2026 is not going to go down as a great year in ATP history. We began the year poised for some scintillating Sincaraz. Instead, we got a nice step forward from Ben Shelton, a breakthrough from Rafael Jodar, and soon, an utterly unconvincing new number one, in Alexander Zverev.
Sinner and Alcaraz didn’t disappoint on court. They just weren’t able to stay on court. Alcaraz missed four and a half months, including two majors. Sinner’s knee has kept him out of action since he beat Zverev for the Wimbledon title. Both men played enough–and well enough–to make it clear they are the best two players on tour. But neither stayed healthy enough to earn the year-end number one ranking.
By process of elimination, that leaves Zverev. My Elo ratings put the German in third place, at 2,106. That’s 43 points behind Alcaraz and a whopping 190 points behind Sinner.
Kind of an awkward situation: The year-end number one is nowhere close to the year’s best player. Using yElo ratings–Elo ratings calculated based only current-year results; here’s 2026–Zverev trails Sinner by more than 200 points. I calculated year-end yElo ratings back to 1985. Over those 41 years, the yElo number one was the ATP number one 25 times. Of the others, there were only four occasions when the ATP number one trailed the yElo headliner by more than 100 points:
Year ATP #1 yElo yElo #1 yElo Diff 2026 Zverev 2118 Sinner 2323 205 2022 Alcaraz 2116 Djokovic 2264 148 1988 Wilander 2164 Becker 2282 119 1992 Courier 2131 Becker 2238 107
Alcaraz’s 2022 season doesn’t quite feel like a fair comparison: He started the year outside the top 30, then his rating took a hit when he followed the US Open with four losses in ten matches. In any case, his underwhelming finish still left him closer to the yElo #1 than Zverev’s 2026 campaign puts him to Sinner.
The yElo of 2,118 is also weak in itself. Here are the lowest year-end yElos for full-season ATP year-end #1s since 1985:
Year ATP #1 yElo 2000 Gustavo Kuerten 2093 2022 Carlos Alcaraz 2116 2003 Andy Roddick 2117 2026 Alexander Zverev 2118 2002 Lleyton Hewitt 2119 1998 Pete Sampras 2121 1992 Jim Courier 2131 1988 Mats Wilander 2164 2001 Lleyton Hewitt 2176
Elo variants aren’t perfect for cross-era comparisons, but this list captures many of the less-convincing seasons from year-end number ones. Only Kuerten’s 2000 scored markedly lower than Zverev’s 2026. (In fairness, he could still improve it. In reality, he’ll probably lose to Jakub Mensik in Vienna next week.)
(Not) beating the best
The true knock on Zverev’s season is less abstract. For a number one (or even a number three), he hasn’t played many matches against high-quality opponents. Of those, he has won shockingly few.
Since 1985, the typical year-end number one has played 19.5 matches against top-ten opponents, winning 14.5 and losing 5. The average number one faces the rest of the top five 11 times, going 8-3.
To say that Zverev has not matched that standard is charitable:
That’s 3-8 against the top ten, 0-6 against the top five.
No year-end number one has posted as low as a .500 record against the top five since Federer in 2009. The last losing record was Sampras in 1998, when he managed only three meetings against such opponents.
For the last losing record against the top ten, we need to go all the way back to Stefan Edberg in 1991, when he went 5-8. And even he had three wins against the top five.
We can’t entirely blame Zverev for this. Most of the top ten wasn’t injured, they just lost too early to face the German. Zverev is an easy target, and he surely could’ve managed better, but the field underwhelmed as well.
Let’s be kind and say that the ATP is in a transition period. Jannik, my friend, we need you back.