The 2025 Australian Open begins January 12 in Melbourne, and the draws for the men’s and women’s singles are intriguing — and have thrown 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 the defending champions — and best players in the world?

They didn’t get any huge favors from this draw.

Jannik Sinner shouldn’t have too much trouble handling Nicolas Jarry of Chile, but Jarry can be sneaky good and there was a little while last year when he was playing top-10 tennis.

From mid-February to mid-May, Jarry made a final in Buenos Aires, a quarterfinal in Miami and another final in Rome. He’s a big man with a big serve and a bigger forehand. When he gets those two working together he can be a handful.

He did little in the second half of the year though. Sinner should be able to manage it all just fine, especially on a hard court.

Life should be fairly comfortable until the business end of the tournament after that. Holger Rune, an enigma at this point, is the highest seed in Sinner’s quarter; Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic wouldn’t come around until a final.

Aryna Sabalenka suffered the same fate as Coco Gauff, drawing a former Grand Slam champion. She will play Sloane Stephens in the first round.

At this point, Stephens is at her best on clay. It’s the surface she speaks most passionately about. She also may have some scar tissue from last year, when she had a golden opportunity to get to the second week up a set against Anna Kalinskaya, before losing the next two.

Beyond Stephens, there’s a good bit of quality lurking in Sabalenka’s neighborhood of the draw. Don’t go to sleep on Linda Noskova, who sent Iga Swiatek home from Melbourne last year, or Mirra Andreeva, who fears no one, or Diana Shnaider, maybe the most improved player of the past 12 months. And if they both get to the quarters, Sabalenka will get a 2024 final rematch against a much-improved Zheng Qinwen.

A nightmare quarter for Gauff — or just a tribute to WTA depth?

If Gauff was looking for an easy path into the second week — as if such a thing exists — she didn’t get it.

She drew a Grand Slam champion for her first-round match in Sofia Kenin. Not just any Grand Slam, because Kenin won this one five years ago — and not just any Grand Slam champion, because Gauff faced Kenin at Wimbledon in 2023 and Kenin won in three sets.

Sure, Kenin’s Melbourne triumph was five years ago, and she has been mostly a shadow of that tennis self post-pandemic, But she’s been winning matches at most of the tournaments she has played for a few months now. If she can get her teeth into the match, which is no guarantee the way Gauff has been playing of late, she could make it a long afternoon or evening for the No. 3 seed.

Kenin might not be the only early speed bump for Gauff, if she gets over it. There is no shortage of quality in her quarter of the draw. Naomi Osaka, Jelena Ostapenko and Karolina Muchova are all there. She wouldn’t face one of them until the fourth round, and that part of the tournament is an eternity away at this point. It is not the time to forecast.

Instead, it speaks to the overall depth of the WTA that there are so many potential problems in the first week for so many good players with a history of success. In one section of 16 players, there are four Grand Slam champions (Gauff, Kenin, Osaka, Ostapenko), two Grand Slam finalists (Muchova and Leylah Fernandez) and an Olympic gold medalist (Belinda Bencic).

Coco Gauff reached the semifinals in Melbourne in 2024. (Daniel Pockett / Getty Images)

USA, USA, USA, U … S … A?

Draw day at the Australian Open was not a great one for American tennis fans. Everywhere you looked, Americans were set up to cannibalize each other.

Gauff and Kenin are just the start of it. Feeling good about U.S. open semifinalist Emma Navarro? She’s got Peyton Stearns, the former NCAA champion and a tough opponent first up. Excited for Ben Shelton to get off to a fast start in 2025? He gets to take on Brandon Nakashima. Madison Keys goes up against Ann Li.

Taylor Fritz will enter the tournament with the highest ranking of his career. He’s the No. 4 seed. He’s got a fellow Californian in the first round — Jenson Brooksby, who won Grand Slam matches before a suspension for missing drug tests and then wrist surgery. Beyond Brooksby, Fritz is in the same quarter of the draw as Frances Tiafoe, Shelton and Nakashima.

The glass-half-full way of looking at this is that the U.S. has so much depth right now, with so many players in both the men’s and women’s tournaments, that it’s inevitable that they bump into each other. Given that Shelton is the No. 21 seed, he was going to have to face a top-eight player in the fourth round anyway.

If it comes to a showdown with Fritz, he’d probably be ok with that. Better him most likely than Sinner, Alcaraz or Djokovic.

