If you would like to follow The Athletic’s French Open coverage, click here and follow our tennis page.
How will the challengers on the ATP Tour respond to their task?
Is this the tournament that proves a WTA Big Four is still possible?
Where will the fight over Grand Slam prize money go next?
And what about the annual debate over line judges?
The 2026 French Open promises to be a cracker. Here, The Athletic’s tennis writers, Ava Wallace, Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, chart some of the key storylines to follow over the next fortnight.
Would the men’s tour please stand up?
Félix Auger-Aliassime has won five of his last 10 matches and never reached the French Open quarterfinals. He’s exited in the first round in four of his six visits.
He’s also the world No. 5, and the fourth seed here because of world No. 2 and defending champion Carlos Alcaraz’s absence due to a wrist injury, which makes him a theoretical semifinal opponent for Jannik Sinner.
But given his form and Roland Garros record, it’s hard to imagine him getting to that stage, let alone testing Sinner once there.
Auger-Aliassime is not alone. The No. 8 seed Alex de Minaur had won just four of his previous 11 matches before going on a run at the Hamburg Open this week. Taylor Fritz is rusty. Ben Shelton’s drive to be formidable on a clay court has hit a sticky patch. Lorenzo Musetti, a semifinalist last year, is also injured. All the way down from the top 3 seeds of Sinner, Alexander Zverev and Novak Djokovic to the 32nd seed, the men’s top tier is in a state of Grand Slam stasis.
Expecting deep runs from its younger members — Rafael Jódar and João Fonseca chief among them — feels premature. Learner Tien of the U.S., like most of his compatriots, is still figuring out the way of clay. 21-year-old Frenchman Arthur Fils has the talent and charisma to ride the wave of French support into the latter stages, but he’s only recently back from an eight-month back injury and retired with a hip issue at his last event.
Arthur Fils is just one rising star trying to make an impact at this year’s Roland Garros. (Franck Fife / AFP via Getty Images)
If there are any sensible bets, they might come in the shape of longtime contenders Casper Ruud and Daniil Medvedev. They both went deep at the Italian Open last week, with the former reaching the final and the latter the semis. Both gave decent accounts of themselves against Sinner, with Medvedev even taking a set off the seemingly unbeatable world No. 1.
Those are the kind of slim pickings that the chasing pack are feeding off at the moment.
— Charlie Eccleshare
Will the four best women’s players in the world share power, or concentrate it?
Here’s what the top of the WTA Tour looks like on the eve of the French Open.
Aryna Sabalenka is the world No. 1 She makes just about every big tournament final these days, and has won a lot of them the past two years.
Elena Rybakina is the world No. 2, and the best player in the world this year.
Iga Świątek is the world No. 3. She is a four-time Roland Garros champion and still the best clay-court player in the world when in form.
Coco Gauff is the world No. 4. She is the defending champion.
All four have the vagaries of fitness and form and the pressures of expectation to manage, but the more interesting thing about their presence in this tournament is how the balances of power could shift by its end.
Gauff is defending 2,000 rankings points and needs to win a good deal of them back to stay in the quartet. Rybakina is defending fewer points than Sabalenka, and could overtake the world No. 1 if she goes deep and Sabalenka makes a surprise exit — the kind she did at the Italian Open earlier this month to Sorana Cîrstea. Świątek has a modest shot at No. 2 with a deep run, and the hot weather forecast, at least for the first week, should suit her down to the ground.
If all four do well, then they are set to concentrate their power and solidify their positions even further, because it will lock out the contenders below them from making meaningful progress.
There are a handful of candidates. Mirra Andreeva. Amanda Anisimova, if her wrist is in shape. There are more, including some dark horses further down the ladder, but these players have won a combined 14 of the past 18 Grand Slam titles, going back to the 2021 French Open, when Barbora Krejčíková beat Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.
— Matt Futterman
How much is the sun going to define the tournament?
Tennis stars hit refresh on their weather apps at the French Open more than any other Grand Slam. Wimbledon is more affected by rain, and the U.S. and Australian Opens are often hotter, but it’s the second Grand Slam of the year whose conditions can flip most drastically and most quickly.
This year, the sun is out and it’s hot, with temperatures set to reach 90 degrees during the first week of play. That makes for fast-flying balls and high bounce, which can quickly become slower, lower and sludgier if clouds appear or rain falls — on the outside courts.
“The conditions changed today, so from now on, I feel like the practices will be more different than two days ago. It’s important to get the feeling of the court right now with the heat,” Świątek, the four-time champion who loves hot days on the terre battue that let her forehand jump above her opponents’ shoulders, said during her pre-tournament news conference.
Clay can stay playable through hot sunshine all the way through to light rain, which means tournaments played on it have the widest range of possible conditions in tennis. A matchup that looks one-sided on a hot day can look very different on a dank grey one — it might not flip entirely from one player to another, the change can be meaningful enough to make a one-sided match a tight one.
Hotter weather also brings conditioning into play, especially in men’s matches that go to four or five sets. But with the forecast promising a cooler turn after the opening weekend, the most important thing for the players might be adapting to swings in the Paris climate. Time to hit refresh again.
