to modernize it, to make it 'all-surface' i.e. optimized for a tour that is 60% hard courts. but i'm getting ahead of myself.
if you could 3d print an italian tennis player off a blueprint, matteo is pretty much what you'd get. comes from a tennis family in rome, started playing at age 4. hugely friendly, platonic hugo boss model, face made to be plastered on things, which it was. he was the advent of something new, and a promise of something coming—it's just, at the time, it seemed like the something was going to be him. unfortunately, his career has been consistently derailed by injury, from needing to pull out of the atp finals in 2021 to losing nearly a year in 2023. this remains true through the time of writing this post (september 2025) his future is deeply uncertain. the last time we saw him in a tennis context he was training with sinner.
who replaced him in 2021, at those atp finals? jannik sinner.
interlude: sinnettini
Three years have passed since Matteo Berrettini announced his withdrawal from the 2021 ATP Finals due to an abdominal injury he suffered in his first match against Zverev. His place will be taken by Jannik Sinner, who will offer us one of the first glimpses of his greatness. Berrettini, however, will never be the same again. His body will begin to fall apart, his ranking will crumble; he will be talked about in the tabloids, and his matches—ever less important—will be watched with ever sadder eyes. A melancholic gaze at what could have been and wasn't. His body, so powerful yet so fragile, with broad shoulders and slender legs, was both his asset and his curse. "The first time I had a back injury, I was nine years old. Injuries would become part of me and part of the sport."
[...]We've always had this unconditional faith in Berrettini. Perhaps because we still vividly remember the dizzying heights of his tennis, or perhaps simply because we trust his charisma and character. We trust him as a human being. (x)
it is important to spotlight while we consider the tension that there is no apparent public tension between matteo, the first promised new-gen tennis great who cracked the ceiling but couldn't break it, and jannik, who broke through. au contraire. they are on the record adoring each other to bits. jannik has described matteo as an idol, having been the representative face of the sport first as jannik was coming of age in the sport; in turn, jannik represents the hoped-for success that used to weigh solely on matteo's shoulders. there's a relationship of natural shared relief there, one that makes each of their roles in the sport less burdensome. when matteo was once again injured in 2023, it was sinner who stepped up and led the davis cup team to their first victory, one they would again repeat in a year. pictures of the italian davis cup team are something of a shorthand for the investment in young atp tennis and how well it has paid off; you look at the pictures of the team and see brotherhood in the individual sport, national dividends repaid.
some lovely anecdata: jannik's speech for supertennis after the 2021 atp finals (with perfect tags c / o @flaviocobolli); matteo calling sinner the leader of the italian tennis movement; "every emotional and physical clash between matteo and jannik seems scripted for a movie in which the most popular player in high school becomes best friends with the good boy with top marks" (esquire), and quoted in the same article: "i trust him and we give each other strength" (JS) x "he doesn't put on any masks, and he's a special guy, he deserves all the success he's having. he never sets limits and always tries to improve himself. maybe we'll truly realize this only in a little while." (MB)
but again. we're here to talk about the tensions.
present: sinner
He's the future of our sport. Actually, he's already the present of our sport. (Novak Djokovic, Monte Carlo, 2021)
jannik sinner skis down from san candido at age 13, NOT fully formed. a child prodigy on the slopes, he switches from skiing (still, 4 slams later, his favorite sport) to tennis. on this switch: "mentally, on the court, i'm not afraid to hit shots because nothing can happen. In skiing, [something] can happen." i think it's really important to keep in mind that when jannik sinner is skiing around the court hitting some deep cruel impossible shot with one foot on each corner of the baseline and his face completely immobile some banked part of him is thinking what's it going to do? snap my neck?
sinner, 13, gangly, long red hair, not fluent in italian, going full-time after playing twice a week and seeing he was better than the full-time junior players he was watching on court. sinner goes direct to futures and itf and challengers and grinds his way upwards. sinner has no juniors record, no baby slam trophies; he skipped all of that entirely. he was directly coached by riccardo piatti, of the piatti tennis academy where he trained, for 7 years; he fired him in 2022 to upgrade to 'supercoach' darren cahill (who coached hewitt, agassi, and halep to slams) alongside simone vagnozzi. it was seen as a somewhat chilly (and costly) culling of a childhood mentor as well as an immediately effective move as he continued to refine his game: a precise, aggressive baseline tennis that resembles no one's so much as novak djokovic's at his best. and at the end of 2023 he beats djokovic, saving 3 match points in the process, at davis cup—insignificant to points but not to momentum and morale. the 2024 australian open comes shortly after. as of the first week of september 2025 he has won four slams in the past two years: two australian opens; one us open; one wimbledon.