— Matthew Futterman

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Matt Futterman’s first-round matches to watch:

Caroline Garcia vs. Naomi Osaka
Nick Kyrgios vs. Jacob Fearnley
Emma Navarro (8) vs. Peyton Stearns
Joao Fonseca (Q) vs. Andrey Rublev (9)

Novak Djokovic may keep outrunning time, but he can’t outrun a seeding

With Sinner and Alcaraz in the same half of the draw for the last three Slams, Novak Djokovic found himself in glorious isolation. That luck had to run out eventually, but in the end, it was less chance and more the seeding system working as designed.

Djokovic is not just in the same half as Alcaraz but the same quarter, a consequence of his relatively lowly seeding of No. 7. This opens up the delicious prospect of a last-eight meeting between two of the three tournament favorites.

Djokovic is no stranger to a kind draw, and his first couple of matches conform to that pattern. He begins against American wildcard Nishesh Basavareddy, before a second-round match against either a qualifier or the Russian world No. 99 Pavel Kotov.

Novak Djokovic has won the Australian Open more than any other major. (Mark Kolbe / Getty Images)

Things are expected to get a lot tougher from there, with a likely third-round match against the mercurial No. 26 seed Tomas Machac or the huge-serving Reilly Opelka, who blew Djokovic off the court in Brisbane last week. The 10-time Australian Open champion would then be seeded to face another Czech, Jiri Lehecka, or three-time major semifinalist Grigor Dimitrov.

If Djokovic wants to go all the way to a final against Sinner, he may have to do it a harder way than he has sometimes been used to. His new coach, Andy Murray, will have ideas.

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How will Novak Djokovic solve a problem like Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz?

The strange tale of the No. 2 seed

How much of a benefit is being the No. 2 seed compared to No. 3 or No. 4? The answer can vary wildly from major to major, but in this year’s draw, Alexander Zverev and Iga Swiatek have landed themselves pretty inviting quarters.

Their potential opponents, however, might find more to divide them than unite them. Swiatek may have exited the Australian Open at the third-round stage last year, but she still possesses the fear factor of a five-time Grand Slam champion and long-serving world No. 1. She also looked pretty intimidating at the United Cup over the last week or so, leading Coco Gauff by a break in both sets of a straightforward-looking 6-4, 6-4 defeat that was anything but.

Zverev, the two-time finalist who is yet to get over the line, might have a bunch of players thinking themselves more predator than prey, eyeing up an opportunity in this quarter. With no Alcaraz or Djokovic, players like Tommy Paul, Arthur Fils and Ugo Humbert will be thinking that a semifinal place could be theirs.

On the face of it, Zverev’s No. 2 seeding seems a little deceptive — it’s up to him to show it’s merited.

Iga Swiatek will be hoping for a truly deep run to start the year. (Cameron Spencer / Getty Images)

The curse of the Grand Slam floater

One of these days Naomi Osaka’s luck with Grand Slam draws is going to change, but Thursday was not that day.

The unseeded four-time Grand Slam champion drew the also unseeded former world No. 4, Caroline Garcia, in the first round ahead of a likely second-round meeting with the No. 20 seed and one-time French Open runner-up Karolina Muchova. Osaka and Muchova met at the same stage of the U.S. Open in August, when Osaka had already beaten 2017 French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko in the first round.

In the other two majors of 2024, Osaka had a match point but lost to the almost unbeatable Swiatek at the French Open and was then defeated at Wimbledon by the now world No. 8 Emma Navarro — both exits coming at the second-round stage.

In New York, Osaka and Muchova were both floaters — the kind of unseeded player that one of the top 32 names in the draw prays to avoid. Since then, their paths have diverged. Muchova used her win over Osaka as a springboard to the semifinals of the U.S. Open, and Osaka would love to turn the tables and do something similar here — especially because it might only be that kind of run that will get her seeded for the French Open.

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Should she get past Garcia and Muchova, another dangerous floater could await her — the former Olympic champion Belinda Bencic, who is unseeded after only recently returning from giving birth to her first child. That’s if Bencic can get past another dark horse, Ostapenko, in the first round.

The prize for the winner of this little cluster of potentially lethal players is a slated fourth round against Gauff. Given how the American is playing right now, that wouldn’t feel like much of a reward at all.

— Charlie Eccleshare

Charlie Eccleshare’s first-round matches to watch:

Belinda Bencic vs. Jelena Ostapenko (16)
Gael Monfils vs. Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard (30)
Marie Bouzkova vs. Mirra Andreeva (14)
Stefanos Tsitsipas (11) vs. Alex Michelsen

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

Yulia Putintseva (24) vs. Elina Avanesyan
Alexei Popyrin (25) vs. Corentin Moutet

Australian Open 2025: Women’s singles draw

Australian Open 2025: Men’s singles draw

Tell us which match-ups you are looking out for in the comments.

(Top photos of Novak Djokovic and Coco Gauff: Getty Images)