For the better part of the 21st century, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic dominated men’s tennis like no group of players ever had before. Between 2003 and 2023, the so-called Big Three won 66 of 83 Grand Slam titles, blocking an entire generation of world-class players from achieving any tennis player’s dream: winning a Grand Slam title. Tomas Berdych, David Ferrer and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga are just three of the players unfortunate enough to play alongside the Big Three their entire careers, coming up short against them time and time again on the biggest stages the sport has to offer.
After Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal both retired and Novak Djokovic started to show signs of vincibility, younger players like Alexander Zverev, Taylor Fritz and Stefanos Tsitsipas looked set to finally break through at the Grand Slam level only to find that two players from the generation after them had already put down their marker. After Sunday’s Wimbledon final, the newly-crowned champion Jannik Sinner and runner-up Carlos Alcaraz won eight of the last nine Grand Slam tournaments, with Novak Djokovic the last player to break their winning streak at the 2023 U.S. Open.
With Sinner and Alcaraz now having won four and five major titles at the ages of 23 and 22, respectively, it looks like one era of dominance is seamlessly followed by another and players like Zverev look increasingly frustrated with the situation as both Sinner and Alcaraz appear to be playing at another level from pretty much everyone else at the moment.