some of this information is granular and some of it, i imagine, is repetitive. he is world no.1 (a number contested for the first time all year—a year he spent three months banned from playing—next week). the information is more public in those cases. the same facts come up more often. bear with me.
At thirteen, tennis revealed itself as an almost ascetic act of self-discovery. The young man abandoned the silence of his childhood mountains and decided to embrace the relentless logic of the courts. He set off alone for Bordighera , on the Italian Riviera , to the Piatti Tennis Team Center , a demanding training ground for the legendary Riccardo Piatti .
Under the rigorous tutelage of his coaches, his tennis took on new dimensions. While he wasn't known for his natural skill at first , it was his unwavering ethic, his unflappable composure, and his voracious desire to learn that were the true architects of his distinction. (x)
sinner has brought four slams to italy in under two years; sinner is proof that the ten-year project worked. sinner is good on hard. sinner plays the modern tennis to its utmost, to the point where it acts as a paralytic to 80% of the tour who plays the 'same' game worse and less fearlessly. sinner is a material, tangible answer to the question "will expanding the challengers pay off?" sinner is a steady and intentional mountain climb. obviously not everyone is capable of making that ascent, not everyone has the lungs or the legs or the fortitude. but there is no mystery in the steps. we saw them happen.
beyond that, his face is everywhere, locally and internationally, advertising pasta and espresso and gucci as well as the sport itself. his statistics and successes are on a constant feed, filling lots of free air space left behind in the absence of good football. sinner is italian tennis right now, in a way that would have been incomprehensible—never mind 10 years ago. three, four. (sinner has, of course, been watched closely since his debut; nonetheless, sinner slam-winner has only existed since 2024.) is italy proud of their no.1? "proud" is a light word for what he is in context. he is a generational phenomenon but more than that, a tectonic reshaping of what a sport means for a country. take all of this as a given as we continue.
there is a tweet i found the other day by some old italian man that went middling viral and which i have to stop looking for or else this is never getting posted. anyway, it painted an idyllic picture of the sports reality of italy in 2025: two children on the beach, playing at tennis. one of them played at being sinner, and the other said "and i'll be musetti!"
who is musetti, on the other side of the net, to sinner?
past? future?: musetti
born seven months apart from sinner, lorenzo musetti grew up in carrara, whose marble is synecdoche for the beauty and value of the sculptures carved in it. this seems like a theatrical accent note: it is in every article about him. he picked up a tennis racquet at the age of four. he played a one-hander naturally, including in the marble quarries where his father worked. his coach and sometimes babysitter, simone tartarini, gave up his role as a tennis teacher to coach lorenzo exclusively starting at the age of eight. he made it to the 2018 us open junior finals, then won the junior australian open in the same year (2019) that jannik sinner won atp nextgen finals.
this is something of a window into the dual paths here: lorenzo soaking in the attention paid to an instinctively brilliant child, maybe even a little longer than he needed to; jannik stepping into the unglamorous end of the adult tour and working his way to reap adult rewards. (more extensive breakdown of sinner's grind vs musetti's once they started entering the same lower tournaments). april 2021 they were the only two teenagers in the top 100 (a young spanish prodigy would shortly join them). andrea petkovic writes about this when seeing them play a prequalifying match in 2019: the glittering teen-phenom buzz around musetti versus the already adult-seeming groundstrokes of still-teen sinner.
in a real way they split the resources of the italian tennis early-investment project, lorenzo with his private hometown coach and junior's success versus sinner with the piatti academy and challengers play. (it is so good, not just for the story but holistically for the sport, that both faces of the game here came from non-tennis working families.) they ran parallel tracks until the paths converged, inevitably, into the straight line of the atp tour. they were not close. they were not friends.
