2025 Predictions

Rune — Sinner — Fonseca — Berrettini — Alcaraz — GMP and serves

On the 31st of December in 2023 I made a list of predictions for the 2024 season on Twitter:

Prizmic and Medjedovic seemed like locks this time last year.

Few of those were really a “hot take” (maybe Fonseca, who started outside the 700s and just snuck in at 145, and Hurkacz, who already had a Wimbledon semifinal to his name), but I’m still batting below .500 here.

Yes, we are already a week into the 2025 season, but I was travelling to Australia on the 31st and let this one slip by.

Anyway, here are a couple of my 2025 (conditional) predictions that are (I think?) more aggressive.

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Rune to Finish top-5 if…

Lars stays as the solo operator/coach for 2025.

Doubling down here after a lacklustre 2024. This is maybe as much about the players ranked 5 to 12 as it is about Holger sitting at 13. There’s an argument that all the players standing in his way of a top-5 spot have hit their ceiling (Ruud, de Minaur?), are on a slight decline (Tsitsipas, Medvedev, Rublev, Dimitrov), or are simply not going to play enough events in 2025 (Djokovic).

Now here’s the bear case, and one that still applied to his opening round loss to Lehecka in Brisbane: “yeah he’s got great shots, but he has no clue WTF he’s doing out there. There’s no strategy. There’s no identity. He’s playing like a jackass (Lehecka match especially).”

Fair.

Here’s the bull case: The Dane is back with Lars Christensen, his longtime childhood coach and the one who steered him to world number 4 in the first place. Since they reunited — or at least since news broke that they reunited — Rune went back-to-back semifinals in Basel and Paris to finish the year. Here’s another: despite the often poor shot-selection, the kid is still #13 in the world and had 45 tour wins in 2024 (he’s also 10th in TA’s elo rating). He lost early at both the Australian Open and the US Open, had an anaemic clay season that ended in a five-set loss to Zverev at Roland Garros, and had two retirements and a couple of blowouts (Marozsan in Miami, Fritz in Shanghai) that just looked like mental checkouts. Still just 21, I’m backing the Dane in 2025 to right the ship. He can attack, he can defend, he can move forward and volley, and importantly, he can play well on all surfaces. If anyone knows how to put Rune’s game back together again, it’s Lars.

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Sinner does the Channel Slam if…

he avoids a doping ban

When Sinner first came on tour I always felt his game was going to translate very well to clay. The backhand is capable of doing heavy damage from deep positions, and now that he is an elite mover, there is only the question of fitness that is stopping him from a maiden final at Roland Garros. To date he has 18 titles on hard/clay/grass and only one on clay, in Umag 2022. Who did he beat in that final? Carlos Alcaraz (highlights). You could argue his lean 2024 clay season is more impressive than the paper trail suggests: he got an unlucky call at a crucial moment in the Tsitsipas match in Monte Carlo; he withdrew before his quarterfinal match against FAA in Madrid; and he won more points against Alcaraz in their tense five-set RG semifinal. A run of poor health leading up to RG — said to be related to the stress of his then secret drug test result — also hurt his fitness in that tournament.

Then there is his grass pedigree. He’s won Halle before and has made the quarterfinals or better at the last three editions of Wimbledon (losses to Djokovic, Djokovic, and Medvedev). Again, you could say there were fitness issues in the quarterfinal against Medvedev this year — a player he is 9-1 against since Beijing 2023 — and on a faster surface he has a matchup advantage against Alcaraz.

Overall, while Alcaraz and Sinner split the grand slam silverware this year, Alcaraz didn’t really play that well for stretches like Sinner did. He played great in the Wimbledon and Beijing finals, and he figured out Sinner in important moments in Indian Wells and Roland Garros, but overall Sinner is doing the basics better than Alcaraz, and along with Alcaraz’s lowered backhand takeback in the latter half of the season — a change that I think is an overall net negative to his game — I think Sinner is the clear front-running player heading into 2025.

