Every year, the world’s elite tennis players converge in Doha for the Qatar Open. Played on outdoor courts over seven days in February, the tournament is an ATP 500, considered the third-highest tier in tennis after the Masters 1000s and the Grand Slams. The stakes are high, especially for its reigning champions defending their titles. For Andrey Rublev, who has two wins behind him as well as hundreds of fans’ eyes, and the sports world’s predictions of a likely win, those stakes couldn’t be higher. We caught up with him just as he pushed Carlos Alcaraz in a tight two-set semifinal, 7–6 (3), 6–4, fighting off five match points before the world number one closed it on his sixth.
By any standards, Rublev has an exceptional career. The 28-year-old Russian has won Masters events in Monte Carlo and Madrid, been ranked number five in the world, and collected more than $30 million in prize money. But Rublev also hit a plateau. In the past nine years, he has reached 10 Grand Slam quarterfinals and lost them all. Eight of those defeats were in straight sets. He knew he needed a reset. After a lifetime of training, he needed to rebuild his game because the bar for elite play kept getting higher.
Rublev’s career is a good reminder of how difficult it is to reach the very top. He has some powerful advantages. He was born into a sporty family. His father, Andrey Sr., was a boxer; his maternal grandfather was a wrestling coach and a keen tennis player. His childhood was spent hanging around at Spartak, a renowned tennis club in Moscow where his mother was a coach. Home videos show a tiny Andrey holding a racket the same size as his bottom half. When he succeeds in dropping a ball onto the racket, it pings off with surprising velocity.
His hours on the court, time training at a club that has produced multiple Grand Slam winners and a budding friendly rivalry with two other Russian players, Karen Khachanov and Daniil Medvedev, were enough to see him through the junior ranks. His familiarity on clay at Spartak helped him win the junior title at Roland Garros in 2014. He took to the professional game easily, picking up points by defeating a series of established players. That was enough to establish him in the world’s top 200, but then, “I got stuck,” he remembered. “For a year and a half, I was between 160 and 200 in the world, and then I saw reality.”
“I realized that I was not ready physically or mentally. My game was not that good. I needed to work in a different way.”
His initial advantages were not enough to sustain a professional career. In 2016, Rublev’s different way meant heading to Barcelona. It was there that he joined up with a Spanish coach, Fernando Vicente, a partnership that has become one of the most enduring in the sport. “When I started to work with Fernando, I realized I couldn’t run. My fitness was not good. My legs were super weak. At that moment I thought, ‘I need to work in the right way.’”
Vicente’s methods paid off. He turned Rublev into an athlete. In 2017, Rublev won his first ATP title in Croatia and entered the top 50. Eighteen months after turning up in Barcelona, he reached the first of those 10 Grand Slam quarterfinals, only to be swatted aside by a peak-era Rafael Nadal.
The losses continued to pile up: The French and US Opens in 2020, Australia in 2021. In 2022, he finally won his first sets in a quarterfinal, at Roland Garros, but lost to Croatian veteran Marin Cilic. Then, it was the US Open in 2022, defeats to Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open and Wimbledon in 2023, a third quarterfinal loss to his pal Medvedev in the US in the same year, and, most recently, a defeat to Jannik Sinner in Australia in 2024. But thanks to wins at ATP 1000 events in Monaco and Spain, he ended both 2021 and 2023 ranked fifth in the world.
Even more than his struggle to reach the final four of a slam, Rublev was becoming known for his on-court meltdowns. “There’s nothing wrong with showing emotion, but you need to put it in the right direction,” he told PLAYERS. “Sometimes there are matches where I can. But sometimes, still, when I’m not feeling well, they start to go in a wrong direction.” In 2024, during a tight semifinal against Alexander Bublik in Dubai, Rublev was angered by a bad call and allegedly swore at a line judge. After a stand-off with the tournament director, he was defaulted. (Bublik, to his credit, tried to get the match restarted.) Three months later, Rublev berated himself throughout a straight-sets loss to Matteo Arnaldi at the French Open, hurling rackets around the court and hitting himself on the legs and face. It was a painful sight. Weeks afterward, he lost to an unknown at the first round of Wimbledon.
Over the past eighteen months, Rublev has tried to add a third act to his career. It hasn’t gotten any easier: the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic triopoly has given way to an intense rivalry between Sinner and Alcaraz. From 2017, the year Rublev reached his first Grand Slam quarterfinal at the US Open, until the end of 2023, the Big Three won 23 out of 27 slams. Then, Sinner and Alcaraz took over and split the past nine.
Getting past Sinner and Alcaraz in the same slam might be the toughest assignment in the history of men’s tennis. Rublev is frank about what it is like to face the pair. “They are super-fast, and they can hold a high intensity for hours. I can play at a high level, but I don’t have the same explosion in my legs, the same fast movements. I’m working on getting closer to them.”
Nevertheless, he has a new strategy. After hitting a low at Wimbledon, he realized his existing game, built around his big forehand, would need to be rebuilt. “This style had already brought me to my maximum. If I wanted to try to be competitive with the top players, I needed something different.” He is adding more variety to his arsenal, with more volleying, more rushing the net, to try and neutralize the power and endurance of Sinner and Alcaraz. He is also strengthening his backhand, to lessen his reliance on his relentless forehand.
Changing your entire approach to match strategy midway through a career is a major endeavor. Rublev recognizes that it requires patience. “For the moment, if I go to the net less and keep trusting my forehand, maybe I would win one or two more matches, but it won’t help me to get to the final stages.” Statistically, 2025 was his weakest year since 2018, when he was still establishing himself on the tour. His proportion of matches, sets and games won were all down on previous years. However, he appears more controlled on court. He credits linking up with another Russian champion who struggled with the mental side of tennis, Marat Safin, with “making me more calm, more mature, more of a man.”
He was in an optimistic mood ahead of the Qatar Open in Doha, a place where “the conditions are quite good for my game.” The tournament provided the best moment of his 2025 season, when he stormed past an in-form Jack Draper to take the title. It has regularly been a happy hunting ground: He won the event in 2020 and reached the final in 2018. After that comes the switch from hard court to clay, the surface on which he has the best record, and the long build-up to Roland Garros. The third coming of Andrey Rublev — kinder to himself, less predictable for his opponents — will be put to the test.