If Matteo Berrettini was the first to explode with a bang (the year of grace 2019) and Jannik Sinner rolled down the mountains of Alto Adige[...] Lorenzo Musetti is the boy to whom the tennis gods have assigned the most talents, so many that it took time to sort out that multitude of crackling sparks, like an earthly superhero who has to learn to manage his powers: "I have so many solutions in my arm that I often get confused and confounded… Matteo and Jannik have three or four that really hurt a lot and never make mistakes" (x)
musetti's tennis is a game of instincts, of excess, of such dramatic variety that he is to this day interviewing about how he needs to pare down his toolkit. he is the only one-handed backhand in the top 10, saving it over and over from rumors of its untimely death. it is at times, putting it mildly, inefficient: "a game similar to the baroque style of certain churches in palermo […] full of details, of deliberately complicated movements, of a bold and ostentatious creativity" (x). sinner, interviewed about musetti in 2021 says: "he is perhaps now a better player than me." by the end of this year sinner is inside the top 10 and lorenzo is just outside the top 50. skip briefly to june 2025 when sinner says: "he play[s] incredible tennis, totally different from mine, perhaps more beautiful to watch".
everything in tennis can be perfected, refined, improved-on (or, in the wrong direction, degraded). not everything can be taught. jury's out on touch, on pure light-handed feel for what the ball is doing and what you can make it do. musetti's tennis runs on touch and on the instinctive knowledge that he can make the ball do nearly anything if (if!) he makes the right decision about what it should be doing. it possesses a clear beauty that is legible to someone who knows nothing about the sport. the federer comparisons are easy, even obligatory, when considering this coupled with (perpetuated by) the one-hander, but musetti's game is much less efficient than federer's: "federer's matches were punctuated by these moments, but sustained by a minimalist architecture of serves, forehands, and short rallies. for musetti, however, tennis is above all this long, dreamlike invention." it's like if you stripped away the scaffolding of power and swiss-watch efficiencies that let federer do his thing effortlessly (magic or no, no one would ever mistake musetti's on-court experience as effortless) and left behind only the ephemeralities that inspired david foster wallace to write "roger federer as religious experience". and then asked a child to make sense of that from birth.
federer comps also skip his primary lineage: he grew up on clay and is unabashedly a clay-first player, although he excels on grass due to a deft weapon of a slice and won his junior's victories on hard; he has a clear stylistic debt to panatta et al, to an 'original' italian style that seemed like a necessary sacrifice to catch up to the present. after musetti defeated zverev in the quarterfinals of the rome open this year, panatta himself tweeted:
Last night Musetti showed everyone how tennis is really played. I thank him because I had lost all hope, but instead maybe not everything is lost. (x)
sinner had won, at the time, two australian opens and the us.
Few players, when losing, give off the impression of weakness like Musetti does. It's not about self-medication, or even swearing; but about the idea that his tennis isn't strong enough to compete. (x)
as a fan, i absolutely do not believe that musetti could have been the one to pull up the sport first and stay sane the way sinner has. his emotional life spills onto the court more than others. to follow him is to be looped into his personal life to an unusual degree because it so affects the game: he admitted that a deep low in his game at the end of 2020 was due to a breakup; another mid-2024 when his first child arrived. (compare to sinner's quote the one time his romantic life actually stepped within the boundaries of the tour: "i can't afford to change as a player or as a person.") nearly every one of his season has been characterized by at least one major slump even as the results always exceed the last; even this year, playing better than he ever had and with a (comparably) cooler head, he was out with injury for two major portions that could have gifted him points (south american clay + all of grass), as well as a string of first-round losses across the north american hard courts until this sharp, miraculous reset at the beginning of the us open. "in his short professional career, he's shown a tendency to spiral into negative situations, giving the impression he can lose to anyone, often in masochistic and depressing ways." (march 2024) and of course he is infamous for his ornate, blasphemous cursing on-court, for instigating a profane dialogue not with his opponent but with god when things go wrong.