He has a strong player identity, his strokes are phenomenal, the movement is elite, the serve is a weapon.

Two slams is conservative given the form versus the field. Could he complete the career slam before Alcaraz?

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Fonseca finishes top 20 if…

He stays healthy and plays a full season

This one is my wild pick. I had this in my drafts before the nextgen finals event, mind you, but I had the ranking at 40.

The more I see from this kid the more bullish I get. Here’s my updated position based on my general thesis of technique having outsized impacts at the elite end of the game:

It’s a matter of when, not if, Fonseca lifts grand slam silverware and the world number 1 ranking.

This is very early to call given he’s completely unproven in grand slams, but it’s a feeling I can’t shake. I had the fortune of watching Alcaraz live at the Australian Open in 2022 for the first couple of rounds. That year Australia still had closed international borders, and it was easy to find a front row seat on the outer courts and watch the Spaniard tear apart Tabilo and Lajovic in the first two rounds, before succumbing to Berrettini in a classic five-setter. Ranked #32 at the time, you could just feel the quality of his game in live viewing. I privately told a friend — himself an astute follower of the game — that he would finish the year in the top-5. He ended up finishing #1 along with winning the US Open.

While Fonseca is nowhere near as physically developed as Alcaraz was at 18, I get that same feeling watching him play.

There’s no ‘if’ in this kid’s game. There is only when. The quality of his ball-striking, the technique off the ground, and the improved serve throughout 2024, is already of a top-20 calibre. We’re just waiting for the legs to catch up to the arms.

Perhaps Sinner is a more accurate comparison. Sinner was ranked #78 coming into the 2020 season (when he was also 18, and like Fonseca, shares an August birthdate) and finished the year #37, which featured a quarterfinal at Roland Garros that was stopped by Nadal. But that was also a Covid-interrupted campaign, and with a full runway of matches to gain experience it’s likely the Italian would have finished higher (he cracked the top-25 in early April of 2021).

Of course, Fonseca would need some luck and wildcards if he starts the year slow, given his ranking. One reason I think this could work is if Fonseca got hot during the Golden Swing — a section on the calendar full of clay 250s (and a 500 in his native Brazil) that have historically allowed emerging and lower-ranked players to find tour success. If he took this form into the European clay season, he could do some damage in major events. Then there’s his US Open experience. He won the juniors there (over Learner Tien, no less) in 2023, and with another nine months of tour development, a then 19-year-old could find his stride in the Big Apple. His current US Open price is interesting to me. More value in this than any other long-shot.

Another Fonseca prediction: one or both of his groundstrokes will make Tennis Insights’ year end top-10 lists.

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Berrettini returns to the top-10 if…

He can stay injury-free

There’s no denying that the Italian Hammer is an injury-prone player; the man is built like a brick house on match sticks. But, when he is healthy he is one hell of a player. He won three titles in 2024 after starting his season in March (following an injury layoff, naturally), and finished the year in style, helping Italy win another Davis Cup alongside Sinner. That season was good enough to earn him 13th on Tennis Abstract’s elo rating. Additionally, he recently hired Sinner’s ex-fitness trainer — yes, that one — Umberto Ferrara. Say what you will of the Sinner fiasco, Berrettini is convinced of his compatriot’s innocence, and Ferrara clearly did help Sinner immensely in their time together. Darren Cahill said as much when asked what had helped Sinner transform his physicality:

“Two words: Umberto Ferrara, the physical trainer. He’s been a genius in what he’s been able to do. I think it’s really important that anybody, when you come in to a team, is that firstly you map out the progress that you need to make. You’re very clear on the training that he needed to do. You don’t try to pack in six months of work into two months. You break down the athlete. Umberto has been unbelievable in that.”

