Who are the Tennis GOATs? (Greatest Of All Time — Men & Women)

We develop a simple, but objective, method of determining tennis GOATs.

This is updated from one of our previous articles — and published here on our free Substack. As we get ready to enter the heart of the 2023 Tennis Grand Slam season, we revisit our work on the all time greats in tennis.

Tennis fans have been fortunate to witness some of the best players on both the women’s and men’s side. Recent years have seen duels between Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer. More “seasoned” tennis fans remember tennis greats such as Pete Sampras, and even all-time greats such as Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe — and Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

How do today’s greats compare to players from the golden era of tennis in the 1980s? Tennis fans and analysts like to debate which player is the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time).

Any professional who has won a major tournament or reached number 1 is a true champion. With due respect to all of our great champions, we’ll use some of our analytical tools to take a peek at contenders for men’s and women’s GOATs in terms of peak performance.

Some purists will argue that you can never truly compare players from different eras — using different equipment — and playing on different surfaces. While we agree that this is true to some degree — and realize that this is a controversial subject — it is enjoyable to imagine how the greats of today might stack up against the greats of yesterday. Our goal is to find the best talent — normalizing for the equipment and training available at the time — in an objective manner. We’ll let the numbers do the talking in the cleanest manner (and most efficient manner, for this article!). Here, we focus on players since the Tennis Open Era started (1968).

Metrics

There are a number of metrics that most tennis analysts and fans consider when selecting the best players of all time. Here is a sampling of the favorites:

• Total number of Grand Slams won.

• ELO — the rating system (link) used for chess, FIDE ratings, and statistically-biased analysts.

• Peak ELO achieved — a very interesting and nice metric.

• Weeks at number 1.

• Year Shares at number 1 — one of our own metrics, this statistic distributes years (or shares of a year) at number 1.

Nerdy Nitpicking

The remainder of this section and the next section are nerdy musings — and diatribe, or complaints, about certain metrics. The main point is: Good analysts, researchers, and data scientists will try to uncover knowledge in an objective fashion.

More normal readers may want to skip to the Methodology in a Nutshell section.

• Head-to-Head — this is an interesting measure. However, head-to-head records are path and time-dependent. For instance, say we have the true tennis GOAT (the best ever during his or her peak years at, say, age 23 to 27). Almost nobody could beat them during that period.

However, age unfortunately gets even the best of us. Even world class athletes will age over time. If the true GOAT happened to be a few years older than another good number 1 player (but not a GOAT; we’ll call this player the GOAT-pretender), the true GOAT may seemingly underperform.

That is, as the GOAT ages, the GOAT-pretender might have a winning record against the true GOAT. This is true even if the peak GOAT would easily handle the GOAT-pretender at that player’s peak.

There is so much to consider when analyzing anything. Numbers and statistics can tell many stories — and can even be misleading. Again: Good analysts, researchers, and data scientists will try to uncover knowledge in an objective fashion.

Our GOAT Goal

As we can see, there are many factors to consider. As an example, while all of the measures mentioned above are useful — they are all very dependent on the prospective GOAT’s level of competition at the time. In addition, the importance of certain Grand Slams varied over time. For instance, during certain times in tennis history — especially before the late 1980s — some top tennis players did not make the long journey to the Australian Open.

For this article, our GOAT goal — is to identify skill and talent — beyond equipment and training. We are after performance at each player’s peak, over a reasonable length of time. In other words, if you are able to select one player to play a match randomly selected from their peak — who would you pick?

Some players put together a great season — or a great year. The truly great tennis players — the GOAT contenders — are able to play at a sustained level of greatness for several years.

Here, we study a player’s level of achievement during a three year period. And, since three is an arbitrary number, we performed sensitivity analyses on various time periods. To smooth results, we used a weighting of results based on two to four years.

Our GOAT results highlight the all-time greats who should be most feared during their peak two to four years.

It should be noted that the objective of our GOAT metric is peak performance over several years. Others may prefer a longer time period — or performance during an entire career.

Methodology in a Nutshell

First, we filtered players based on the total number of Grand Slams won. Once we have our pool of GOAT contenders, we focus on Grand Slams — as well as other top tournaments at the time. In most years, this means the four Grand Slams (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open) — and the season-ending tournament.

