Overprotected?

With a dozen coming at the 2025 Australian Open, protected ranking entries are exploding at the Grand Slam events

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The 2025 Australian Open entry lists were published a few days ago, and it struck me as I looked them over how the news value of these lists has evolved in recent years.

Barring a major injury or a ban (or pandemic-related travel concerns), every player in the Top 100 reliably enters every major in this era; the list is essentially just a straight copy-paste from the rankings.

The new information which major entry lists now reveal, therefore, is the number of players outside that Top 100, many of whom have long been out-of-sight to most tennis fans, but who have catapulted themselves inside the field with a protected ranking.

For the 2025 Australian Open, 12 players—six men, six women—have entered the singles main draws using a protected ranking. 2021 Olympic gold medalist Belinda Bencic, coming back from her maternity leave, is probably the most successful player of the dozen.¹ Nick Kyrgios and Jenson Brooksby are on the list, too, after both missing the entire 2024 season before registering for 2025 Australian Open using protected rankings.

12 would have been an unprecedented number of protected ranking entries a decade ago, but after compiling the data from the last 60 slams, it’s smack-average for recent years. Seven of the last nine majors featured twelve or more protected ranking entries in their main draws; before that, there had never been as many as 12 in the data I compiled dating back 15 years, back to the 2010 Australian Open:

The uptick in protected ranking entries has had a clear effect on the entry cut-off for majors, as being ranked inside the Top 100—once a conservative benchmark—no longer guarantees a main draw spot.

The fields of 128 players in major main draws are currently composed of 104 direct entries, 16 qualifiers, and eight wild cards; with six men and six women using protected entries to enter the Australian Open main draw, the entry cut-off for both fields was set at No. 98.

What is a protected ranking? What’s behind the spike in their usage at major tournaments? How have rules been shifted to stop them being exploited? And what are the noticeable differences between how men and women use protected rankings?

I’ll answer all those questions and more in this post for subscribers, share a bunch of the insights that my dig into protected ranking data revealed, and include lots of colorful graphs and charts and whatnot!

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