If Carlos Alcaraz is to claim a hat-trick of Wimbledon titles by taking this year’s Championships, he will have to do something few before him have achieved.
The Spaniard would be only the fifth player to win at SW19 three years on the spin, following in the footsteps of Bjorn Borg, Pete Sampras, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic (the Serbian’s four consecutive wins were punctuated by the cancelled Championships in 2020 during the Covid pandemic).
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Alcaraz himself has described Federer and Djokovic, along with childhood hero Rafael Nadal, as “not from this planet”, but if he took a moment to look at his own record he would see that his young career is already on course to challenge the very best the sport has ever seen.
The domination of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic throughout the opening decades of the 2000s is etched into tennis history – winning a combined 66 out of the 83 grand slam-tournament men’s singles finals held between 2003 and 2023.
This era also spanned Alcaraz’s childhood and teenage years, but what he could once only dream of he is now on course to achieve and, dare we say it, even eclipse.
The firm favourite to win a third consecutive title at the All England Club as the gates opened in 2025, his career trajectory suggests he could surpass all rivals, past and future.
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By the time Alcaraz was born in Murcia, southern Spain, on May 5, 2003, Federer had already breached the top 10 in the rankings.
In May the previous year, the Swiss prodigy won his first of 54 “big titles” – a victory in either a major, the ATP Finals, the Masters or Olympics – in Hamburg, age 20.
By the age Alcaraz is now, 22 years and two months, Federer had two. The young Spaniard now has 12.
His meteoric rise in the sport tracks only that of compatriot Rafael Nadal, who won the French Open four times in a row between the ages of 19 and 22, alongside 13 other titles. Djokovic had managed six.
But focusing on majors alone, Alcaraz’s early-career performance is even more spectacular. He already has five majors on his palmarès. While this is on par with the equally precocious Nadal, Federer (Wimbledon, 2003) and Djokovic (Australian Open, 2008) had to wait until they were 22 and 21 respectively to win their first majors.
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Jannik Sinner, the current world No 1 and the main challenger to Alcaraz, did not lift a major until he was 22 years and eight months old in Melbourne last year.
Glory aside, Alcaraz has also been reaping the financial rewards. After clinching Queen’s last month, he had amassed a total of $45,277,264 in prize money (just over £33 million).
This puts him seventh on the ATP prize money leaderboard, just six years since turning professional in 2018.
Averaged per year and adjusted for inflation to the start of their professional careers, this puts him ahead of even Djokovic, and everyone else in the sport.
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But whereas Nadal was the “King of Clay”, his protege’s turf is clearly grass. After clinching Queen’s, Alcaraz’s win percentage on the surface rose beyond 90 per cent: higher than any of the 29 current or former ATP world No 1s in the Open Era.
His defeat of Fabio Fognini in the first round of Wimbledon saw him become the fastest top seed to reach 30 grass victories, and vanquishing Germany’s Jan-Lennard Struff in the third on Friday pushed his win rate up to 91.2 per cent. Federer retired with an 86.9 per cent win rate on grass.
Alcaraz is already among just 13 men in the Open Era to have won at the All England Club more than once. Only Borg and Boris Becker also did so before turning 22.
All this is priced in for bettors: he is the clear favourite to lift the trophy again in 2025. According to Telegraph Sport’s analysis of BetFair Exchange, his implied chance of victory rose to well above a third in early June after overcoming Sinner in the longest Roland Garros final in history.
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Despite going into the tournament as the top seed, the bookies put Sinner’s hopes 10 times lower. In the pair’s 12 ATP Tour head-to-heads so far, Alcaraz has won eight. But they have only met once before on grass – in Wimbledon’s fourth round back in 2022 – and then it was the Italian who prevailed.
The once unstoppable Djokovic, hunting his 73rd “big title” – far more than anyone else – appears to be his nearest contender (although for anyone other than the steely Serb, last year’s straight-sets final loss would be weighing on their mind).
“It’s going to be very tough to follow what these giants have done,” Alcaraz said upon Nadal’s retirement after the Davis Cup finals last year. If he only improves with age as they did, they may just end up in his wake.