We then focus on performance during each player’s peak years. How many major events was the player able to capture? How many majors did the player enter?

This method of studying each player’s results at the five major events as a function of how many events entered helps to even the playing field (for travel or injury). These results are weighted over the player’s best two to four consecutive years.

What do the numbers say? First, let’s get a quick summary on selected contenders.

Selected Players and Rivalries

Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert: At her peak in the 1980s, Martina Navratilova and her serve and volley game made her the most feared woman tennis player in the world. Interestingly, Chris Evert, with her baseline style, was a great rival. Coincidentally and ironically, Evert and Navratilova both won 18 singles Grand Slams!

Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe: Borg and McEnroe ushered in the golden age of tennis. Huge personalities, huge popularity, and huge games. Borg, as a type of rock-star-athlete, single handedly increased tennis’ popularity. Borg used to be interviewed and asked how he invented topspin! Borg and McEnroe had personalities, styles, and games that contrasted so much, that fans just had to watch. And they drove each other to great heights. McEnroe’s serve and volley pressure combined with genius eye-hand coordination on volleys and balls at his feet would have pressured any other all-time great.

Serena Williams: Serena Williams is already considered the GOAT of women’s tennis by many. Williams has produced some of the most dominating tennis in history. Using our method, Williams actually appears on our list twice!! Williams’ career had two peaks — and was especially shiny from 2002–03 and 2009–15, with a few gaps of performance in between. No other player achieved two such peaks — so if Williams is not the model’s GOAT, she should at least get an asterisk — and her own category!

This Model’s GOAT

The model parses out all-time greats across time periods (since 1968) and styles of play. The results generally agree with other metrics — and group intelligence methods — that attempt to measure or judge peak performance. SO — who does the model pick as its GOAT for men’s and women’s tennis?

Monica Seles: Monica Seles won 9 Grand Slams — and 8 Grand Slams before she turned age 20! This was before the unfortunate stabbing incident in 1993. Most GOAT contenders have a strong rival who offered stiff competition and helped to lift their levels of play. Seles’ supernova of a career had Steffi Graf — who dominated women’s tennis before and after Seles.

No matter what, Seles was able to achieve domination and greatness that no other woman tennis player has matched during tennis’ Open Era. It’s sad that we’ll never know “what might have been” — but it’s great that we were able to witness the accomplishments of this all-time great, and this model’s woman’s GOAT. Several tennis players and historians have said that Seles might have become the most accomplished tennis player in history if the unfortunate incident did not occur (Wikipedia).

Roger Federer: Recent tennis history has clouded the picture of the men’s tennis GOAT, but our model’s goal — that focuses on major titles won during peak years — gives us an objective measure. This metric selects Federer as this model’s GOAT. Picking Federer as the GOAT needs more background on Nadal & Djokovic, which we discuss below.

More on The Big 3 (Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Roger Federer)

The contenders for the GOAT often have other greats who drive each other to new heights. The golden era of tennis had Borg, McEnroe, Connors and Lendl — as well as Evert and Navratilova. More recent tennis history had Sampras and Agassi — and Seles and Graf. And modern tennis has The Big Three.

Interestingly, various metrics seem to be split when picking the GOAT amongst Nadal, Djokovic and Federer. Many fans point to head-to-head results. On the other hand, as discussed earlier, this statistic can be misleading.

Djokovic seems destined to break the record for the most Grand Slams (singles) won by a man. And suffice it to say that Nadal is the greatest male clay court player in history. However, our simple, but objective, method picks Roger Federer as the GOAT in men’s tennis.

From the mouth of babes, this video says it all:

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Future Work

Our approach uses an objective method to key-in on the GOATs who should be most feared during their peak years. And while this is a good objective method, we prefer to triangulate results using differing approaches. In particular, we’d like to better study peak performance and normalize for the level of competition. In addition, we are excited to study historical greats such as Rod Laver and Bill Tilden. We have done work in this area and will publish results at some point. Thank you for reading!

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Author

Carlton Chin, a graduate of MIT, is an investment officer focused on portfolio strategy and data-driven models. Carlton has been a professor at a local university and worked with various sports organizations, including the Sacramento Kings — and has been quoted by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN.