French Open draw: Iga Swiatek’s title defense gets a gauntlet run, Novak Djokovic avoids Carlos Alcaraz

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The 2025 French Open begins May 25 in Paris, and the draws for the men’s and women’s singles are intriguing, while also throwing up some blockbuster first-round matches.

The Athletic’s tennis writers, Matthew Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, analyze the match-ups and offer some of their picks for the best matches of the opening days.

What lies in wait for Iga Świątek as she mounts her title defense?

Seeing Iga Świątek’s name followed by a No. 5 rather than the customary No. 1 will take some getting used to, but that’s where she is right now after a challenging 12 months since she won her fourth Roland Garros title.

It was also a third French Open in a row, but Świątek has not won a title since and so finds herself with a trickier-than-usual path to the final. Looking ahead, a rematch with last year’s runner-up Jasmine Paolini could await in the quarterfinals, followed by the woman who usurped her as the WTA queen, Aryna Sabalenka, in the last four.

The problem? Doing draw prognostication is often a mug’s game. The bigger problem? Even for a clay-court player as inevitable as Świątek, the path to those matches is laced with danger. She begins against Slovakia’s Rebecca Šramková, who impressed at the Billie Jean King Cup, the international women’s team competition, last year, before most likely taking on 2021 U.S. Open champion Emma Raducanu.

Things could then get really dicey for Świątek.

She could face a third round against the in-form Ukrainian Marta Kostyuk and then a round-of-16 clash with her nemesis Jelena Ostapenko, against whom Świątek has lost six times out of six.

The upside? Winning a first title in 12 months with a gauntlet draw like this would be one of the greatest victories of her career.

Novak Djokovic’s new tennis reality continues with chastening draw

When at the peak of his powers, Novak Djokovic would often get a presentable-looking draw. Fans would wonder: does he really need a leg-up?

Outside the top four seeds for a second successive major, he no longer has that luxury. Djokovic knew he’d be seeded to play one of Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Alexander Zverev or Taylor Fritz in the quarters, and in the end landed Zverev, which isn’t a terrible outcome, but would leave him with a possible Sinner-Alcaraz double bill in the semifinals and final to lift the trophy. Those two have become a pack, like the one Djokovic used to form with Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, and they make the path to a 25th Grand Slam title look painfully narrow.

Djokovic does have a fairly straightforward-looking first week, with projected matches against America’s Mackenzie McDonald and then two mercurial but generally unreliable lefties in Corentin Moutet and Denis Shapovalov, but his form this year makes nothing certain. The 2021 U.S. Open champion Daniil Medvedev, who beat Djokovic to win his first and only Grand Slam title to date, could lurk in the round of 16.

Perhaps Djokovic will have found some form by then, both in Paris and possibly at the Geneva Open, where he is in the quarterfinal at the time of writing. He’ll need to have done so to stand a chance in a daunting second week at Roland Garros.

Is this Sabalenka’s clearest path to a first title away from hard courts?

Forgive Sabalenka if she feels a little cheated. She finally arrives at Roland Garros as the No. 1 seed and she’s got plenty of danger lurking in her half of the draw – and that’s long before a potential semifinal match against Iga Świątek.

Sabalenka should be just fine in her opener against Kamilla Rakhimova, the world No. 75 who’s never been above No. 60. But after that, there are some names that could make things more complicated for the three-time Grand Slam champion. Danielle Collins might be there in the second round. Clara Tauson or Amanda Anisimova might be there in the fourth.

All are big hitters who can be big players on the right day, the way Madison Keys was in the final of the Australian Open. Zheng Qinwen is also in her quarter. Diana Shnaider, a dangerous No. 11, is there, too.

Zheng is either the player who is 1-6 against Sabalenka, or the one who won an Olympic gold medal on these courts, and who handled Sabalenka pretty easily last week at the Italian Open in Rome.

All of this means that if Sabalenka is alive in the final four and Świątek is on the other side of the net, both are likely to be in the kind of form to give the sport a rare treat: the two of them actually playing one another. It basically never happens, and they’ve played once in the last year, but it was the best match of that year.

Miles to go before they get there again. Just five matches for each, but for different reasons, that feels like a long way off.

World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka is seeking a first French Open final. (Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP via Getty Images)

Matt Futterman’s first-round matches to watch:

Ben Shelton (13) vs. Lorenzo Sonego
Gael Monfils vs. Hugo Dellien

Alexandra Eala vs. Emiliana Arango
Olga Danilović vs. Leylah Fernandez (27)

Can Sinner find his five-set fitness for another deep run on the Parisian clay?

Who had a better draw day? Sinner, the world No. 1, or Alcaraz, the defending champion?

Alcaraz, in a big way.

For starters, Djokovic, who is capable of putting a bit of a hex on Alcaraz, is on Sinner’s side of the draw. Alcaraz has never lost a Grand Slam final. If he faces Djokovic in the final Sunday, it’s hard to imagine him losing his first one on that day. It took one of the great efforts of Djokovic’s career to beat him in the Olympic final here in two tiebreaks.

Early banana peels for Alcaraz look few and far between. Fabian Marozsán and his fiendish drop shots have conquered Alcaraz on clay before, but that looks very far away now. The seed at the top of Alcaraz’s quarter is Casper Ruud, a two-time French Open finalist who has publicly said that his game can’t match Sinner and Alcaraz’s relentless offense at this point.