When matches slip through his fingers, Musetti begins to see a supernatural agenda working against his efforts on the court. For Musetti, tennis seems like a sport in which the athletic, technical, and tactical components are complemented by another important, more mystical and ineffable element, which for agnostics or atheists might be classified as chance, luck, or fate , while for believers it can become a terrain for cultivating their relationship with the divine. (x)
he is not close to sinner in relationship. he is not close to sinner in style. he is not close to sinner in power or results. and yet his name is yoked to sinner's somewhat permanently in the italian record, a duality of age and promise that self-perpetuates because they are such complete opposites. having a 'perfect' ambassador of modern tennis creates a nostalgic desire for the seemingly less-efficient less-powerful less-perfected past that musetti is more than happy to play into; having an obvious dominant winner inevitably creates interest in underdogs and upsets and musetti is always doing just well enough that he seems on the edge of a breakthrough. this has been the year of his career (top 10, master's 1000 final, clay slam semi + hard court slam qfs*, fighting plausibly for a spot in turin) and it seems nowhere near the top of his potential. if you follow him he makes you believe—choose to believe, volunteer for the pain of belief unrewarded—in a future for him and for less predictability and more intangibility in the game. this itself is one of the intangibles: the ability to impose faith on the audience.
the pride in sinner's results casts an almost deliberately wide radius of light. even from those who love him most and with fewest caveats, he is a door to something larger than himself, and praised for this to such an extent that it can lose sight of the actual individual. the point of sinner is that he is 'possible' even when he is unplayable, that he is a tangible result. a wonderful one. how glorious for italy to have a no.1 that pulls up his companions! how wonderful it is to have sinner, and also musetti, to say nothing of cobolli and sonego and darderi and nardi to say nothing of matteo (may he recover quickly) and our beloved jasmine over on the women's side—
musetti catches reflected light from the past, from ideas of national representation and lost glory. nonetheless, the fascination in musetti is localized in musetti, in this transfixing and intensely personal career and style. there is no single flaw or devastating loss that could unmake him as a player or personality. the beauty is always there and—more than that, indissociable from that—the astonishing technical dexterity is there, the sense that anything might happen on court. as a child he was called: l'incantatore di serpenti, l'illusionista, il bello, il magnifico, il mago. that element of enchantment, of the impossible, of something that does not quite exist and yet shimmers on court in front of you, is always there. you will almost always see the best player in the world for at least a game or even a set in a match musetti loses (go back and watch set 1 vs norrie in dc). you will almost certainly always see a flicker of personal and technical vulnerability even in a match where he bagels.
as we know from my previously cited inability to rediscover them in the wild, tweets from random old italian men are not reliable sources. nevertheless, a tweet from a random old italian man:
(it was in response not to a tennis result but to a modeling shot where lorenzo, parodically beautiful and basking in the camera's attention, caught the crucifix around his neck between his teeth.)
epilogue: musinner
imagine: you are the world no. 1, you have permanently elevated the sport you play for the country of your birth, you have set records and you know this is just the beginning of your capabilities. you have worked for every second of this. your technical shifts are on the record. your meticulous inspiration is clear in your game. your superiority—to the tour, never mind to your countrymen—is in every one of the numbers, and they're not close. you have closed up shop externally. your private life is private, your outward-facing personality is as frictionless as you can make it, that door is locked and sealed away from the public. there is maybe even, let's speculate, a little pride in that restraint. you weren't born with total control. you've earned that too. and yet you cannot shake the national narrative tether to a player whose brand is fragility and excess and outward theater and aesthetic indulgence and—all that for results that can't begin to compare to yours! you can't unyoke yourself from that and you can't get the upper hand on the dynamic: the more precisely and dominantly you play, the more emotional investment people pour into the other guy's fallibility. there is something that happens when they look at him that does not happen when they look at you.
imagine: you are born shining with a magic touch, you grow up being told how beautiful you are and how special and how rarefied your skill, you are praised as a living memory of a national golden age, your gifts a heritage treasure to be protected and cultivated even and especially as they run counter to the present. you dream of representing your nation, you are told you symbolize its most identifiable best. you are no.2 in your country behind the world no.1, who plays an impossible unbeatable game purely in the tools of the present with no magic whatsoever. you are a step behind. your dreams are expanded by force into fields that do not suit you. your inadequacies and setbacks are no longer measured on your own scale, but by that of the best player in the world, who is in every way the opposite of you. adapt or die.
