ATP Rankings 2026

History

ATP Rankings were in 1972, first came a tennis union called the Association of Tennis Players, or ATP for short. It was the laboring child of three men. Those three men where Jack Kramer, Cliff Drysdale, and Donald Dell. The impact of the new association was immediately felt when over eighty of its members boycotted the Wimbledon Championships in the year following the formation of ATP. The tennis rankings were initially controlled by national tennis federations and the directions of individual tournaments.

But not everyone welcomed this much-needed change. The first number one on the men single rankings, Nastase, lamented the changes. He claimed that the new men rankings only made enemies out of players. He concluded that everyone was out to get the best players, any means possible.

These remarks did not influence the popularity of said rankings. They persisted and were even published every week, starting with the year 1979 when they were printed in magazines. But people also noticed that not everything was well and perfect with these rankings. There were some obvious flaws. The ATP tried to remedy this by applying similar criteria to the ones skiing events have. The different events were assigned different amount points. In 1990 a new system of the best was created. That system has 14 different events that used a very specific points system. Ten years later these events were expanded to 18.

Calculation

The original men rankings users were a lot different from the complexities that we have today. The first criteria were to average out the results of every player. As we said before, now we have a system of the best, where players are ranked on the number of points that they collect. There are 18 different types of tournaments. Every placing in every one of those tournaments brings in more points. The stronger the tournament the more points a better placing brings in.

Tournament types and points

Men single rankings are a system of the best that is based on the accumulation of points players collect in 18 potential types of tournaments.

The tournaments that bring the most points are the four Grand Slam tournaments. They are the Wimbledon Championships, the French Open, Australian Open and US Open. Winners of these tournaments get 2000 points, finalist 1200 points. Semifinalist gets 720 points. The players who manage to qualify get 10 points.

Masters 1000 tournaments are as the name implies, tournaments when then the winner gets 1000 points. The finalist gets 600, the semifinalists get 360. The players who qualify and play in the first round get between 10 and 25 points, depending on the number of qualifying matches they played.

The 500 series and 250 series tournaments are again, as the names imply tournaments where winners get, respectively, 500 and 250 for a win. Everyone below the champion gets at least two times less, per placing. So a semifinalist in a 500 tournament will get 180 and a semifinalist in a 250 tournament will get 90 points.