The Tennis 128* Welcomes Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner

A few young players are working their way up the ranks of the all-time greats.

In 2022, I published the Tennis 128, my ranking of the 128 best players of the previous 100 years. It was (accidentally!) well-timed, as there were only a few legends in mid-career at the time. That has changed. At the end of 2023, I ran the calculations again and found that Iga Swiatek had earned a place just outside the top 100.

Now it’s the turn of Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner. Both number ones posted outstanding campaigns in 2024, enough to move them into my top “128.” (It’s now 131, since I’m not going to give anybody the boot.) Several other players improved their cases, though not enough for inclusion. We’ll probably have at least one new addition a year from now, as well.

74a. Jannik Sinner

Sinner posted a season for the ages, losing just three matches on hard courts and picking up two majors. He’s still at it, adding the 2025 Australian Open and reaching a new peak Elo rating, placing him among the top ten of the Open era.

My plan was to update the ranking at a logical time, like the “offseason” in December. Had I done that, Sinner would have landed in the mid-80s. I can’t yet do much with his 2025 Australian Open title, but I can use his ever-higher peak Elo rating. That’s the difference between a mid-80s ranking and his new position of 74th.

The Tennis 128 algorithm is based on three components: peak Elo, year-end Elo rating in the player’s best five seasons, and year-end Elo rating for the player’s entire career. The latter two factors make it difficult for a 23-year-old to achieve a high ranking–and understandably so, as it takes time to build an all-time-great résumé. But peak is different. Only a couple dozen men have ever played as well as Sinner is playing right now.

Appropriately, he slides into the list just ahead of Lew Hoad, another man who reached stratospheric peaks. Rod Laver was one of many who long considered Hoad the best ever. Now, to the extent fans still think of him, the assessment is more that on his best day, Hoad could outplay anybody. I’m not sure if Sinner makes quite the same impression, but he’s getting there.

93a. Iga Swiatek

Swiatek lost her place at the top of the WTA rankings, but she added a major in 2024 and posted another solid season. That was enough to move her inside the top 100, to a new position just ahead of Simona Halep.

117a. Aryna Sabalenka

I wrote last year that Sabalenka needed a “particularly dominant season” to crack the list, and she delivered. Two majors, two more notable titles, and a new peak Elo rating to kick off 2025.

One might argue that Swiatek, Sabalenka, or both, should rank even higher. Iga has five majors and Sabalenka has three. There are a lot of names ahead of them on the list with fewer. Part of the issue is that they are young: If they keep playing at the same level for another half-decade or more, they’ll move up quite a bit. I designed the Tennis 128 to assess careers, not careers-in-progress, so it’s a bit awkward to apply the same algorithm to players in their mid-20s or younger.

The other factor is that Elo doesn’t hold the current era of women’s tennis in particularly high regard. Swiatek reached a peak rating of 2,287, good for a place in the top 30 all-time. But Sabalenka has yet to crack 2,200, and Iga has dropped back to 2,154. The Tennis 128 algorithm has a mild era adjustment, because I don’t entirely trust Elo to compare eras. But the adjustment depends on several years of data, so it won’t fully affect 2023 or 2024 for some time.

There’s a reasonable case that I’m underrating the current era. Top players lose early more than the greats of the past, and that is, at least in part, due to an ever-stronger field. Accordingly, we don’t get a lot of head-to-heads among the handful of top women, and that makes it harder to assess just how good they are. I’m keeping an open mind about this, but that won’t affect the rankings for some time: We simply can’t judge the early 2020s from the vantage point of 2025.

On deck

Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev both rank around 140. Another 2024-like season from Alcaraz will be enough for him. Zverev will need a step forward, as his peak Elo is holding him back.

Daniil Medvedev is still around 150. The way things are looking at the moment, that’s where he’ll remain.

The next active player on the list is Naomi Osaka, around 180th. She’ll need to return to top-ten form to climb the list, and she’ll need more than that to break into the top 128.

After that comes Coco Gauff, the woman most likely to join the Tennis 128 a year from now. She sits around 200th, about where Sabalenka was a year ago. If she can turn in a season like Aryna’s 2024, increasing her peak Elo rating in the process, she’ll probably make the cut. If not, it would take (at least) one more year.

No one else is really on the horizon. Elena Rybakina ranks around 250th. Madison Keys is also in the top 300. As Sinner has shown, a monster season with a historically great peak suffices to rocket up the list. So it’s always possible that someone like Rybakina or Qinwen Zheng will come out of nowhere, even if their timetables are likely more conservative.

Check back in December for 2025’s tweaks to the list–I might even do the next update on schedule!

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