these are the tension points. they happen on the surface, in the realm of sportswriting and metaphor and observation and subjectivity. all of this is about what happens on the surface. i have no speculation whatsoever about the personal relationship between sinner and musetti, which seems like a healthy rivalry (in the sense that any friction is native to the game, and productive, rather than brought in from off-court). i just know that they are in constant imposed conversations, and that those conversations shape both players' perspectives on their own games, their position in the sport, the global and local future, maybe more than they would choose. this like all sports coverage is an attempt not just to capture the present but to tell the story of the future as it happens, even as you know at least some of that story is destined to be proven false. (who knows what a year, let alone a decade, will bring! it's individual sports and anything can happen! jasmine broke through at age 29! maybe in ten years the most important young italian tennis talent will have been cobolli all along!) but the future is not just theirs but also that of Italian Tennis TM; not just that of a country but also that of the game and its adaptability going into the future.
musetti thinking about sinner, his same-age peer the national and world no.1, is inevitable. sinner thinking about musetti feels less inevitable; it would be easy to dismiss the relationship as one of no.2 seething behind no.1. not quite, i feel. those recurring interviews about how his game is more beautiful and versatile than sinner's are the ones that fascinate me, because they spotlight sinner’s awareness of something he can't have and specifically can't attain. how does he feel about it? when he gives those interviews is it capitulation to the expectations/desires of his audience, is it a goad of what he will never be able to give them and shouldn't be asked to given his results, is it a reflection of something he really wants? all of that is speculation. the material reality is: sinner interviewing about something beyond his grasp. sinner volunteering it but also being put in a position—results regardless—where people keep asking him to admit it, over and over.
and then there is what happens in the hearts of the watchers. it is, statistically, easy and rewarding to believe in sinner. you watch a sinner match and think about his strength and his fearsomeness and, abovegame, the practical meta and optimization that led to djokovic's dominance over men's tennis for a decade followed by the refinements and further optimization that created something even more dominant. to watch a musetti match and certainly to get involved in his career you become a believer in something higher. you enter into the same dialogue with god that he has put himself into. you volunteer for a certain amount of pain and delusion by proxy as payment for entry to those matches where he can hit a ball to the sky and it will descend, lightly, into the baseline corner every time. you are going to like one of these experiences more than the other.
while of course you can enjoy multiple players and different styles, being drawn to one will naturally point you away from the other due to the sheer polarity of their styles and the emotional experience of the game. the reflection of everything your player is not casts your choices and your instincts as a watcher of the sport in an even brighter light. it tells you something about them and it tells you something about yourself: are you upset by uncertainty or bored by dominance? do you need to feel like you know, or can guess, the results in advance or can you live with precarity if you believe the emotional payoff is there? do you like intense personal spillover on court or do you find it messy and offputting? does this look like vulnerability or weakness to you? does the opposite look like discipline or robotics? is your sports journey more about statistical victories or who can inspire the most elaborate sportswriting metaphor? do you need to believe in strength or beauty more? or the converse, which of those puts you off when it's too obvious? one-handed backhand or two?
ultimately: who is your protagonist and who is your deuteragonist? you pick your player. you pick your lens. but regardless of your selection, the other is there holding the mirror.
as we come closer to the likely outcome i think i have figured out what i want to say about this. this being zverev winning a slam.
i understand that winning a slam comes with an amount of pedigree within tennis, and it’s an achievement that comes with a lot of publicity and lauding. on this level i understand the frustration with him winning one.
what i dont agree with is the idea that this fundamentally changes anything. zverev is good at tennis, this is not a moral judgement. he has been a serious contender for many years. as much as it feels vindicating to call him a choker, to make fun of him for not winning one- that is ultimately a selfish feeling because it doesn’t serve any purpose. and in some ways directly obfuscates and trivialises the real issue.
obviously, i don’t think making a joke here and there is necessarily wrong, but i do sometimes worry the overwhelming amount of posts treating players beating him like a game is diluting the seriousness. the posts that only ever call him the rat or another nickname, the posts congratulating people for “exterminating him”- i worry these miss the point. he isn’t some funny little issue, he’s a serial domestic abuser. whether or not a player beats him isn’t them doing a favour for women or for viewers who don’t like him, there is no morality in it.
