The draw for the last ATP tournament of the season, the 2024 ATP Finals in Turin, has been released, and it again promises to be a great year-end championship.
Every year at the end of the season, the eight best players get to compete in the year-end championship. That offers greater rewards in both points and prize money than regular ATP tournaments.
That's mostly because of the exclusivity of the tournament and the fact that only the eight best compete at the event, making every match at the tournament a spectacle.
This year, however, it won't be the eight best players competing at the tournament. Novak Djokovic finished the season as the sixth man in the 2024 ATP Race, but he withdrew from the ATP Finals.
That meant that three players fighting for the last two spots at the time all qualified for the tournament, and as a result, they didn't have to compete at the last ATP 250 events of the season but instead could focus on the ATP Finals.
All should be present in Turin for the official photoshoot, which always delivers memorable pictures, but the ATP Finals don't deliver only memorable pictures but also memorable matches.
Fans in Turin will be hoping for those this year at the event running from November 10th to 17th. The players were drawn into two groups named after legends of the sport: the Ilie Nastase Group and the John Newcombe Group.
The World No. 1 player and the player that will receive the most support in Turin, Jannik Sinner, leads the Ilie Nastase Group. With Carlos Alcaraz not being among the top two seeds, there was a chance that these two would meet in a group, but unfortunately for many tennis fans, that won't happen.
The fourth-seeded Daniil Medvedev was drawn into the same group as Sinner. For the young Italian, and everyone else in the group, that is certainly a challenging draw, as the Russian player is a former champion at the event, having won it in 2020, which was the last edition in London.
Another player in this group is the fifth-seeded Taylor Fritz. The American player had probably the best season of his tennis career, having reached the US Open final, but Sinner beat him in that final. Now, Fritz will have a chance to get revenge.
The last player in this group is the seventh-seeded Alex de Minaur. For him, it will be a debut at the ATP Finals, and certainly a well-deserved one, considering he got injured just when he played probably the best tennis of his life this year.
The John Newcombe Group is led by Alexander Zverev, who is another former champion of the event. The German player won it not only in London in 2018 but also won the inaugural edition in Turin in 2021.
He proved that he can thrive in the indoor hard court conditions, which, on the other hand, are conditions that one of his round-robin rivals struggled with in recent weeks.
The third-seeded Carlos Alcaraz will play in this group, and he will want to forget the disappointment from the Paris Masters when he lost much earlier than he would have liked.
The sixth-seeded Casper Ruud and the eighth-seeded Andrey Rublev are two of the players who benefitted from Djokovic's withdrawal, and they will both play in the John Newcombe Group as well.
| Ilie Nastase Group | John Newcombe Group |
|---|---|
| Jannik Sinner [1] | Alexander Zverev [2] |
| Daniil Medvedev [4] | Carlos Alcaraz [3] |
| Taylor Fritz [5] | Casper Ruud [6] |
| Alex de Minaur [7] | Andrey Rublev [8] |