— James Hansen
Where will the prize-money dispute go next?
No one is going to get out the violins for the players who lift the French Open singles trophies. They will each receive a winner’s check for nearly $3.3 million.
Every top player knows that. So the stars who took part in a partial boycott of media duties Friday at Roland Garros were unequivocal about why. During their briefer-than-usual news conferences — at least for the players who regularly go over 10 minutes — the message was that all this is in service of bettering the lives of lower-ranked players.
The 10-minute news conference plus five-minute video limit, which, they said, adds up to 15 because that is the proportion of revenue paid as prize money, delivered some oddities. Some players participating, including last year’s winner and runner-up, Aryna Sabalenka and Coco Gauff, actively cut things short. Others were less aware of the clock. But the shared vision was on full display.
“I think top players who are winning and selling tickets of course should be rewarded for bringing in those fan bases,” said Jessica Pegula a leader of the effort to gain at least 22 percent of the revenue the four Grand Slams collect. “We’re more worried about the ecosystem of the sport as a whole, not seeing it be so top-heavy.”
Ben Shelton of the U.S. said that Grand Slams need to think about how more players can sustain themselves.
“We have so many talented players in the top 200 and even outside that you should be able to make a living playing this sport being ranked at that place, and that’s not the case right now,” Shelton said.
Barring some sort of major unforeseen collapse, prize money at the Grand Slams will continue to go up. But the players want those increases to be commensurate with the tournaments’ increased revenues, as they sell more tickets and renegotiate sponsorships and, eventually, media-rights deals.
The next question is whether or not the players up the ante in terms of their protests, and whether or not this one leads to any significant change. The move to limit media availability has gotten them some of their first audiences in a while with the federations that run the Grand Slams, to discuss player compensation, benefits, and representation.
Tennis leaders though, are very good at meetings – and talking to agitated players without necessarily doing a great deal.
The players seem to sense that they are going to have to do more, but how much more? Their mileage may vary.
When asked about the possibility of a boycott, which Sabalenka floated and Gauff and others supported at the Italian Open earlier this month, Taylor Fritz was reluctant to call it anything more than “the B-word.”
“It’s a really big deal, and I don’t think we as players should really, I don’t know, make big threats like that unless we’re fully ready to do it. I think that’s a discussion we need to have and we need to see what the potential ramifications for doing that are,” he said in a news conference.
Some are ready for that discussion.
“I think that players — especially top players — are willing to do more than most people think,” Shelton said.
— Matt Futterman
How long will line judges last?
The French Open has once again gone against the majority of tennis tournaments by retaining human line judges, making it the only Grand Slam to do so.
The reasoning is sometimes egocentric — French Tennis Federation president Gilles Moretton said last year that the country has the best officials in the world — but it is also seen as noble, by those who feel the replacement of human eyes with technology has lost something ineffable as well as reducing job opportunities. Some players also take this view, not that it prevents them from agonizing over the a ball mark as much as anyone else.
And herein lies the problem. At every other clay-court tournament, players have been told not to believe their eyes. Clay is a live surface, and some parts of a court can have a thicker layer of red brick at one moment and a thinner one the next, because of wind or a player sliding over it. This means that ball marks are sometimes not actually an accurate trace of how the ball met the court on a given shot.
They are still getting to grips with this, and still arguing with umpires over ball marks that look out, but are not, according to electronic line calling. Umpires are still getting to grips with it too, saying things like “I have to go with the system,” rather than reiterating the message that the marks do not always tell the whole story. It’s a process. It takes time.
As a result, the most important clay-court of all chucking players back into their old way of seeing and understanding the contours of a tennis match is hugely counterproductive. Could the tours and events that use ELC on clay do more to communicate why players need to disregard ball marks entirely, because they and the system tell opposing stories? Yes they could. But it’s hardly a surprise, with this officiating whiplash on one of tennis’ biggest stages, that its players are not yet fully understanding why ELC on clay is the way it is.
— James Hansen
And will the French Open run into tennis’ surprising popularity problem?
It’s become commonplace at tennis tournaments to be informed of record attendance figures. It happened at the Australian Open at the start of the year on an almost daily basis, and then again at the Italian Open this month.
Events are understandably proud of being packed, but being so does not necessarily equate to a positive spectator experience. At the Australian Open, the grounds were heaving and there were lengthy lines to get into smaller courts and for food and drink outlets. Things got especially jammed when players like Fonseca and Alex Eala, who have huge fanbases, were in action on the outside courts. This can devalue the experience of spectators who come on ground passes, just as their popularity causes their prices to rise year on year.
With sunny weather forecast for the next couple of weeks, crowds will likely flock to Roland Garros. That’s been the case this week too, with a tournament spokesperson saying that the expectation is that the overall attendance will be higher than the 102,000-plus who came through in opening week last year.
One way to help manage the situation? Newly installed screens, showing the percentage occupancy of the outside courts. The U.S. Open did something similar last year, but on the tournament’s phone application.
It’s a good problem for the sport to have, but one that needs addressing nonetheless.
— Charlie Eccleshare
Which storylines will you be looking out for during the next fortnight? Tell us in the comments
