Carlos Alcaraz: "The amount of tournaments that we have to play I think is too high"

As the 2025 tennis season winds down, the length of the tour's calendar is once against coming under fire from the top.

World No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz was asked for his thoughts on the "ideal number" of matches a top player should play in one season ahead of his opening match at the Rolex Paris Masters, the final ATP Masters 1000 event of the season. While Alcaraz wouldn't commit to a number, he wound up singing a familiar refrain about the commitments demanded of players throughout the year.

"I can't answer with [an] exact number. But obviously they have to do something with the calendar," he said ahead of his 16th tournament this year. "The amount of tournaments that we have to play I think is too high. We don't have such, you know, good period of time that we can practice, we can rest.

"Even during the season, I think it's week after week after week and we don't have the chance to have a week just to prepare pretty well the tournaments or what we have ahead in the season."

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The ATP recently announced that as soon as 2028, the number of Masters 1000 tournaments will increase from nine to 10 with the addition of a top-tier event in Saudi Arabia. Eight of the nine are currently mandatory for players to play.

While the addition comes with the promise of an opportunity to chase more ranking points and prize money, the six-time Grand Slam champion still offered a critique in the aftermath of the announcement that he hasn't been shy in sharing since establishing himself at the top of the sport.

Read more: Top ATP, WTA players push Grand Slams again in bid for more money and more say

“The calendar is so tight, a lot of tournaments, no days off or not as much days off as I want,” he said as recently as September at the Laver Cup the Laver Cup. “I’m the kind of player who thinks there is a lot of mandatory tournaments during the year, and probably during the next few years [there's] gonna be even more tournaments ... I mean, probably they are going to kill us in some way.”

The 22-year-old is returning to action at tour-level for the first time in almost a month following his triumph in Tokyo, having withdrawn from the recent Shanghai Masters event with a left ankle injury. That followed other notable pullouts by Alcaraz this year from 1000-level events in Madrid (adductor) and Montreal (fatigue)—though he committed to a stacked slate of exhibitions and non-mandatory tournaments in 2025, including a trip to Puerto Rico with Frances Tiafoe before Indian Wells and a US Open mixed doubles appearance with Emma Raducanu. In the off-season, he has one-day appearances planned at A Racquet At The Rock on Dec. 7 in Newark, New Jersey with Tiafoe and Raducanu, and the Miami Tennis Invitational alongside Joao Fonseca on Dec. 8.

Together in a draw with world No. 2 Jannik Sinner for the first time since the US Open, Alcaraz will open his tournament against Cameron Norrie on Tuesday.