WTA Player of the Year, No. 1: Aryna Sabalenka

Sabalenka's 2025, by the Numbers

• 63-12: Overall win-loss record
• 23-3: Grand Slam win-loss record (AO F, RG F, W SF, USO 🏆)
• 4: Titles (Brisbane, Miami, Madrid, US Open)
• 5: Runner-ups (Australian Open, Indian Wells, Stuttgart, Roland Garros, WTA Finals)
• 1: Year-end ranking

🖥️📲 Stream Sabalenka's best matches of 2025 on the Tennis Channel App!

The Story of the Season

Aryna Sabalenka opened 2025 as the WTA world No. 1 and never let go of the top spot. She was the tour’s most dominant force, lifting four trophies—Brisbane, Miami, Madrid and the US Open—and finishing with a 63–12 record, the most wins of any player this year.

Our verdict? She’s Tennis.com’s 2025 WTA Player of the Year. Sabalenka’s verdict? It was just “pretty good.”

“It’s been pretty good so far. I just need to get a little bit better with myself, and hopefully next season I’ll improve,” Sabalenka told press after the WTA Finals.

Still, the year wasn’t without frustration. She reached three more big finals—the Australian Open, Roland Garros and the WTA Finals in Riyadh—and lost all of them. Those near-misses kept her from feeling fully satisfied, even as she led the tour in wins and prize money. In many ways, her season was defined by how consistently she bounced back from those heartbreaks and returned to the winner’s circle.

“Sometimes players are just better on the day than you. The good thing is that I’m always there. The bad thing this season is that I lost most of the biggest finals I made,” she reflected in Riyadh. “So I guess I’ll just sit back in the Maldives, probably having my tequila, and think back and try to analyze my behavior, my emotions.” — Stephanie Livaudais

What's to Come in 2026?

The success of a Sabalenka season can sometimes be difficult to measure, for she often enjoys emphatic wins and shattering losses in close to equal measure.

Any one of the world No. 1’s high-profile defeats would have been enough to derail the season of a lesser player. Who expected Sabalenka to reach the semifinals of Wimbledon less than a month after getting outfoxed—and out-gutted—by Coco Gauff at Roland Garros? Or win the US Open by avenging her Wimbledon semifinal loss to Amanda Anisimova?

For as emotional a player Sabalenka can be, it is been her tenacity that has defined her reign atop the women’s game. Her base level is so high that conversations of improvement come down to little tweaks here and there, but those tweaks could make the difference in a big-stage final.

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And Sabalenka is nothing if not fixture in big-stage finals: of her nine finals in 2025, only one came below the Grand Slam and WTA 1000 level. But where semifinals proved tricky in seasons pasts, the championship match was a bigger hurdle than she would have liked. She seemed to have conquered the mental block in New York, describing a feeling of confusion when opponents would show up to play.

“I thought that, ‘Okay, if I made it to the final, it means that I'm going to win it,’ you know, and I sort of didn't expect players to come out there and to fight. You know, I thought that everything going to go easily my way, which was completely wrong mindset.”

Where others learn those lessons during a dip in form, Sabalenka has continued to adapt at cruising altitude. Should that new mindset hold, she has every potential her to rocket into an even higher stratosphere next season.—David Kane