if it’s more important for you to be able to make fun of him for not reaching some arbitrary point of success than it is for him to be recognised and face consequences for being a serial abuser than your priorities are wrong. i don’t actually think anyone is doing this on purpose, but i think it’s easy to get caught up in our own anger, our own desire to feel better short term.
the first allegations came out i believe in 2020, if zverev had won a slam before that it would not have changed the fact that he’s an abuser. if he’d won every slam since it would not change that fact. on the other hand, if he lost every slam first round it would also not change anything. the truth of it though is that he does make deep runs frequently. that’s why he’s been top 5 for so long, and him being top 5 for so long has already made him a face of men’s tennis regardless of his slam success.
no longer being able to say he’s a choker or he’s a slamless loser or whatever insult in that vein you want is not even remotely relevant when the real reason people should be upset is that he is, once again, a serial domestic abuser.
maybe flavio pulls off a miracle and he wins this one, zverev will continue to be a contender in the next and the next and the next. the issue has never been that he might win one, but that he’s able to compete at all.
I've never been happier that a slam is over! Being an F1 and Tennis fan has never tested my will to live like tonight.
Congrats to Andreeva for winning her first grand slam, Errani and Vavassori for winning two years in a row, Granollers and Zaballos for winning two years in a row, and Sinakova and Townsend for winning their 12th and 3rd GS respectively (4th and 1st RG title).
Congrats to Cobolli as well, its an amazing performance for a first grand slam final, exceeded my expectations by dragging this match into a deciding set and he can be proud of what he has achieved.
Onto grass Season!
Now Wimbledon, its time to show RG how a Grand Slam should be done and reinforce your status as the superior European Grand Slam and finally show up the French.
Hello! I remember that you did a very good breakdown of Jannik's doping case. Since it's getting more and more possible that Zverev is going to win this slam, would you care to shine more light on his domestic violence case? I fear I am lacking the information about it and it is getting harder to differentiate which are speculations and assumptions, and which are facts. Thank you!
my dear anon, i won’t be posting about this case myself because, frankly, it makes me sick to my stomach. but since you asked, i can point you to three sources that lay it out well. one thing worth keeping in mind is that the atp had no abuse policy in place throughout most of this, which complicates both how the allegations were handled and how people interpret the outcome.
two cases
before proving sources: there were actually two separate cases against zverev, involving two different women.
olga sharypova, a former russian junior tennis player he dated in 2018–2019, made allegations of repeated physical and emotional abuse across multiple countries. that case was handled privately by the atp, which ran a 15-month investigation and concluded there was “insufficient evidence”; not that nothing happened, just that they couldn’t substantiate it to their threshold.
brenda patea, the mother of his daughter, who alleged he pushed her against a wall and strangled her in berlin in may 2020. that one went to a german criminal court, ended in a settlement where he paid €200,000, with €150,000 going to the state treasury and the remainder going to non-profit organizations. it was closed without a verdict in either direction — not an acquittal, not a conviction.
for sources
1. the espn piece gives a solid factual overview of the charges and legal process if you want the basics.
2. looking for the clearest full breakdown of the whole case, i came across this substack piece. the writer is very controversial, but he put this together specifically to understand what the actual documented record was. it’s a very good breakdown of both cases, and he’s careful to separate what’s confirmed from what’s speculation.
3. the most important piece and the most detailed is an article by ben rothenberg, originally published in racquet magazine in 2020 and followed up with a longer piece in slate in 2021. both cover the case of olga sharypova, the case that never went to court since sharypova chose not to press criminal charges. the articles include named witnesses, whatsapp messages, photographs of bruising, and match footage showing scratch marks on zverev’s neck appearing mid-tournament.
the reason you may not have seen them: zverev sued rothenberg and both publications in germany, where defamation laws are considerably harsher than in the us. a court granted zverev a preliminary injunction and ordered slate to remove its story. the publisher complied by geo-blocking it for audiences in the european union but continued to stand by the reporting and kept it accessible elsewhere. due to a technicality in how the lawsuit was served, racquet was eventually dropped from the claim, leaving rothenberg alone on the docket and facing considerable legal costs he had not anticipated.
