The eight players who have qualified for the 2024 ATP Finals have been split into two groups. The most eye-catching news may be who isn’t in either of them: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. For the first time since 2001, none of the Big Three are taking part in the tour’s year-end championships. Djokovic, despite not winning any tour events in 2024, managed to qualify, but elected not to play.
Chalk it up as another small sign of generational turnover in the men’s game. More than any other event, the Finals are for the elite only—the eight players who make it there are the tour’s ruling class for that season. While Nadal never won it—and, frankly, wasn’t all that interested in it—Federer and Djokovic made it a big part of their résumés.
Federer won it six times, before Djokovic—as is his habit—one-upped him with his seventh ATP Finals title in 2023. Federer’s demolition of Andre Agassi in the 2003 final in Houston signaled a changing of the guard, while Djokovic’s close two-set win over Federer in the 2012 final in London was a key moment in his rise to dominance.
It’s fitting that the 2024 Finals would bring an end to a streak of Big Three participation, because this is also the first season since 2003 in which none of them won a Grand Slam title. Instead, the tour’s new, two-man ruling class—Jannik Sinner, 23, and Carlos Alcaraz, 21—split the four majors. Now the new Big Two will try to follow in the footsteps of Federer and Djokovic and start their own winning traditions at the season-ending championships. While Sinner has already the clinched the year-end No. 1 ranking, and Alcaraz has dropped to No. 3, a title run by the Spaniard in Turin would give him an edge of his own.