— Darren Cahill

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Demon’s best down under if…

I don’t have an if for this one. de Minaur looked very sharp in his first United Cup match against Tomas Etcheverry. I liked how he hit the backhand early both ways, and he often snuck forward in a premeditated fashion after a well-struck groundstroke.

We gotta talk about the volleys and the hands. Most under-rated volleyer on tour?

I think the Demon is primed for a big AO campaign. As the 8th seed he will avoid the top brass until at least the quarterfinals, and it’s taken Sinner, Djokovic, or an epic tussle with Rublev last year to stop him.

Let’s see how the draw shakes out on Thursday.

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Alcaraz’s backhand goes backwards if…

He keeps this abbreviated setup.

You can see the straighter arms and lowered racquet head on the left (Paris), compared to his older takeback (23 AO) that was higher and with more elbow flexion.

Alcaraz scored a 7.81 in 2023 and an 8.08 in 2024 based on Tennis Insights’ algorithm. Enough for fifth and fourth place, respectively.

Perhaps due to the speed of the game and the type of opponent that troubles him (big hitters with flat, early ball striking: Humbert, Tiafoe, Struff, Sinner) Alcaraz is trying to create a backswing that can handle fast incoming balls. It may suit that particular issue, but I see this as a net negative. By straightening the left arm more he is losing the ability to create racquet speed with elbow extension and the natural racquet drop of the higher takeback a bent elbow creates. So many great backhands have featured this ‘bent → straight’ move in the left arm in the initial drop as it transfers speed efficiently from the torso rotation, through the arm, and then into the hands (Djokovic, Nishikori, Nalbandian, Safin). Some might point to Tomas Machac as a model of someone who has this initial setup and that has a backhand that thrives. However, the details of the Czech’s backhand swing are different in a subtle, yet crucial, way. Here’s a side-by-side of a similar approach shot backhand (this is Alcaraz’s older backhand, but his new one is similar in the important topic anyway — see above gif):

Notice it? Here’s the crucial image:

Look how much farther back Machac gets the racquet tip with is hands closer to his body. This is a Sinner style backhand with straighter arms. For all of Machac’s compact setup, he gets the racquet tip a long way back that allows him to build in-to-out speed (shocker). Alcaraz does not. You can see that Alcaraz doesn’t really get much swing length in the backswing. It’s not as anaemic as de Minaur’s, but it’s quite small. His racquet drop that he used to have was the source of his racquet speed that allowed it to work without a Machac-esque length in the backswing.

Recall the Sinner/Djokovic comparison of backswings from the 2023 ATP Finals recap.

So where is Alcaraz going to be weak with this setup? If the ball gets high on him, or particularly heavy, I think he will struggle to generate enough speed to time the ball well. He’s using the small muscles of his forearms and wrists too much now. Just watch his initial warm up video with GMP and notice how he now has a Rublev-esque issue with getting the outside of the ball efficiently. I think the backhand down-the-line will suffer, and the clay court backhand will suffer. But I certainly could be wrong and let’s see what he does over the next fortnight.

Speaking of GMP, I don’t have a prediction of this guy yet, but what he is doing with his serve is nuts. He’s breaking the game almost. If you go onto the itf tennis site there is an article in their resources section that is titled ‘State of the Game’ and highlights research on serve returnability and what makes it more difficult, namely: serve angle, proximity to the sideline or centre T line, and post-bounce ball speed.

It’s interesting that the ITF has their finger on the pulse with respect to rally length and how to ensure the game stays within a healthy range (from an entertainment perspective; we are in the entertainment business, you see).

Their proposal would be to make the service box narrower

Anyway, I don’t have a prediction for GMP because what he does is unprecedented. His second serve speed is outrageous, he can move, he is learning the net game, he can stay in rallies ok. Can he win a slam? Probably at some point.

That will do for now. An Australian Open draw preview will drop before the tournament gets underway on Sunday, and I’ll be on the grounds during the first week to quench my live tennis needs.

What are your predictions for 2025?

Let me know in the comments! HC