However, too much variance.
At the moment we have a duopoly that has made a clean sweep at the slam level this year, and aside from Sinneraz the situation seems more or less like this;
- Last shots to fire for Djokovic, but how many will he still have at his disposal?
- The mind-generation can still hold a threat for Sinneraz but more on a single tournament than on a wider scale.
The problem is that, in theory, while Sinneraz can still have some margin to improve his current level, the various Medvedev, Zverev, Tsitsipas, Fritz, Rublev, etc., if they have not already entered the downward curve, will certainly hardly be able to rise further than the peak already reached.
- This 2024 has shown that there are many emerging players capable of hoisting themselves into the top 10 in a rather short time, I am thinking of the various Fils, Musetti, Draper, Shelton, Perricard, the return of Rune, Mensik himself, and many others.
However, for each of them the distance that separates them from Sinneraz is so wide that it is difficult to think that in 2025 at least one of them can fill that kind of gap.
Obviously this is a short-medium term reasoning, in the long term it is impossible to make predictions about what the opposition could be in order to counter Sinneraz.
Paradoxically at the height of Fedal, so let's say between 2006 and 2009 roughly, even though Fedal had monopolized the big tournaments of that period, players like Djokovic, Murray and Del Potro himself were appearing in turn, who even though crushed by the overwhelming power of Fedal were starting to take some space left by them.
Instead, the current situation sees players belonging to Sinneraz's generation who, before arriving at Sinneraz, still have to manage to surpass the bastions of the mind-generation, something that instead the various Djokovic, Murray and to a minimal extent Del Potro (thinking of his 2009 US Open) had already done with respect to the generation that preceded them (except obviously Federer).
Obviously, someone could object that until the 2023 US Open, even on Sinner it was unimaginable to think that he could make all that progress, so much so that behind the unreachable Alcaraz, many in the future preferred Rune to Sinner, and to a minimal extent even Shelton.
However, Sinner must always be given credit for having always progressed constantly, unlike Rune and Shelton who were initially more blinding but more extemporaneous flashes.
Furthermore, I am not engaging in historical revisionism if I say that even before Sinner's definitive explosion (which actually coincided with the Beijing 2023 tournament), despite Rune having been consistently ahead of him in the rankings between the end of 2022 and the first half of 2023, with the added bonus of being almost two years younger, when there was any mention of a possible future contender for Alcaraz, the media and Alcaraz himself always pumped up Sinner's name, as if, despite a ranking situation that suggested otherwise, they had understood well in advance that Sinneraz was much more popular than Alcarune in the future.
