Bill ConnellyJan 16, 2026, 01:46 PM ETCloseBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Follow on X
The first Grand Slam of the 2026 tennis campaign begins this weekend in Melbourne, and it must be said: The hierarchy has rarely been this clear.
We’re used to a small core of players dominating on the men’s side, and Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz are certainly doing that. Sinner is 32-0 against anyone not named Alcaraz over his past five Slams, while Alcaraz has six Slam titles and won’t turn 23 until May; Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer had won a combined three Slams at his age.
Meanwhile, there’s a clear top player on the women’s side as well: Aryna Sabalenka has lost just two matches in her past six hard-court Slams and has reached the finals in seven of her past 10 hard-court events. What Iga Swiatek has been for a few years on clay, Sabalenka is on hard courts. (Oh yeah, and she beat Swiatek on clay last year, too.)
Nothing’s guaranteed during a fortnight, however, and even if we think we know how the Australian Open will end, each Slam gives us a unique ride — and countless secondary storylines. So, let’s buckle up, adjust our sleep schedules and see where the 2026 Aussie Open takes us. Here are the 20 players most likely to make noise over the next two weeks.
Sinner won the young titans’ last matchup (7-6, 7-5 at the Tour Finals in Riyadh) with particularly big serving, but Alcaraz is the only player who can force him out of his comfortable patterns of play. Sinner appears to have a slightly better draw than Alcaraz — among other things, he has won eight straight matches against Shelton, his likely first top-10 opponent — but then again, every draw is friendly for Sinner. It’s just a question of whether he finishes first or second.
It took Alcaraz a little while to dial in last year, as he reached the finals of only one of his first five tournaments. But, incredibly, he reached the finals of 10 of his final 11 events of the year. He won the French Open, and after a surprisingly poor performance against Sinner in the Wimbledon final, he took some time off, worked on a Sinner-specific training block, and mostly manhandled Sinner in a four-set US Open finals win.
Swiatek couldn’t keep up with Sabalenka in the points race last year, and she had an awful clay season by her standards, failing to reach a final (and falling to Sabalenka at Roland Garros). But Swiatek also won Wimbledon for the first time — dropping just two total games in the final two matches, no less — and won 62 matches overall.
The two-time Australian Open semifinalist is now just a title in Melbourne away from a career Slam. But Swiatek lost her past two matches at this year’s United Cup (to Gauff and Belinda Bencic), and her draw is rough: She could face two-time champ Naomi Osaka in the fourth round, then Rybakina — the hottest player on tour not named Sabalenka — in the quarters.
After laboring for over a year after her return to the tour in 2024, Osaka finally found the accelerator last summer, reaching the finals in Montreal and the semis of the US Open (sweeping Gauff along the way). The two-time Australian Open champ ran out of steam from there and began 2026 battling illness; she has won only four tour matches since her US Open run. But Osaka is back in the top 20, and her serve is back among the game’s elite, maybe trailing only Rybakina’s.
A 2025 Australian Open semifinalist, the boisterous and athletic 23-year-old was on his way to the best year of his career before a painful shoulder injury forced him out of the US Open in the third round. It wasn’t as serious as feared, but he lost seven of 10 matches to finish 2025, and he’s a bit of a mystery entering 2026. The upside remains unquestionable.
Andreeva, 18, has looked like a future Slam champion since her first professional tournament, and it didn’t seem like we would be waiting too much longer on that when she won back-to-back 1000-level events (Dubai and Indian Wells) early in 2025. But a downturn in form and nagging injuries led to her losing six of her last 10 matches of the year. She has started 2026 well, reaching the final in Adelaide, and we know what she’s capable of when fully dialed in.
An all-time grinder, Pegula has been all-or-nothing in Slams of late: Over the past two years, she has been upset before the fourth round four times but has reached two semifinals and one final. She has beaten Sabalenka and Gauff in recent months, and she’s 3-0 all time against Anisimova (the highest seed in her quarter), but is this an “all” Slam or a “nothing” for the 31-year-old?
After reaching two Slam finals in 2024, the 30-year-old Paolini staved off flash-in-the-pan-itis with a career-high 46 tour wins in 2025, and she remains seventh in the world despite having reached zero Slam quarterfinals last year. Her form isn’t great, though: She has lost five straight matches (and 10 straight sets) against top-10 opponents and seven of her past 13 matches overall.
