U.S. Open storylines: Sabalenka’s last Grand Slam shot and Sinner and Alcaraz’s rankings fight

Will world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka go “Slamless” in 2025 – and does it even matter?

Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner could go eight from eight at the Grand Slams – but their bigger fight might take place in the world rankings.

Is Coco Gauff sacrificing her home major for her greater tennis good?

And does this U.S. Open, with its mixed doubles title already handed out, herald the end of the majors as the tennis world has known them for so long?

The 2025 U.S. Open promises to be a cracker. Here, The Athletic’s tennis writers, Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, chart some of the key storylines to follow over the next fortnight.

How will defending champion Aryna Sabalenka define the rest of her season?

Sabalenka has had a hell of a season. She made the final of the Australian and French Opens and the semifinals at Wimbledon. She won the Miami and Madrid Opens. She made the final of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif. and the Stuttgart Grand Prix in Germany. She’s first in the “Race” to the WTA Tour finals.

But she’s still missing the one thing she really wants, which is to win a Grand Slam. She’d also like to finish the year as the world No. 1. But she has one more chance for that elusive major, and Iga Świątek is hot on her heels at the top of the rankings.

The positives are that she is the defending champion at the U.S. Open, and she has won three of the last five hard-court majors. Her Grand Slam record this year speaks to going deep reliably as much as missing out at the last. But she has also eked out a lot of wins through tiebreaks – tiebreaks that became tiebreaks because she had to recover from her serve being broken, not because both players held. Only two of the 19 sets Sabalenka has played in 2025 that ended in tiebreaks have not featured a break.

“If this goal is not going to be achieved, I’ll still think that this season has been really amazing for me,” she said in her pre-tournament news conference.

“All of those tough lessons that I learned this season are only going to make me stronger for the next one. I’ll work even harder in the preseason to make sure next year is going to be only a year of success, like truly success.”

The “Slamless” world No. 1 is a tennis archetype that refuses to budge even though it ultimately means little. Sabalenka appears to be aware of that – but she will also be desperate to make sure that she does not fill it.

Can Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner continue their remarkable streak with another milestone on the line?

Having never had a match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, let alone a final, the U.S. Open won’t be taking anything for granted when it comes to a potential meeting between Alcaraz and Sinner in two weeks’ time.

If the world’s two best men’s players do contest their third Grand Slam final in a row, it would be the first time it has ever happened on the ATP Tour in the same calendar year; Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic faced each other in four straight finals across 2011 and 2012. Sinner and Alcaraz met in a final as recently as this week, but their Cincinnati Open contest was cut short in the first set with the Italian feeling unwell.

What’s especially worrying for the rest of the field is that each time these two play each other, they each elevate the other a bit more and create ever-increasing distance from their peers. The other especially worrying thing is that they have another major milestone on the line: the world No. 1 ranking. If Alcaraz betters Sinner’s result in New York, he will assume the world No. 1 ranking, having lost it to Sinner last year despite beating his nearest rival in all three of their meetings that year.

And they appear aware of the task at hand. “If we don’t continue to improve, players will catch us,” Sinner said in a news conference Friday. “It’s just a question of time.”

After winning all of the previous seven majors between them, it still doesn’t look like happening anytime soon.

What will Coco Gauff’s long view mean for her home Slam, the site of her biggest triumph to date?

Focusing on process rather than results is one if the biggest cliches in sports and life. As cliches go, it’s not a bad one to follow.

Gauff became a walking billboard for it this week when she switched technical coaches and embarked on the process of changing her serve just days before the start of her home Slam, which is arguably her most important tournament of the year.

Her new coach, Gavin MacMillan, achieved pretty fast results with Sabalenka three years ago when he worked with her. Her double faults dropped into the single digits from the neighborhood of 20 within a few weeks.

That doesn’t mean that will happen for Gauff. She knows that.

“I’m looking at long-term,” Gauff said Friday. “I hope I can get it all together.” She knew she needed to make a change, even if that meant potentially sacrificing this tournament while she tries to learn on the fly.

“I don’t want to waste time continuing to do the wrong things,” she said.

Can things get any worse for the sandwich generation in men’s tennis?

With every passing Grand Slam, the sandwich generation of 1990s-born players led by Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitsipas seems to slip further and further away from genuine contention. Zverev, as the world No. 3, is slightly separate from this, but for Tsitsipas and Medvedev, it’s been a miserable year. Especially at the Grand Slams, where they have two match wins between them in 2025.

Tsitsipas is battling an ongoing back injury and has given worrying quotes about how much it’s affecting him, while Medvedev has looked hopelessly underpowered for much of the year.

Zverev said Friday that consideration has to be given to external factors when assessing a player’s form, and that he expects both Medvedev and Tsitsipas to work their way back into the world’s top 10. At present, though, the most likely genuine challengers to Sinner and Alcaraz would appear to be the players younger than them rather than the lost boys of men’s tennis.