Four Grand Slams, four different champions: The importance of this year’s WTA Finals

More often than not on the women’s tour, someone wins multiple Grand Slam titles in a season—but this has not been one of those seasons.

Four women have split the four majors in 2025, with Madison Keys winning the Australian Open, Coco Gauff winning Roland Garros, Iga Swiatek winning Wimbledon and Aryna Sabalenka winning the US Open.

With the WTA Finals being the fifth-biggest event of the year, and all four of those players competing, will one of them come through and become the only woman to win two of the five biggest events of the season?

Or will one of the other four women in the field lift the title and make it five different champions at the five biggest events of 2025?

The importance of this year’s WTA Finals couldn’t be greater.

To predict which of this year’s four major winners might win the WTA Finals, let’s look to the past, and all of the times the WTA Finals have been held in a year where a different woman won each of the majors.

That situation has happened 17 times since the first WTA Finals in 1972.

That number doesn’t count 2020, when the WTA Finals weren’t held due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though three different women won the three majors that year (Wimbledon was cancelled too). But it does count 1977, when there were five majors held, with two Australian Opens in January and December (and five different women won those five majors).

In terms of which major champion usually wins the WTA Finals in this situation, there’s a clear leader—and second place might surprise you.

WHEN DIFFERENT WOMEN WIN EACH MAJOR, WHICH CHAMPION WINS THE WTA FINALS THAT YEAR?

• Australian Open (2): 1981 (Navratilova), 1998 (Hingis)
• Roland Garros (3): 1990 (Seles), 2019 (Barty), 2023 (Swiatek)
• Wimbledon (6): 1978 (Navratilova), 1979 (Navratilova), 1999 (Davenport), 2004 (Sharapova), 2008 (Venus), 2011 (Kvitova)
• US Open (2): 1977 (Evert), 2014 (Serena)
• None of the above (4): 2005 (Mauresmo), 2017 (Wozniacki), 2018 (Svitolina), 2021 (Muguruza)

So there’s a clear trend towards the Wimbledon champion—which in this year's case would be Swiatek—coming through at the WTA Finals.

But in terms of recency, only one of the above categories has done it four times this century, and that’s none of the above…

And there’s no reason that the one of the other four players in this year’s field—Amanda Anisimova, Jessica Pegula, Elena Rybakina and Jasmine Paolini—can’t lift the WTA Finals trophy in Riyadh next week.

Rybakina has won a major, at Wimbledon in 2022, and she has two WTA 1000 titles to her name at Indian Wells and Rome in 2023. The other three players have all reached major finals and have multiple WTA 1000 titles on their resumes—Pegula three and Anisimova and Paolini two each.

Stay tuned to Tennis.com and Tennis Channel starting on Saturday to see if one of this year’s four major champions will cap their season with the next-biggest title of the year, or if someone will break up the party…