The Next Gen Finals gets underway this week, with the eight best players aged 20 and under facing off for the title and a grand prize of £416,303 ($526,480).
Past winners of the young stars event include Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz and Stefanos Tsitsipas.
And 18-year-old Joao Fonseca – the lowest-ranked man in the draw at No. 145 in the world – will be bidding to join them this weekend, where he can almost double his career prize money.
Fonseca has long been tipped as a future star. Earlier this year, he became the first player born in 2006 to win an ATP Tour-level match.
In 2023, he was invited to the ATP Finals in Turin to serve as a hitting partner for the likes of Sinner, Alcaraz and Daniil Medvedev. And the Brazilian teenager will now get a chance to follow in their footsteps by playing in the Next Gen version of the event.
Fonseca will make his debut at the tournament, which now takes place in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has been drawn in the brutal Blue Group with world No. 20 Arthur Fils, top-50 star Jakub Mensik and Learner Tien.
Alex Michelsen, Jerry Shang, Luca Van Assche and Nishesh Basavareddy make up the Red Group. The players will compete in three round-robin matches to try and reach the semi-final.
Every competitor gets £119k ($150k) just for participating. Each round-robin victory is worth £29k ($37k), the semi-final prize is £90k ($114k) and winning the final carries an extra £121k ($153k).
If Fonseca can go 5-0 throughout the week, he will take home £416k. So far in his young career, the 18-year-old has earned £231k ($292k).
While the Brazilian star will be the underdog in his group, he already has a win over Fils. In February, he beat the three-time title winner at the ATP 500 in Rio to record his first win.
The world No. 145 could also benefit from the unusual format at the Next Gen Finals. Matches are best-of-five sets, but each set is first to four games, with a tiebreak played at 3-3 to speed things up.
No-ad scoring is also used. It means that if a game goes to deuce, the person who wins that point wins the game.
There are fewer and shorter changeovers and less time in between points, with players getting 15 seconds instead of the full 25 allowed on the rest of the ATP circuit.
Fonseca will begin his campaign against Fils on day one of the tournament on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Michelsen will face Basavareddy in an all-American clash, Shang will play Van Assche and Mensik takes on Tien.
Content Source: www.express.co.uk