Sinner’s early issues, if you can call them that, might be an inspired Arthur Fils playing in front of a hometown crowd in the round of 16. Fils grew up in and around Paris and has become the country’s next great hope. If the weather warms up, a hot Jack Draper in a quarterfinal could pose a challenge.

And then there is the tantalizing possibility of Djokovic in the semifinal. At this point, Sinner would enter as a favorite, but on the red clay, Djokovic would have a puncher’s chance, and then some.

Still, it’s hard not to see the first 13 days of the men’s tournament as the warmup for the big event.

The best hopes for a champion from a country less au fait with the terre battue?

For some of the American and British players at Roland Garros, there’s a sense that opportunity knocks.

Starting with the Americans, Coco Gauff has a presentable-looking draw in a quarter that features a number of her compatriots. With fellow seeded players Madison Keys, Sofia Kenin and Emma Navarro all there with her, that part of the draw has the feel of a U.S. clay-court championship to decide who gets a semifinal berth. The most likely opponent once there, according to the seedings anyway, would be another American, the world No. 3 Jessica Pegula. Though she may have to beat Mirra Andreeva — the prodigiously talented 18-year-old Russian and a French Open semifinalist last year — to get that far.

On the men’s side, where Americans have tended to struggle at Roland Garros, No. 12 Tommy Paul comes in with the best form. He reached the semifinals in Rome last week, having done so the previous year. He could face Madrid champion Ruud in the fourth round, and then Alcaraz in the quarters. Fritz, the No. 4 seed and not a natural on clay, is seeded to face compatriot Alex Michelsen in the third round, and then another American, either Sebastian Korda or Frances Tiafoe, in the fourth.

For the British players, Raducanu has that projected second-round against Świątek, while the country’s No. 1 Katie Boulter takes on a qualifier in the first round. Jodie Burrage is up against America’s Danielle Collins.

Jacob Fearnley, now just outside the world’s top 50, has an interesting match against 2015 champion Stan Wawrinka, but the main focus will be on Jack Draper, the No. 5 seed and a runner-up in Madrid earlier this month. He begins against fellow leftie Mattia Bellucci, the Italian world No. 68, and could then face his good friend Sinner in the quarters.

Laura Robson, a former British No. 1 herself, believes Draper, who has never won a match at Roland Garros, can kick on after what has been an excellent start to the year. “He’s heading to Paris with huge amounts of belief in himself and in his game,” said Robson, who is covering this year’s French Open for TNT Sports.

“Yes, he doesn’t have a huge amount of experience in best-of-five, but he’s just reached a final and then backed that up by reaching the quarters on a very different clay court in Rome.”

Robson added that the positive clay results enjoyed by Raducanu and Boulter in the last few weeks have been partly down to a “different mindset” and “the Brits in general looking forward to playing on clay for once.” Last year was a dismal one for the Brits at the French Open, with zero singles victories.

And what of 2025’s popcorn players and floaters?

A year ago, the French Open draw had maybe the most dangerous floater ever: a 14-time champion and 22-time Grand Slam winner named Rafael Nadal.

Nadal’s name floated down to the slot next to Alexander Zverev, the world No. 4 but the most in-form player ahead of the tournament after a win at the Italian Open. Unfortunately, Nadal was a shadow of the Nadal of old, and Zverev breathed easy after mostly cruising past the Spaniard in three sets.

Not surprisingly, neither draw had any floaters of that magnitude this time around. The two most dangerous ones are probably in the women’s bracket: Naomi Osaka and Emma Raducanu.

Neither has much of an outdoor clay pedigree, but they have both shown promise on the dirt of late. Osaka won nine consecutive matches between St. Malo, France and Rome. St. Malo is a WTA 125 event, but it got her confident and ready for the two biggest clay tournaments of the year. Paula Badosa, the No. 10 seed who has been nursing a chronic back injury, probably wasn’t all that happy to see Osaka’s name pop up next to hers.

Raducanu dodged a seed. If she can float into the second round, she could be a stiff test for Świątek, even though the defending champion thrashed Raducanu at the Australian Open.

On the men’s side, the French Open has a different kind of floater. The way the crowds go nuts for their own, any seed outside the top two who lands a Frenchman can be in for a special form of torture that crafty players like Hugo Gaston and Corentin Moutet can deliver.

Gaston starts with a qualifier. If he can pass that test, there’s a world where his drop shots melt the brain of big-hitting Ben Shelton in the second round. Moutet does too, and he’s slated to meet Djokovic in the second round. Last year, he bewitched and beguiled Sinner for a set and a half. If he can do so again, things could get exciting — if only for a while.

Charlie Eccleshare’s first-round matches to watch:

Naomi Osaka vs. Paula Badosa (10)
Elena Rybakina (12) vs. Belinda Bencic

Hubert Hurkacz (30) vs. Joao Fonseca
Alexander Zverev (3) vs. Learner Tien

And… James Hansen’s bonus first-round matches to watch:

Peyton Stearns (28) vs. Eva Lys
Polina Kudermetova vs. Jelena Ostapenko (21)

Alexandre Muller vs. Jakub Menšík (19)
Tomás Martin Etcheverry vs. Stefanos Tsitsipas (20)

French Open 2025: women’s draw

French Open 2025: men’s draw

(Top photo of Iga Świątek: Matteo Villalba / Getty Images)

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