rothenberg has not retracted the reporting, set up a gofundme to cover his legal costs, and is still contesting the case. the defamation proceedings have not produced a finding that the reporting was false, only that it was published. the archived version of the slate piece is available here. discretion is advised — it is a very painful and at times distressing read.
the policy that came five years too late
throughout all of this, the atp had no domestic violence policy whatsoever. there was no mechanism to suspend a player facing abuse charges, no reporting structure, nothing. this meant zverev competed freely at every tournament during the entire period, including while a criminal trial was actively pending against him.
it gets more uncomfortable than that. in early 2024, while that trial was still scheduled and unresolved, zverev was elected by his fellow players to the atp player advisory council, a body that advises atp management and the board of directors on policy decisions. ben rothenberg pointed out the obvious irony at the time: if the atp were to finally draft a domestic violence policy, it would potentially need to pass through a council that included the man at the center of the most prominent domestic violence case in the sport’s recent history.
the atp only launched a formal safeguarding programme in december 2025, effective january 2026. it now includes a specific code of conduct covering domestic violence, designated safeguarding officers at every tournament, and anonymous reporting channels. it came five years after sharypova first went public, and well after both cases had been permanently closed with no verdict in either.
under the new rules, zverev’s situation would have looked meaningfully different, though not necessarily ended in suspension. the biggest change is a mandatory disclosure obligation: players are now required to notify the atp’s safeguarding director if they are facing any police investigation or criminal proceeding involving a safeguarding concern. so the moment the berlin prosecutor issued that formal penalty order in 2023, zverev would have had to report it to the atp, triggering a formal review process rather than leaving the tour to simply ignore it. an independent safeguarding advisory panel would then have assessed the situation and could have recommended provisional suspension.
that said, the policy does not appear to mandate automatic suspension upon charge alone, so whether he would have actually been kept off the tour would have depended on how that panel exercised its judgment. what it would have definitively prevented is what actually happened: a player under active criminal proceedings competing without any formal atp response, no review, no oversight, nothing.
Remember when a story inspired by Jannik was published on the Mickey Mouse comics in Italy. And his name was Quacknik Spinner
"It's normal, I get nervous too sometimes!" "Well, we're not robots, Quacknik" (jesus even Duffy Duck understood it before every tennis journalist in the world😭)
"After seeing TWO tennis matches on TV I wrote 'Champion in one afternoon' to help Quacknik!" (drag them💀)
"But the two best players in men’s tennis, who have been redefining its terms of brilliance for some time despite their youth, are living on through their tennis children." is a CRAZY line btw
No but when I say I don't have anymore of these left in me I mean it. Jannik, if you have to lose at Wimbledon, or anywhere, can you please do it normally? No illnesses/injury scares, no choking, no goating out in the first sets just to lose in the end, can we do that, please? Just a normal 3/4 sets stinker, where you are at no point in a winning position. I didn't appreciate USO25 enough
What happened to losing just because you got outplayed? bc the guy across across the net spent 15 days before the major was training exclusively on how to beat you? I would be less heartbroken if he wasn't one game away, if j cerundulo actually played good tennis and figured you out. Losing to Djokovic in AO bc he dragged you to 5 sets, losing to Mensik because he served big. Please lose normally from now on. I don't want to watch another Cincinnati final where you almost get bageled bc you're being stubborn.
hi anna! i was listening to this best of three podcast episode (https://open.spotify.com/episode/2j5cJ4mvyAbntOvH9w7ImU?si=dwFjH2yxSyix5TVUWPCCGQ) where they speak about sinner’s build and physicality. i found the conversation at the 16-minute mark particularly interesting:
“Much like I feel that Carlos’ athleticism has let him play ‘bigger’ than his 6 foot frame, I feel like Jannik plays more of a nimble, dare I say ‘shorter’, compact and manoeuvrable [game] at 6”3’.”
i was wondering if you think this idea has any merit to it, or is at all reflective of your own analysis of their playstyles and mechanics?
my dear anon, the podcast observation is in my opinion very sound, and that stylistic contrast they describe is genuinely there when you look at what carlos and jannik are actually doing mechanically.