Few players have learned to grind out results and shore up weaknesses more than Fritz. But he has lost three of his first four matches in 2026 — and nine of 14 since reaching the Tokyo finals in September — and he recently revealed that he’s struggling to overcome nagging knee issues. If he can fight through that and establish a solid level of play, his draw could be conducive to a quarterfinal run at worst, but that’s quite the “if” at the moment.
It’s fitting that Tien landed in a quarter with Zverev and Medvedev, as early-2025 upsets of both of those players teed up his charge into the top 30. He’s a big-game player — 4-3 against top-10 opponents over the past year — and he might be the most likely young player to make a charge on the men’s side with Joao Fonseca battling back issues.
Others: Joao Fonseca (+10000), Linda Noskova (+10000), Iva Jovic (+15000), Tereza Valentova (+15000)
No matter who her second-round opponent might be, Gauff should enjoy a solid stay in Melbourne. The 2024 semifinalist, who’s still somehow only 21 years old, battled a patchy 2025 campaign full of double faults — her 10.3% double-fault rate over the past year is by far the worst of any top-50 player — and high points. Even with service issues, she went 3-2 against Sabalenka and Swiatek, won her first French Open title and reached the finals of three 1000-level tournaments, winning one. She’s a threat in any tournament she enters, and she has already scored a win over Swiatek in 2026 (though she’s also double-faulting 11.8% of the time).
Rybakina’s 2025 season was all over the map. The 2022 Wimbledon champion (and 2023 Aussie Open finalist) fell out of the top 10 in April and failed to reach a Slam quarterfinal as she first separated from her suspended coach, then brought him back into the fold. But she won 11 of her final 12 matches of the year and took down four top-five opponents to take the Tour Finals title in Riyadh. She could face a titanic quarterfinal against Swiatek, but when she’s fully dialed in, she’s a top-three talent at worst.
At this point, the 38-year-old Djokovic — a 10-time Australian Open champion and 24-time Slam winner — is basically a part-time professional. He’s also still almost certainly the third-best men’s player in the world. He entered only 13 tournaments in 2025, and he relies on his ability to play his way into form in a given draw. That resulted in a few early exits, but it also produced four Slam semifinal appearances in 2025, plus a 27-4 record in his past six tournaments. He has lost five straight matches (and nine straight sets) to Sinner, and Alcaraz manhandled him in the US Open semis, but his capabilities are still incredible.
Keys pulled a Reverse Rybakina in 2025. She finally claimed her first Slam title with an epic Australian Open finals win over Sabalenka that was part of a 16-match winning streak that pushed her to fifth in the world. But she went just 19-14 over the rest of the season, and a combination of injuries and poor form meant she didn’t win a match after early August. She has looked decent in January, at least, but her draw might require her to beat Pegula and Amanda Anisimova just to return to the semis.
A three-time Australian Open finalist, Medvedev won only 65% of his matches in 2025 and went a shocking 1-4 in Slams, his worst output since 2017. But desperation can sometimes provide a spark: Since falling out of the ATP top 15, he has won 16 of 19 matches with two tour titles. He’s back up to 12th, and with almost no Slam points to defend in 2026, he could rise quickly. He also landed in Alexander Zverev’s quarter of the draw — aka the quarter most conducive to a semifinal run. Medvedev turns 30 in February, but it looks like he might have found the shot in the arm he needed.
With Alcaraz battling inconsistency and Sinner suspended for three months, Zverev had a chance to sneak to the No. 1 ranking for the first time last spring. Instead, he stumbled throughout the clay-court season and missed his window. A three-time Australian Open semifinalist (and a finalist in 2025), his ultra-consistent serve and suffer-ball capabilities make him hard to upset. But he also went just 4-11 against the top 10 and 1-6 against the top five in 2025. Is there anything he can do to reverse that trend?
Despite all of Sabalenka’s success, you could make the case that Anisimova was the story of 2025. After taking most of 2023 off from the tour and enjoying merely decent results in 2024, she won 47 matches and went 4-4 against Sabalenka, Swiatek and Gauff. And after suffering a humiliating 6-0, 6-0 loss to Swiatek in the Wimbledon final, she beat Swiatek to reach the US Open final. She might have the best backhand in the sport, and her mental resolve is unquestionable at this point. She has never advanced past the fourth round in Melbourne, but there’s no gap in her game to suggest she can’t.
CloseBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Follow on X