Update June 2026

It’s a sign of how impressive the current talent pool of Italian male tennis players is – many of them Head ambassadors – that Matteo Arnaldi has been a regular in the world’s top 50 yet frequently only the sixth-best in his own country.

His rise up the rankings began in 2021, coinciding with the emergence of Italy’s impressive new generation of players, including his Head colleagues Jannik Sinner, Lorenzo Musetti and Matteo Berrettini. Arnaldi clearly benefits from the competition and the solidarity: “It has been great,” he says. “We are all good friends. We help each other.”

‘It all happened very fast!’

The cheerful Arnaldi became a name worth watching by reaching the fourth round of the 2023 US Open, where he faced the then world number one Carlos Alcaraz in his debut on the Arthur Ashe Stadium. That run took him into the world’s top 50 and also earned him $284,000 in prize money, a useful sum given that he had just moved in with his Australian girlfriend to a prestigious apartment in Monte Carlo.

He also gained momentum. Apart from the fact that he can claim to have played Alcaraz and Borg in successive tournaments (that’s Leo Borg, the son of Björn), Arnaldi went on to post a highly impressive three-sets win over Australia’s Alexei Popyrin in the crucial rubber of the 2023 Davis Cup final.

When he beat some quality players to reach the semi-finals of the Montreal Masters in August 2024, he broke into the world’s top 30. And he has stayed in the top 50 for much of the intervening time. “It all happened very fast,” Arnaldi says.

Perhaps too fast, because by the second half of 2025 the cheerful Italian with the sunny smile was suffering from serious foot problems. It turned out he had a micro-fracture, and his doctors told him that if he wanted to let it heal properly, he would have to wear a boot for six months. “I’m an athlete, I don’t want to go in a boot for six months,” he explained. “The fracture means the blood doesn’t flow so well into the foot, so I find whenever I travel, the foot hurts for the first day or two, or the first match in the new place. Then it gets better.”

The result was a poor start to 2026, and when he lost in the first round of qualifying for Madrid where he had ranking points to defend, he was in danger of slipping out of the top 150. But then Arnaldi took himself to the Challenger tournament in Cagliari in southern Italy. After a quarter-final victory on a final-set tiebreak, he suddenly felt his confidence coming back. He won the tournament, then won a couple of rounds in Rome the following week, but still arrived in Paris ranked outside the top 100.

What happened at Roland-Garros really announced Arnaldi to the world. He set a record for the longest time on court to reach the quarter-finals (at 17 hours 42 minutes, it was nearly two hours longer than the previous record), he then reached his first Grand Slam semi-final, where he was due to play his fellow countryman and Head ambassador Flavio Cobolli. But on the night before the all-Italian semi, Arnaldi woke up in the night, started vomiting, and couldn’t keep any food down all day. By late afternoon, the infectious player was appearing in a bizarre press conference with Cobolli where one sat at one end of a long desk and the other sat at the other end so Arnaldi didn’t pass on his virus.

He couldn’t eat for two and a half days, but was starting to tolerate food when he watched Cobolli lose to another Head ambassador Alexander Zverev in a five-set final. “It was not easy,” he says, “I just know it would have been a good semi-final, and if I’d won that, it would have been a good final. But OK, it was a good tournament, I played some of my best tennis, had long matches, so I was happy about it.”

Continuing a great Italian tradition

Arnaldi’s tennis education began on the Italian Riviera close to the French border. He began playing at a local club, not far from where the late Bob Brett, who coached Boris Becker and Goran Ivanisevic at the height of their careers, ran his academy in San Remo.

It was there that he picked up a Head racquet at a very early age and has stuck with it ever since. “It suits me fine,” he says, “no need to change!” Today he endorses the Head Radical range.

He is clearly aware of the great Italian tradition he is continuing. Asked whether he was aware of Nicola Pietrangeli, the great Italian of the 1950s and 60s who won singles, doubles and mixed titles at Roland-Garros, he replies with eyes sparkling, “I have met him, we were able to talk for a while in Rome. People tell me he had a lovely one-handed backhand.”

With Sinner, Cobolli, Musetti, Berrettini, Arnaldi, and others like Luciano Darderi and Mattia Bellucci, Italian tennis looks in very safe hands for the next decade.

Words by Richard Evans and Chris Bowers