how they generate power
the clearest place to see it is how each of them generates force. carlos’s forehand operates as a stretch-shortening cycle weapon: the kinetic chain loads eccentrically through hip-trunk counter-rotation, stores elastic energy in the obliques and shoulder internal rotators, then releases through a lasso follow-through that produces 3,200+ rpm topspin.
carlos hitting forehand in slow-mo during iw practice
jannik, at 191cm with long limb segments, operates more as a lever system than a rotational engine. his forehand uses a slingshot lag pattern where the racket head trails the hand through the hitting zone, storing energy in the wrist extensors before snapping forward at contact. torque equals force times moment arm, and jannik’s longer arm segments create a larger moment arm, producing equivalent racket-head speed with less angular velocity.
jannik hitting forehand in slow-mo during iw practice
the result is that carlos generates more spin and trajectory curvature, while jannik produces superior linear ball speed and depth consistency.
carlos vs jannik forehand back and front view comparison
on pure forehand quality, carlos leads. his forehand tops the atp leaderboard and is widely considered the best shot in the men’s game right now. the mechanical reason for that is the stretch-shortening cycle: the same muscle-tendon elastic loading that produces 3,200+ rpm also allows him to play bigger, heavier and higher than his 6-foot frame would suggest possible. he genuinely plays like a taller player through technique alone.
jannik tells the opposite story as at 6’3” you would expect a player who imposes himself physically through leverage and height — instead his mechanics are deliberately compact: backswing low, wrist quiet, racket head dropping through the hitting zone using gravity rather than muscular force. he plays a precise and contained game that looks more like it belongs to someone 5’10”. the compactness is not a limitation but the design.
how they cover the court
their movement patterns are equally divergent and the contrast is immediately visible in how many steps each takes to cover the same ground. carlos is widely considered the best mover on tour: he generates explosive lateral force through a low centre of gravity and wide base, producing rapid multi-directional acceleration in short bursts that look almost supernatural at full speed. the result is someone who takes many small, loaded steps, constantly firing and reloading to change direction with radical suddenness. his straight-line speed compounds this further, giving him the ability to retrieve balls that simply should not be retrievable and then reset into an attacking position within the same point.
court coverage from carlos
jannik prioritises vertical force through long-lever leg extension, which means his stride covers far more ground than carlos’s. where carlos might take four or five rapid cuts to reach the same ball, jannik gets there in two or three, his longer limbs doing the work with less visible effort and less total movement. the steps are fewer, the strides are longer, and by the time the ball arrives he is already set.
court coverage from jannik
how they construct points
the tactical identities that follow from this are almost perfectly opposed: carlos operates as a chaos agent, introducing variance, unpredictability and temporal disruption into rallies. jannik operates as a time thief, systematically reducing the opponent’s preparation window through ball speed, depth and early ball-striking that compresses their decision cycle. carlos needs time to create chaos. jannik’s system specifically eliminates time.
so to me the podcast framing holds: carlos plays bigger and more expansively than his frame suggests, and jannik plays with a mechanical containment and economy that belies his height. one wins through flair and disruption, the other through the accumulation of relentless technical pressure.
the longer game
what makes this more than an aesthetic observation is what each system asks of the body over time. jannik’s game is built to be renewable: the mechanics distribute force more evenly, gravity does much of the work, and his longer limbs mean he covers the court with less physical expenditure per step. there is no free lunch in professional tennis, but jannik’s system comes closer to one than almost anyone else on tour.
carlos’s game is the opposite proposition. every shot requires the full elastic loading and unloading of the muscle-tendon chain, every movement pattern is explosive and high impact, and the same mechanism that produces those high rpms places extreme cumulative stress across the entire kinetic chain. it is sensational precisely because it is always running at maximum output. carlos’s explosive, rotational system produces the more spectacular tennis and in many ways the more complete game. but a style built entirely on full athleticism being available at all times raises a real, non-theoretical question that jannik’s game simply does not: whether it can sustain itself across a long career without eventually demanding a technical adaptation. sports medicine experts have already noted that players with carlos’s mechanics may at some point need to adjust their technique to reduce the structural load.
in the end their career longevity may ultimately be determined by which mechanical system degrades more gracefully with age. right now the two systems produce remarkably similar results. but systems that look identical in their output can be running at very different rates of wear, and the time will only tell if it becomes visible.
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