Mpetshi Perricard Leads the Way in Players to Watch for in 2025
Mensik, Andreeva and Badosa Top the List
Singling out “players to watch for” at the start of a new season is a tricky business. When 2024 began, did anyone have Jasmine Paolini making two major finals, or Taylor Fritz passing Novak Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev in the rankings?
Yet speculation springs eternal in this sport. We want to know who will be dominating our TV screens, and holding up Grand Slam trophies, in the future. After all, whoever rises to the top will become an important figure in our lives for a long time to come.
The 2024 season just ended, which means, of course, that 2025 is almost upon us—it starts in a little more than three weeks. Who are the players you’ll be seeing more of in the new year? Here’s a look at two men and two women who showed promise over the past 12 months.
*****
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard
Servebots typically come from countries like the U.S. and Croatia, where athletes grow long and lean. Now France may have its own variation on the type, complete with a little Gallic flair. Mpetshi Perricard, 21, is 6-foot-8, and he’s the state of the art in serving today. In 2024, he averaged a tour-leading 18 aces per match, and showed an uncanny ability to bomb them in on second serves as well.
Perhaps not surprising for an ultra-aggressive rookie, GMP’s 2024 was wildly uneven. He won a title on clay in Lyon, and one on indoor hard court in Basel, and made the round of 16 on grass at Wimbledon and Queen’s Club. But he also lost eight first-round matches.
By season’s end, Mpetshi Perricard had landed at a career-high No. 30. He had also shown off flashes of opportunistic brilliance with his forehand, one-handed backhand, and reflex return. Enough to make him more watchable, and likely more successful, than the servebots of the past.
*****
Jakub Mensik
As the head of the game’s nascent player union, the PTPA, Novak Djokovic is always on the lookout for young talent. He has long seen it in this 19-year-old Czech.
“Jakub is somebody that I have been following for the last three or four years,” Djokovic said after their three-set match in Shanghai in October. “We like playing each other, we raise the level when we face each other…I could see today why he is one of the best servers we have in the game.”
At 6-foot-4, Mensik isn’t as tall as Mpetshi Perricard, but his serve is nearly as lethal; he put 17 aces past Djokovic that day. Just as important, the rest of his game is more consistently bruising. He hits a heavy ball with his topspin forehand and two-handed backhand, and loves to make rallies as physical as possible. Mensik hasn’t won a title or made it past the third round at a major yet, but he finished 2024 at a career-high No. 48. Even more so than Mpetshi Perricard, he has plenty of time to go higher.
*****
Mirra Andreeva
In Madrid in the spring of 2023, a 15-year-old Andreeva became the third-youngest player to win a match at a WTA 1000. The reaction from the tennis world was explosive—and, I thought at the time, maybe a little premature. Andreeva was certainly talented, but her forehand and her composure both needed a good deal of work.
It turns out that I should have believed the hype. The young Russian’s forehand quickly improved, and while she’s still prone to teen meltdowns, they haven’t hurt her as much as I thought they would. At 17, her height—she’s 5-foot-9—her two-handed backhand, and her fierce competitiveness and belief are already too much for most opponents. In 2024, that nearly included the WTA’s Top 2: Andreeva upset Aryna Sabalenka at Roland Garros, and almost did the same to Iga Swiatek in Cincinnati. Against Sabalenka, she said she forgot what her tactics were as soon as the match started, but that didn’t seem to hurt her either.
Andreeva finished a career-high No. 16 last season. With two years under her belt, and veteran Slam-winning coach Conchita Martinez in her corner—and hopefully reminding her of her game plan—the ceiling should only continue to rise for her in 2025.
*****
Paula Badosa
The three players I mentioned above would all seem to have Top 10 potential. With Badosa, we already know she can get there, because she has done it before. In the spring of 2022, she was ranked as high as No. 2 in the world, before injuries and well-publicized anxieties sent her game plummeting.
Finally, in 2024, the 27-year-old Spaniard bottomed out and began to rebuild. After starting the year slowly, she gradually went deeper at tournaments. She made the round of 16 at Wimbledon, won the title in D.C., made the semis in Cincinnati, the quarters at the US Open, and the semis in Beijing and Ningbo. That left her at No. 12 to finish the year, well-poised to make a leap into the Top 10, or higher, in 2025.
Badosa can still get down on herself, but her game remains a smooth mix of offense and defense that transitions well from surface to surface. She was one of the players who seemed cursed by her appearance in the Netflix documentary, Break Point. Can she be the one to break that curse in 2025?
