The 20th: how Alexander Zverev joined the shortest list in men's tennis

On the Sunday of this year’s US Open final, Alexander Zverev beat Ben Shelton in four sets, lifted the trophy, and walked off Arthur Ashe with the second Grand Slam of his career and most of a year-end No. 1 ranking already banked. On 12 October the maths finished the job. Jannik Sinner’s withdrawal from the European indoor swing combined with Carlos Alcaraz’s early Shanghai defeat made the German’s lead unassailable, and that Monday the ATP confirmed that for the first time in the 53-year history of the computerised rankings, a German national would finish a calendar year as the best tennis player in the world.

Zverev will be 29 years and 217 days old on 23 November, the date the year-end rankings freeze. That makes him the oldest player ever to clinch the position, three days older than Andre Agassi was when he did it in 1999. Agassi’s record had stood for 27 years.

Zverev becomes the twentieth different man to finish a year as ATP No. 1 since the rankings began in August 1973. Twenty names in 53 years.

Who has finished year-end, and who has not

Twenty-nine men have reached No. 1 in the ATP computer rankings. The ten who did not often owned the top of the sport only for a few weeks, in some cases for a few days.

Men who have reached No. 1 but never finished a year there include greats like John Newcombe, Boris Becker, Thomas Muster, Marcelo Ríos, Carlos Moyá, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Patrick Rafter, Marat Safin, Juan Carlos Ferrero, Daniil Medvedev.

Each of them held the ranking for a stretch and then lost it before the rankings were frozen at year end, all of them (except one anomaly), Grand Slam winners but without a year-end crown.

The 19 men who did finish are the names you would expect at the top of the sport. Novak Djokovic leads with eight year-end finishes (2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023). Pete Sampras has six (1993 through 1998). Jimmy Connors, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have five each. John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl have four. Björn Borg, Stefan Edberg, Lleyton Hewitt and Carlos Alcaraz have two each. Năstase, Wilander, Courier, Agassi, Kuerten, Roddick, Murray, Sinner and now Zverev have one.

Djokovic also holds the record for most total weeks at No. 1, 428 across his career, while Federer holds the record for most consecutive weeks, 237. No need to enter that argument here.

The women’s figures tell a parallel story. Thirty women have been ranked WTA No. 1 since the computer system began in November 1975. Sixteen of them have finished a year there. Steffi Graf sits level with Djokovic on eight year-end finishes. Martina Navratilova has seven. Chris Evert and Serena Williams have five each. Lindsay Davenport has four. The fourteen women who touched No. 1 but never owned a year include Naomi Osaka, Maria Sharapova, Kim Clijsters, Venus Williams, Jennifer Capriati, Amélie Mauresmo, Ana Ivanovic and the current world No. 1 Elena Rybakina, who is still playing for her first year-end crown.

Is year-end is harder than a Slam?

The year-end ranking is a 52-week argument. Both tours use a rolling 52-week ranking for the normal “live” position, and a separate “Race” that starts fresh on 1 January and ends on the Monday after the ATP Finals and the WTA Finals. The Race decides year-end.

The points schedule determines finishing the year as the best player on the planet. A Grand Slam champion takes 2,000 ranking points. The ATP Masters 1000 and WTA 1000 events give 1,000 to the winner. The ATP 500 and WTA 500 events give 500, the 250 events 250, and the two year-end Finals award up to 1,500 for a champion who goes undefeated through the round-robin and the knockout. The ATP counts a player’s best 19 tournaments across the year. The WTA counts the best 18, with the WTA Finals folding in as a bonus nineteenth event for those who qualify.

To finish a year at the top of either list, a player has to be among the deepest consistently across all four Slams, several Masters/1000 events, and the smaller tournaments underneath. One hot fortnight is not enough so the player who finishes the year No. 1 is the one who has accumulated more points than anyone else over 52 weeks of travel, surface change, injury management, scheduling and media mishaps or otherwise.

Chris Evert put it as:

Finishing No. 1 at the end of the year means you were the best player for twelve months, not just two weeks. It means you survived the mental grind, the injuries, and the pressure of everyone chasing you.

Lindsay Davenport, who finished year-end No. 1 in four separate seasons across two decades said:

There’s a huge difference between reaching No. 1 for a week or two and ending the year there. Ending the year at No. 1 means you dominated the narrative of that entire season.

And the man who has the most, Djokovic, who has done it eight times put it this way:

Obviously it’s the crown of the season, finishing the year as No. 1 in the world. I think it’s a dream of every tennis player. It’s one of the most difficult things to do in our sport. Obviously winning Grand Slams and being No. 1 in the world are probably the pinnacles of the sport.

