Roland Garros opens for play on Sunday 25 May. The seedings, the draw and the bookmakers' lines have arrived in the same configuration, which is unusual. Jannik Sinner — twenty-four years old, holder of the Australian Open and US Open titles, on a 29-match winning streak that has dropped three sets — is the heavy favourite at minus-300 across the offshore markets. The two-time defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, who would in any normal year be the alternative narrative, is absent through injury and will miss Wimbledon as well as the French Open. Novak Djokovic, the five-time Roland Garros champion, is at thirty-eight years old and has had one clay match this season ahead of the tournament, having entered three events total in 2026 because of a recurring shoulder problem.
The combination of those three facts has produced a draw in which the most likely outcome is not really in doubt. The market price reflects the analytical consensus: Sinner has been the dominant player on tour for the last eighteen months; in the absence of Alcaraz he is the only top-tier clay player in his half; the surface suits his game; and the form data, including his having won the three clay Masters events at Monte Carlo, Madrid and Rome leading into Paris, is unanswerable. The price is short but the price is correct.
What that calculation produces, narratively, is a tournament that has to find its drama in places other than the outright winner. The interesting threads at Roland Garros this year will be: whether Djokovic can extend his improbable late-career run to a sixth Paris title (his draw is on the far side from Sinner, so any Djokovic-Sinner showdown can only happen in the final); whether Alexander Zverev, the second favourite at +750, can finally translate his Grand Slam final losses into a final win; and whether the women's draw, which is genuinely open and is being treated as the more interesting half of the tournament by most of the European tennis press, produces a winner from a substantially deeper field than the men's.
The Sinner question, at a deeper level, is the question of what a career Grand Slam looks like at twenty-four. Sinner needs only the French Open to complete the set; he has already won Australia, Wimbledon and the US Open. The career slam at twenty-four is a thing that happened twice in the open era — Mats Wilander in 1988, Rafael Nadal in 2010 — and would put Sinner into a category of historical company that the contemporary tour does not generally produce. Doing it on the slow Paris clay, on which his game is structurally less suited than on faster surfaces, would moreover make the achievement structurally harder than a hypothetical alternate run through the four surfaces.
It is worth asking the alternate-history question: how does the analytical case for Sinner change if Alcaraz is in the draw? Sinner remains the favourite, but the price moves from minus-300 to roughly minus-130. Alcaraz on clay is the only player the models rate as a genuine threat on this surface; he is the only player to whom they would assign a 50:50 outcome against Sinner's current form. Alcaraz's absence therefore halves the variance of the draw.
The corner of the conversation that this magazine pays attention to is the Scottish corner. Scottish tennis is, by the international standards, a small affair: Jamie and Andy Murray remain the dominant names, both have retired from singles, and the next generation of Scottish tour players is thin. The Wimbledon coverage is more popular in Scotland than the Roland Garros coverage, by a significant margin, because the home-soil connection works at Wimbledon and does not work at the French Open. For the Scottish audience that follows the French Open, therefore, the appeal is structural rather than partisan: the slow surface produces a different tactical conversation, the clay-court demands on stamina and shot selection are interesting in a way that the modern hard-court game is not, and the European public-broadcast feed has a kind of low-key Continental atmosphere that is genuinely pleasant.
It is also, frankly, the kind of tournament where the gambling community ends up doing some of the most interesting analytical work in tennis. The argument is partly that the slow clay creates more set-by-set variance than the fast surfaces, which makes the in-tournament markets more interesting; and partly that the depth of the men's draw at the second tier — Tsitsipas, Ruud, Rune, Fritz — produces upset paths that the books are slow to price correctly. The Scottish Review forum has had a long-running Roland Garros thread in which the regulars work through the conditional probabilities of various second-round and third-round upset paths; the analysis there, while obviously commercial in spirit, is also some of the more rigorous tennis analysis available in the English-language tennis press, and is worth a look if you want to see where the value lies in this year's draw beyond the outright market.
The Djokovic question is the most interesting of the second-tier narratives. Djokovic at thirty-eight is a different player from Djokovic at thirty: the serve has lost roughly two miles per hour of average pace, the lateral movement is reduced. What has not changed is the big-match psychological dominance. Djokovic in a Grand Slam quarter-final against a player ranked fifteenth in the world is, by the data, a 70:30 favourite. Djokovic in a semi against a top-five player is a 45:55 underdog. The Paris draw has put him in a path that would let him reach the quarters; the analytical work is in pricing whether he can convert from there.
The journalistic temptation is to write the tournament off as Sinner's procession. The honest analytical position is that it probably is — but the second-tier narratives are interesting enough to follow on their own terms, and the women's draw, in which the four top seeds have been distributed across the four quarters in a genuinely open shape, is arguably the more interesting tournament.
It is finally worth noting, for the readers of this magazine who follow tennis casually rather than analytically, that the final is on Sunday 7 June. The semi-finals are the Thursday and Friday of the second week; the quarter-finals are the Tuesday and Wednesday. The first week is the upset week; the second week is when the seedings settle. The fortnight rewards close watching.
There is no need to make a contrarian argument against Sinner. He will probably win. The interesting work is in pricing the path: who reaches the quarters, who reaches the semis, what the second-tier draws produce in the way of upsets. The minus-300 outright is what it is. The interesting tennis happens around it.
By Fraser Lindsay — Opinion Columnist at The Scottish Review. He writes on Scottish public life, sport and the slow business of getting the argument right.