The best ATP players without a title: Five top-40 names still waiting for their first trophy

A top-40 ranking on the ATP Tour usually comes with at least one trophy somewhere along the way. For five players currently ranked between No. 27 and No. 37, it doesn't. Alexander Blockx, Arthur Rinderknech, Alex Michelsen, Arthur Fery and Matteo Arnaldi are among the tour's highest-ranked men without a single ATP Tour-level title, and between them they've still produced a Masters 1000 final, a Grand Slam semifinal, and a win over a since-undisputed world No. 1—all without ever lifting a trophy on tour.

What separates this group from the women's equivalent list is the shape of the near misses. Rather than a string of lost finals, most of these five have built their rankings on standout runs and signature wins that simply never carried them all the way to a title match. It makes for a different kind of case study in how far a career can go before the first trophy arrives — if it ever does.

Blockx's rise this year has been one of the most efficient on tour. The 21-year-old Belgian, a former world No. 1 junior who beat Learner Tien in the 2023 Australian Open boys' final, broke into the ATP top 100 only in March 2026 and has climbed to his current career-high of No. 27 in the space of six months.

The signature result came at the Madrid Masters, where he upset four seeded players, including world No. 5 Felix Auger-Aliassime and the tournament's 2025 champion Casper Ruud, to reach his maiden tour-level semifinal.

He backed that up with a run to the quarterfinal at the US Open, his best Grand Slam result to date, in a season that's also included his first Masters 1000 quarterfinal and steady results across every surface. What he hasn't done yet is win at ATP Tour level — his only trophies this year have come at Challenger level, including the Canberra title in January, where he beat fellow next-gen riser Rafael Jódar in the final. For a player still just 21, the gap between his big results and his first tour title looks more like timing than ability.

Rinderknech is the veteran of this group, and the one whose ranking has moved the least in a single direction. Now 31, the Frenchman reached a career-high of No. 24 as recently as May 2026, built on a career that included multiple ATP Tour finals without ever closing one out.

His breakthrough moment came earlier than most: at the 2021 Lyon Open, entering as a lucky loser, he beat sixth seed Jannik Sinner for his first career top-20 win, a result that looks considerably more impressive in hindsight than it did at the time.

Since then, Rinderknech has settled into the role of a dangerous, well-traveled pro capable of troubling seeds on any surface, reaching the third round or better at all four majors across his career without ever pushing into the second week. At 31, with his ranking still fluctuating in the low 30s, the question for Rinderknech isn't really about untapped potential anymore — it's whether he ever converts one of his remaining opportunities into the title his career has so far lacked.

Michelsen's case is the most conventional of the five: a young American, still only 22, who turned pro out of high school in 2023 and has climbed steadily rather than exploded. He reached a career-high No. 30 in July 2025, and this season produced the best Grand Slam result of his career, a quarterfinal run at the US Open, to go with a third round at the French Open — both new bests on those surfaces,

Standing 6-foot-4 with a game built around a big serve and forehand, Michelsen carries the kind of physical profile that tends to produce ATP titles sooner rather than later once the results start clicking at Masters level. He hasn't reached a tour-level final yet, but a career record of 89-82 at 22 suggests a player still building a foundation rather than one stuck on a ceiling.

No player on this list has a more improbable recent story than Fery. Ranked outside the world's top 100 entering this year's Wimbledon, the 24-year-old received a wildcard into the main draw and rode it all the way to the semifinal, becoming the first British wildcard in history to reach a Grand Slam singles semifinal, and the first unseeded British player, man or woman, to do so at Wimbledon in the Open Era.

The run included wins over seeded opponents Flavio Cobolli and a gritty victory at Queen's Club weeks earlier, and it vaulted him from outside the top 100 to a new career high of No. 36 on July 13, then further still to No. 33 by the end of August — briefly making him Britain's new national No. 1, ahead of Cameron Norrie.

Fery's path to this point has been unusual even by tennis standards. Born in France, he's spent his career representing Great Britain, and his father reportedly owns a Ligue 1 football club, a detail that's added an unusual layer to the coverage of his breakthrough. On the court, though, the achievement stands on its own: a player who'd never won an ATP-level match of real consequence before this summer suddenly has a Grand Slam semifinal on his résumé, and no title anywhere in sight yet to go with it.

Arnaldi's 2026 season might be the most volatile of anyone on this list. The 25-year-old Italian, who broke into the top 100 back in May 2023, fell as low as world No. 106 by May of this year, going 2-5 across his spring tournaments with an early exit at Rome. Weeks later, at Roland Garros, he produced the best result of his career: a run to the semifinal, his first Grand Slam final four, on the surface where he'd historically struggled most.

That single result reshaped his season. Arnaldi has settled at No. 37 since, still without a tour-level title to his name despite the French Open run, a career-high of No. 30, and part of Italy's Davis Cup-winning squad. His career has included lower-level titles, including the 2023 Murcia Challenger, but the gap between a Grand Slam semifinal and a first ATP Tour trophy remains, for now, unresolved — a reminder that even a career-best result at the majors doesn't automatically translate into silverware at the smaller events surrounding it.