2025 Roland Garros Semifinal Preview: Men's Draw

We have reached the final weekend of Roland Garros 2025. Jannik Sinner, Novak Djokovic, Lorenzo Musetti, and Carlos Alcaraz will battle it out to see who joins Sinner as 2025 Grand Slam champions.

There is a massive amount of firepower in these semifinals, especially on the clay. Every player on this list has been in a tour-level final on the clay since the middle of April, and the only one for whom that was not at a Masters 1000 tournament is Novak Djokovic, who has won Roland Garros 3 times. All 3 medalists from last year's Olympics, played at Roland Garros, are here. Sinner, Djokovic, Musetti, and Alcaraz are all among the 5 best players in the world on the clay right now. There will be fireworks this weekend.

Let’s look at the Roland Garros men's semifinals by reviewing how our models evaluated each player’s journey through the draw and ending with a prediction for each match.

(2) Carlos Alcaraz vs (8) Lorenzo Musetti

This segment has to start with the fact that Lorenzo Musetti should not be here. In his quarterfinal against Frances Tiafoe, he kicked a ball in frustration and it hit a linesperson. This should have been a default, and this should be Alcaraz vs Tiafoe. The video is below:

With that being said, let's get to the tennis that will actually be happening. This match will not be a servers' duel. Both of the most important ratings for each player are higher behind their return than their serve. Lorenzo Musetti has been reliant on being able to consistently break his opponent’s serve to make it through his matches, especially considering that Musetti is the only player in these semifinals to have played a match in which he has held his own serve less than 80% of the time. A major concern for Musetti here, though, is that his return numbers have dropped as competition ramped up into the second and third tiers. In the past two rounds, Musetti has played against #10 seed Holger Rune and #15 seed Frances Tiafoe. What had been consistently excellent numbers in the previous three rounds – Return Excitement Index above 0.3, breaking serve over 40% of the time – dropped. They did not drop below average, but multiple-match drops like this did not happen for any of the other semifinalists.

Carlos Alcaraz is the favorite to win this whole tournament. He has been since the beginning, and he is now. He has put up exceptional Return Excitement Index numbers in every match other than his Round of 16 encounter with Ben Shelton, who is one of the biggest servers in tennis. Despite the lofty numbers, the Return CFOE Ratings have not been far above 2, the norm for wins. In fact, his Return CFOE Rating has not yet been above 2.21, while everyone else has had at least one match above 4. This shows that despite the lofty numbers he has put up, they should arguably be even higher than they are now. Add that to the multiple matches without being broken, and Carlos Alcaraz is a juggernaut.

Lorenzo Musetti will more than likely not be the player who decides this match. If Carlos Alcaraz stays healthy and focused on winning, this match should be over quickly. If, however, he goes for too many highlights and loses focus, that is where Musetti could step in. Musetti and Alcaraz have actually played twice on clay this season, in the final in Monte Carlo and in the semifinal in Rome. In each of those matches, Alcaraz has won at least 48% of points on Musetti’s serve. Even on the clay, men do not win very much when losing that many of their own service points.

Prediction: Alcaraz in 3. Our model has Alcaraz’s win probability at 91%. Below are the predicted outcomes

(1) Jannik Sinner vs (6) Novak Djokovic

For most of the last 5 months, Novak Djokovic has, for the first time in his life, looked mortal. Almost ordinary. It is unclear how much of that was the hamstring injury sustained in the Australian Open, a lack of motivation, or father time beginning to catch up to him, but over the last three weeks, Djokovic has been more himself. The way he systematically dismantled Alexander Zverev over the final three sets of their quarterfinal was vintage Novak. But if Djokovic, the greatest returner of all time, is going to take down Jannik Sinner, it would likely have to be behind his serve. He has had some adventures in his return games, but he has been mowing people down behind his serve, having been broken just 6 times in the 16 sets he has played this year at Roland Garros. His Serve Excitement Average has been better than the Roland Garros tournament average in all 5 of his matches. Those numbers will need to continue to be stellar if Djokovic wants to upset Sinner.

Jannik Sinner has been destroying everyone in his path at Roland Garros. Every metric Sinner has had for Roland Garros has been stellar. I could rattle off things like point counts or Serve and Return Excitement Index, and all of those have been incredible, but Sinner’s dominance has been much simpler than that: he has not been losing games, much less sets. In his last 4 matches, Sinner has lost just 24 games. For comparison, Kyrian Jacquet won 23 games in his LOSS to Nuno Borges last week. There has been a trend emerging of players reacting to finally winning just a single game against Sinner this tournament. Put simply, Sinner is a machine.

This is from Jiri Lehecka’s Instagram post following his Third Round loss to Sinner. Keep in mind that this is the 34th-ranked player in the world.

Novak Djokovic is the best player ever. This gives him a reasonable chance against anyone. But if Jannik Sinner plays the way he has at Roland Garros, there is only one person who can beat him. And as things currently stand, Novak Djokovic is not that man.

Prediction: Sinner in 4. Our model has Sinner's win probability at 70%. Below are the predicted outcomes