Alcaraz & Sinner’s tennis rivalry of winning, losing & learning

A loss to Jannik Sinner in the Wimbledon final in July sent Carlos Alcaraz back into the lab. (Instagram via carlitosalcarazz)

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

After nearly 11 months of shadowing, sparring, one-upping and obsessing over each other, the Sinnercaraz era, Year 2, has ended.

Back and forth Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner go, using the most important trophies in tennis as batons in a relay race. They have won eight Grand Slams in a row, with two ATP Tour Finals for Sinner and the world No. 1 ranking back in Alcaraz’s lap in their game of pass the parcel.

But for a loss by Alcaraz to an injured Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open in January, Alcaraz and Sinner probably would have faced off for all four of the biggest titles in the sport in 2025. Instead, they played for three of them, and took turns winning.

After the 7-6 (4), 7-5 win by the Italian Sinner in Turin on Sunday, the ball is back in Alcaraz’s court for the offseason. Alcaraz played a brilliant match, but Sinner was better than he had been two months ago, at the U.S. Open final in New York — just as Alcaraz was the better player at the U.S. Open, after his loss against Sinner at Wimbledon. And just as Sinner was the better player at Wimbledon, after his loss to Alcaraz at the French Open.

By an hour after the ATP Tour Finals’ end, the Spaniard Alcaraz sounded as if he had already begun figuring out with his coaching staff what he needs to topple Sinner the next time they meet, to keep this pattern of victory trades going. A hamstring injury he sustained during the match will keep Alcaraz out of the Davis Cup finals this week, so his off-season starts now.

“They will tell me how they saw the match, my weaknesses, my good points, my good things,” he said in his news conference. “I have a few in mind already, which I already told them. The season is almost over, so we have the preseason already in the corner. I will try to put everything to be better on that preseason to start the season even stronger.”

As for Sinner, he took a moment to pat himself on the back for showing up better than the last time he looked across the net, but also sounded determined to disrupt the pattern.

“The work we have done was very positive,” he said in his news conference. “If not, you don’t reach these results. December is very important for me.”

Therein lies the continuing psychodrama at the heart of this rivalry between two players who are friendly but not necessarily friends. Their competition has become a game of tennis cat and mouse. One of them wins something big; the other figures out why and searches for the edge.

Just when tennis thought it was moving into uncharted territory after the dominance of the Big Three, it is back where it was from roughly 2005 to 2010. Then, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were the dominant characters, continually taking the measure of the other, hunting for the slightest tweak that could provide a better chance of beating the other.

As startling as the six Sinner-Alcaraz matches this year have been, the seeds of those plot twists lie in their interregnums, going back more than a year ago to the China Open final, when Alcaraz obliterated a 3-0 deficit in a final-set tiebreaker with seven irrepressible points that left Sinner helpless.

They did not play the rest of the year, but Sinner blazed to his first ATP Tour Finals title and led Italy to the Davis Cup. In January, he won his second consecutive Australian Open. He did not play Alcaraz there, but he had seen in Beijing what he would have to do to get the better of his rival, who had beaten him in all three of their matches in 2024.

For the foreseeable future, Sinner and Alcaraz will factor the other one into nearly every tennis-related move they make. It will happen on the macro level, in terms of tactics and strategy, maybe even scheduling outside the mandatory tournaments. But it all pales in comparison to how they process the data from the six matches they played against each other this year.

The Italian Open in Rome was Sinner’s first tournament after his three-month antidoping suspension. Alcaraz won another tiebreaker with a surge and then cruised through the second set. In the Cincinnati Open final, Alcaraz took brutal advantage of an ailing Sinner, who ultimately retired with an illness after five games played and zero won.

The other four matches, though — the three Grand Slam finals and the most recent showdown in Turin — hold all the high-value data that these two players could want. And their teams acted as one might expect.

“We always make some adjustments because they’re really close,” Simone Vagnozzi, Sinner’s day-to-day coach, said during an interview at Cincinnati in August. “They change something, and we have to adjust.”

The first of those matches was the all-timer, standing out perhaps beyond every match that has come before. Decades from now, people will still be talking about the five-set, 5 1/2-hour marathon that unfolded on Court Philippe-Chatrier in Paris through a June afternoon and evening at the French Open.

It will serve as the ultimate tennis mind-bender, how Alcaraz climbed out of a two-set hole and escaped three match points to prevail in a championship-deciding tiebreaker against a seemingly unassailable foe.

Sinner and his team thought they knew. Sinner needed to be bolder and better on the run. When Alcaraz sent him running into the corners, especially on his forehand side, Sinner had to find a way to turn defense into offense.

Five weeks later, Sinner got a measure of revenge, beating Alcaraz in the Wimbledon final. In a tight four-set duel, Sinner was the better player from the baseline, imposing his percussive ground strokes and throttling Alcaraz’s improvisations.

That sent Alcaraz back into the lab. After months of searching, and some improvement, he finally found true rhythm and a lethal edge on his serve. He tweaked its motion, as well as his forehand and backhand setup, iterating on all three shots to make them as devastating and secure as they could be.

Eight weeks after the Wimbledon loss, Alcaraz struck back with a mostly dominant win in the U.S. Open final.

And then it was Sinner’s turn. He made it clear after the loss in New York that he had to be more surprising, on his serve and off the ground.

He did both of those in Turin. He spot-served as effectively as anyone has all year on break points, and sprinkled in just enough variety, including some nifty lobs in key moments Sunday, to make Alcaraz start guessing about him again.

“All the losses I had, I tried to see the positive thing,” Sinner said, using them as opportunities to force him to evolve. “This happened in a very good way.”

Now he needs to break this pattern and become the player to evolve after a win, rather than a loss. Alcaraz has done that plenty in this rivalry, which is why he has won seven of the past nine meetings and leads, 10-6. Alcaraz will surely bring some innovation to Melbourne, where he has never been past the quarterfinals, and where he goes in search of a career Grand Slam.

“A player like him always comes back stronger from the losses. He always learns from the losses,” Alcaraz said of Sinner. “Once again, he has shown everybody that he did it. Especially in the serve, putting so much pressure on you. It’s really difficult to play against him.”

Enter 2026, the next chapter in the Sinnercaraz rivalry of evolution and adjustment. And enter Alcaraz, the latest to have the chance to learn from a loss.