Carlos Alcaraz vs. Jannik Sinner: playing in a third straight Slam final, who wins the 2025 US Open?

Jannik Sinner was asked if he ever gets “sick of seeing” Carlos Alcaraz around.

The Italian, who always has the right answer in his matches these days, had one for this question, too.

“On court we like seeing each, you know, because it means that, considering our ranking, that we are doing well in the tournament.”

🖥️ 📲 Tennis Channel Live at the US Open: Stream at 7 p.m. ET Saturday and Sunday

They’ve been doing well in a lot of tournaments lately. This will be the fifth straight event that they both entered, and both made the final. Rome, Roland Garros, Wimbledon, Cincinnati, and the Open: That’s three Slams and three surfaces. They’re getting farther from rest of the pack with every passing week.

This has been especially true at the Open. For the first time, the famously up-and-down Alcaraz didn’t drop a set on his way to a Slam final. In January, Novak Djokovic beat him at the Australian Open; on Friday, Alcaraz ran Djokovic ragged over three mostly uncompetitive sets.

“Probably I’m just getting mature,” Alcaraz says.

Does that mean he’s only getting better from here? A scary thought for his colleagues.

As for Sinner, he has been a little more on and off, relatively speaking. He dropped two sets to two Canadians: One to Denis Shapovalov and one to Felix Auger Aliassime. But he also demolished three quality opponents, Alexei Popyrin, Alexander Bublik, and Lorenzo Musetti, and was labeled an AI-generated tennis player by one of them.

The only downside for Sinner is that it took him more than three hours to subdue a feisty Auger Aliassime on Friday night. Will that leave him less than fresh when he takes the court again at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday? He also said he felt a “twitch” in his abs that slowed his serve and forced him to get treatment off court. Sinner has been a little more prone to injury and illness recently than Alcaraz, so we’ll see if that factors into this final.

There are reasons to favor each man.

Sinner has been No. 1 for the last 65 weeks. He’s the defending champion, and has won the last three hard-court majors. He beat Alcaraz in their most recent completed match, in the Wimbledon final. He’s 20-8 in finals, and 17-6 in hard-court finals.

Alcaraz, meanwhile, leads their head-to-head 9-5, and is 6-2 against him on hard courts (though one of those wins was in Cincinnati, where Sinner retired after five games). Alcaraz has won 45 of his last 47 matches, improved his serve over the summer, and seems entirely confident in his baseline attack on the courts in New York.

Sinner also has a history of bringing out the best in Alcaraz. In their matches, the Spaniard tends to dial in and find a way to reach his top level by the end. We saw him do it in Beijing last fall and at Roland Garros this spring, in matches that ended in final-set tiebreakers.

But that changed at Wimbledon. In that final, it was Sinner who took Alcaraz’s best in the early going, and raised his level beyond it. It was Sinner who hit more winners, who came to net twice as often, who was superior in the front court and back court.

“At some points I didn’t know what I had to do in the match because from the baseline I was feeling he was better than me, and I couldn’t do anything about it,” Alcaraz said after his Wimbledon loss.

“I think the big key was the second serve. He was returning really well the second serve. Thanks to that, he was in the position to attack the second ball every time.”

Alcaraz says he likes playing Sinner because he learns from their matches. Judging by his post-Wimbledon analysis, we might expect him to take the initiative as early as possible on Sunday, to get to the net more often, to disrupt Sinner with drop shots, to add pace to his second serve, or try to make more first serves.

At this point, it’s almost impossible to pick against either of these guys. No one will be surprised by the result, whichever way it goes. But the way Alcaraz has been playing for the last two weeks, as well as the last four months, it’s even harder to pick against him. Winner: Alcaraz