Finishing the season as year-end No. 1 requires full commitment throughout the entire year and consistency and playing the best tennis in the biggest events.

Slams or No. 1?

Among tennis fans, this is one of the oldest arguments in the sport. Grand Slam counts are the metric the public and the media use to rank careers at retirement. The year-end No. 1 is the metric players themselves tend to lean on when the Slams column alone looks unfair.

The reason is the small set of players who have only have one of the two. Naomi Osaka has four Grand Slam titles and has never been world No. 1 at any point. Stan Wawrinka won three Slams and never got to the top either. On the opposite side of that ledger, Dinara Safina spent 26 weeks at WTA No. 1 across 2009 without winning a major, and reached three Slam finals. Serena Williams, during that same stretch, mocked the computer points system for allowing it. Safina later said the pressure of being called the best in the world without the Slam to back it up made her “feel stupid”.

In 2008 Jelena Janković became the first and so far only woman to finish a calendar year as WTA No. 1 without a major title in the trophy cabinet. She finished runner-up to Serena at that year’s US Open and never did win a Slam. Asked afterwards to defend her position, she said this:

Winning a grand slam is only being the best for two weeks, but being number one during the whole year means you had the best results out of everyone.

And here's that anomaly. Marcelo Ríos remains, in the men's game, 28 years later, the only ATP player to have reached No. 1 and retired without a Grand Slam title.

What Zverev’s 2026 looks like

Alcaraz has made the Slams-and-No.-1 double a routine conversation on the men’s side (multiple Grand Slams and two year-end No. 1 finishes already, at 23 years old). Zverev has now done it as well, inside a single calendar year. He won the French Open in June against Flavio Cobolli, five sets, his first Slam after three prior finals in which he had come up short. He won the US Open in September against Ben Shelton, four sets, his second. He becomes the fourth man in history to win his first two Grand Slam trophies in the same calendar year, joining Jannik Sinner (2024), Guillermo Vilas (1977) and Jimmy Connors (1974).

The year-end ranking is the number that put the season into context because a single Slam is not enough to secure it. Two Slams in a year without the deeper consistency across the Masters schedule still might not be enough. Zverev added deep runs across the other Slams and the Masters schedule, with the indoor season still to come when Sinner’s withdrawal made the maths academic.

The result is a 2026 season that lines up alongside the kind of year-end campaigns Sampras ran in 1996, Nadal in 2010, and Djokovic in 2015 and 2021. Zverev does not yet have the career total those players carry, but inside the calendar year he now has the same set of achievements.

Carlos Alcaraz has given the position its best contemporary framing:

The year-end number one is always a goal. For me it means everything, you know, that we put every day during the whole season, up and downs. It’s a journey that you’re not going through alone. It’s with your whole team, with your family.

Turin and Indian Wells

Zverev travels to Turin on 15 November for the ATP Finals with the ranking already settled. Some year-end No. 1s have added the Finals in the same year (Djokovic has won the title seven times); others never have (Nadal, zero in his five year-end seasons). Zverev has won the ATP Finals twice before, in 2018 (beating Djokovic in the final) and 2021 (beating Daniil Medvedev). A third title in Turin would complete the set of year-end No. 1, Grand Slams wins, and the ATP Finals trophy.

The women’s version remains open. The WTA Finals moved from Riyadh to Indian Wells this year and run from 8 to 15 November. The Race standings have Elena Rybakina on 7,492 points, Aryna Sabalenka on 6,485, with Jessica Pegula, Mirra Andreeva and Coco Gauff behind them in contention. Up to 1,500 points are on the table in Indian Wells. Sabalenka can still take the year-end crown if Rybakina does not go deep. Sabalenka has said that ending the year as World Number 1 is very important to her:

That’s one of my goals, to finish the season at world No. 1. To be called the best player in the world, that really means a lot.

As I always say, I want to finish the year as world No. 1, then I’ll be like okay, I’ll be more confident on saying I’m world No. 1, not because someone lost a hundred points.

Rybakina, if she holds, will become the seventeenth woman to finish year-end No. 1 and the first player representing Kazakhstan to do so. Sabalenka, if she overtakes, will defend the position she took from Świątek at the end of 2024 and held through 2025.

The twentieth

Djokovic, who called it the crown of the season, now has company at the top of a sport that is quietly adding another full set of achievements to its honours board. On 23 November, the ATP computer will stamp the year off and Alexander Zverev will be the player holding the crown.