The 2025 season will start already before the new year begins, and the first event on the calendar is the 2025 Brisbane International.
With the United Cup starting already on December 27th, 2024, some players will begin their season even earlier, but individual competitions start a few days after that.
The first tournament to start will be the Brisbane International, as the WTA 500 event, which is held at the Queensland Tennis Centre, will begin already on December 29th, 2024. The tournament will then run until January 5th, 2025.
Almost a month prior to the tournament start, the entry list for the 2025 Brisbane International was released, and it features the names of two former champions as well.
In 2024, Elena Rybakina won the Brisbane International. However, the Kazakhstani player won't return to Brisbane to defend the title, as her name doesn't appear on the entry list.
Instead, Rybakina chose to represent her country at the United Cup, where she will play against Spain before taking on Greece. In her absence, the path to the title opens up for many players.
For one player, however, the situation didn't change at all. Aryna Sabalenka is the World No. 1 player, and she will be the top seed at the event, regardless of who competes in Brisbane.
In 2024, she was the player that Rybakina beat in the final, and in 2025, the Belarusian player, who is a former champion of the event, having won it in 2023, will want to go one step further again.
She isn't the only former champion on the entry list, and coincidentally, she isn't the only former Belarusian champion either. The other player who won the tournament is Victoria Azarenka, who triumphed two times in 2009 and 2016, and she will make an appearance at the tournament as well.
The former World No. 1 player is currently ranked only around the 20th place in the rankings, which means that there will be many players seeded ahead of her at the tournament.
The second seeded spot should go to Jessica Pegula, with her compatriot Emma Navarro securing the third seeded spot, and Daria Kasatkina closing out the list of the Top 10 players that signed up for the event.
But the field for the first WTA 500 tournament of the year is extremely strong, as the likes of Paula Badosa, Diana Shnaider, Anna Kalinskaya, Jelena Ostapenko, and teenage prodigy Mirra Andreeva will all threaten to make a winning run.
One player who isn't among the seeds but will certainly attract many fans in Brisbane is Ons Jabeur. The Tunisian player's ranking slipped on the verge of exiting the Top 50 after she had to end her 2024 season early.
Seed | Name | Entry Ranking |
---|---|---|
1 | Aryna Sabalenka | 1 |
2 | Jessica Pegula | 7 |
3 | Emma Navarro | 8 |
4 | Daria Kasatkina | 9 |
5 | Paula Badosa | 12 |
6 | Diana Shnaider | 13 |
7 | Anna Kalinskaya | 14 |
8 | Jelena Ostapenko | 15 |
9 | Mirra Andreeva | 16 |
10 | Marta Kostyuk | 18 |
11 | Victoria Azarenka | 20 |
12 | Magdalena Frech | 25 |
13 | Linda Noskova | 26 |
14 | Liudmila Samsonova | 27 |
15 | Ekaterina Alexandrova | 28 |
16 | Yulia Putintseva | 29 |
Dayana Yastremska | 33 | |
Anastasia Potapova | 35 | |
Xinyu Wang | 37 | |
Magda Linette | 38 | |
Ons Jabeur | 42 | |
Rebecca Sramkova | 43 | |
Elina Avanesyan | 44 | |
Marie Bouzkova | 45 | |
Peyton Stearns | 47 | |
Yue Yuan | 49 | |
Viktoriya Tomova | 54 | |
Moyuka Uchijima | 56 | |
Anhelina Kalinina | 57 | |
Renata Zarazua | 58 | |
Kamilla Rakhimova | 63 | |
Yafan Wang | 64 | |
Ashlyn Krueger | 65 | |
Mccartney Kessler | 67 | |
Cristina Bucsa | 71 | |
Anna Blinkova | 75 | |
Veronika Kudermetova | 76 | |
Arantxa Rus | 80 | |
Ajla Tomljanovic | WC |