Associate Professor
Three players won 66 of the 81 Grand Slam titles contested between 2003 and 2023, and their era is widely held to be the most dominant in the history of tennis. Assessing it means comparing players who never met, so that every comparison passes through the opponents each did face. The paper measures dominance by how far a player stands above the field of his own day, how many stand there at once, and how long they remain, using averages over fixed windows rather than unstable unbroken runs. Strengths come from a Bayesian dynamic Bradley-Terry state-space model, and dominance is characterized through exceedances of a high threshold. Applied to 197,926 matches played between 1968 and 2025, the analysis finds that only Djokovic separates from the field on peak strength, while what distinguishes the recent period is how long three players stood near the top together.
Leonelli, M. (2026). How exceptional was the Big Three era? Extremes and persistence in men’s professional tennis. arXiv:2608.27362.
Manuele Leonelli