The incubator: how every player in the current ATP top ten passed through the Next Gen Finals

The ten players in the current ATP singles top ten look like a graduating class. Jannik Sinner is at No. 1, Alexander Zverev at No. 2, (that will soon be swapped around), Carlos Alcaraz at No. 3, Ben Shelton at No. 4, with Daniil Medvedev, Flavio Cobolli, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Alex de Minaur, Frances Tiafoe and Arthur Fils filling out the rest.

All ten, earlier in their careers, qualified for the ATP's Next Gen Finals. Seven played, one had qualified for the bigger ATP Finals event and played that instead, and two declined to play.

As a predictor of who ends up at the top of the men's game, qualifying for the Next Gen Finals has been close to perfect. The event is nine editions old. In those nine editions, four of its alumni have won Grand Slam titles. Daniil Medvedev won the US Open in 2021. Alexander Zverev won the French Open and the US Open in 2026. Jannik Sinner has won five majors since 2024. Carlos Alcaraz has won seven since 2022. Between them, those four players account for fifteen Grand Slam titles in the past six years. All four were on a Next Gen entry list before any of them became famous.

What's it all about?

The Next Gen ATP Finals started in Milan in 2017. The ATP's pitch was for a season-ending tournament for the best eight men under 21 in the world (and who had not already qualified for the senior ATP Finals). The format was deliberately experimental: best-of-five short sets, each set first-to-four games with a tiebreak at 3-3, no-ad scoring on deuce points, no lets on the serve, a 25-second shot clock, Hawk-Eye Live electronic line calling with no human line judges on court, headset communication between coach and player permitted during changeovers, and towel boxes at the baseline instead of ball-kid handoffs. Matches are typically short and tight. Nothing in the tournament carries ATP ranking points, though the prize money is pretty tasty for a teenager or close thereto. An undefeated champion earns over half-a-million US dollars, with participation fees coming in at US$154,000.

The event ran in Milan from 2017 through 2022, with the 2020 edition cancelled because of the pandemic. In 2023 it moved to Jeddah on what was announced as a five-year hosting arrangement with Saudi Arabia, which the Saudi Tennis Federation opted out of after three editions. The age cutoff was lowered from 21-and-under to 20-and-under in 2024. This year the tournament moves back to Italy, to Reggio Calabria, a region situated dead-center on the toe of Italy's high-heeled boot shaped peninsula.

Qualification is through a parallel race called the Race to Jeddah (previously the Race to Milan and now, we suppose, the Race to Reggio Calabria), tracking ranking points earned by eligible players during the calendar year. For most of the tournament's history, the field was the top seven on that race plus one wildcard (usually the winner of an Italian national qualifying event). From the 2024 edition, the straight top eight has been taken.

The champions

Chung Hyeon won the inaugural title in 2017, beating Andrey Rublev in the final. Stefanos Tsitsipas took the 2018 edition, beating Alex de Minaur. Jannik Sinner won in 2019 at the age of 18, qualifying as a wildcard from the Italian playoff when he was ranked outside the top 90 in the world, and beating de Minaur (always a bridesmaid) in the final. Carlos Alcaraz won in 2021, aged 18, beating Sebastian Korda. Brandon Nakashima took 2022 at his second attempt. Hamad Medjedovi won the first Jeddah edition in 2023 after Alcaraz (qualified and played the ATP Finals), Rune (also qualified and played the ATP Finals), Shelton (injured) and Musetti (personal reasons) all declined to play. Joao Fonseca won in 2024 at the age of 18, ranked No. 145 at the time, the lowest-ranked champion in the tournament's history. Learner Tien upgraded his 2024 runner-up result to beat Alexander Blockx in the 2025 final.

That is the honours board. Of the eight unique players who have won the trophy, Sinner and Alcaraz are elite. The other six champions have not yet won a major, although Tsitsipas has reached two Grand Slam finals. Chung's career was ended by chronic back injury. Nakashima had the best season of his career in 2026 and sits at No. 17. Medjedović is at No. 78. Fonseca is No. 28 and climbing, as is Tien at No. 18.

Winning the Next Gen Finals is a weaker signal than qualifying for it.

The current top ten, mapped

These ten players fall into two groups. The ranking they held when they first appeared on a Next Gen entry list is in the table below.

Three of today's top six in the men's rankings were ranked outside the worlds top 60 when the Next Gen race first flagged them: Sinner at 93, Cobolli at 100, Medvedev at 63. The three who declined to play were already closer to the top 20, with Zverev at No. 4 before the inaugural edition had even been held, ranked high enough to play the senior ATP Finals in the same week, which naturally he chose to do.

What the pattern says

Qualifying for the event has up until now gone on to produce the top of the men's game. Winning it has produced less consistent careers, except in the two stunning cases of Sinner and Alcaraz, outliers in whatever tennis field you put them in.

The race to get into the tournament measures the same thing the senior ATP ranking measures: results across the calendar year, weighted by tournament size, catching the same players as for the ATP Finals but of course at a younger age and pitting them against each other in a round robin format. By the time a player is projected to make the Next Gen Finals, they have already produced the kind of season that may extrapolate to a top-ten career. The make-up of today's top 10 proves that to be the case.

But will it always be the case? This year's field is the weakest the event has ever assembled, behind the top two. Jodar at an ATP ranking of 11 and Fonseca at 28 are strong. However, slots four through eight are all ranked outside the ATP top 400. The average rank across slots three to eight is roughly 365, more than double the previous “worst” year (2025 at 152). There are two likely reasons for ATP rankings of the top eight young players who qualify for Next Gen falling off a cliff: the 2024 age cutoff drop from 21 to 20 wiped a year of eligible talent off every subsequent field, and the strongest surviving 20-and-unders (Fils, Menšík, Darderi) have already aged out of the bracket or outgrown the event entirely. Another reason could be post-COVID junior-circuit disruption: 2005–2006 births hit their key junior ITF development years in 2020–2022 with constrained competitive calendars.

What else is it good for?

The ATP has used the event to test out different formats and technology and then brought some of those learnings into the main draw. The 2017 edition was the first ATP event to use Hawk-Eye Live and remove line judges from court entirely. The US Open adopted the same system on 15 of its 17 courts in 2020 and tournament-wide by 2022. The ATP introduced live electronic line calling across every tour event from the 2025 season onwards, and Wimbledon adopted it the same year, ending its own run with human line judges. The shot clock, the no-let serve rule, the towel racks, and the in-match coaching headsets were all first trialled in Milan. The tournament has operated as a laboratory whose experiments have become standard practice across the men's and women's game.

What to make of it

Qualifying for the Next Gen Finals, measured against the age-matched version of the ATP's own ranking formula, has flagged four of the past six years' Grand Slam champions and every player in today's top ten. In six weeks the trophy may go to a player ranked outside today’s ATP top 70, as it has done in the past. That part is unremarkable. What is new is how far outside the top 70 most of this year’s qualifiers sit. Historically the eight players in a Next Gen field were all at least inside the ATP top 150 when they played, and most of them reached the senior top ten within five years. This year five of the eight are ranked outside the top 400. For the race to predict the next decade’s top ten the way it has this one, Sakamoto, Cina, Schwärzler, Blanch and Budkov Kjær would each have to climb further in the five years ahead of them than any Next Gen qualifier has ever climbed. The 2026 edition is the first test of whether that climb is still possible.