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

A top-40 ranking usually comes with a trophy somewhere in the résumé. For five players currently ranked between No. 22 and No. 40, it doesn't. Anna Kalinskaya, Nikola Bartůňková, Talia Gibson, Xinyu Wang and Hailey Baptiste are the highest-ranked women on tour who have yet to win a WTA singles title, and the gap between their rankings and their hardware says as much about how the tour works as it does about any of them individually.

The freshest reminder came on Sunday in Singapore. Gibson, a 22-year-old Australian who was ranked No. 63 a week earlier, reached her first final and lost it 7-5, 6-0 to Leylah Fernandez, who won the last nine games. It was the sixth lost final between three of these five players, against zero titles. Fernandez has now beaten two of them in finals: Kalinskaya in Washington last year, and Gibson.

None of the five is here for lack of quality. Baptiste has beaten a world No. 1 this year, Wang beat a world No. 2 in a final run last summer, Kalinskaya reached a WTA 1000 final as a qualifier, and Bartůňková beat Madison Keys in Rome. What they share is depth without a payoff, built in very different ways and at very different ages.

Kalinskaya is the veteran of the group and its most decorated near-miss. The 27-year-old Russian has lost three singles finals, Dubai and Berlin in 2024 and Washington in 2025, and reached a career-high No. 11 in October 2024 after debuting in the top 20 that June. Dubai was her first WTA 1000 final, reached as a qualifier, which made her only the second qualifier ever to get that far at a WTA 1000 event after Caroline Garcia in Cincinnati in 2022. She lost it to Jasmine Paolini, 4-6, 7-5, 7-5.

Berlin was closer still. Kalinskaya held five championship points against Jessica Pegula in the 2024 final and lost 6-7(0), 6-4, 7-6(3). Two of her three finals were settled in a deciding set, 7-5 in Dubai and a tiebreak in Berlin. Her best hardware is a WTA 125 title in Midland in 2023 and a WTA 1000 doubles title in Madrid with Sorana Cîrstea in 2025, proof she can finish big matches, just not yet as the singles finalist.

What keeps her at No. 22 is the majors. Kalinskaya is 11-4 across the four Grand Slams in 2026, with a Roland Garros quarterfinal, a US Open fourth round and third rounds in Melbourne and at Wimbledon. That is the most major-level wins she has ever recorded in a season, up from 10 in 2024 and just three last year.

Bartůňková is the youngest of the five and the one least likely to stay on this list for long. The 20-year-old Czech made her Grand Slam main-draw debut only in January, beating Daria Kasatkina and Belinda Bencic at the Australian Open before losing to Elise Mertens in the third round. She matched that at Wimbledon, where she beat Peyton Stearns and Kateřina Siniaková before losing to Barbora Krejčíková, and again at the US Open. The one blemish in between was a first-round loss to Victoria Mboko at Roland Garros.

The tour-level numbers are those of a player still building a sample. According to TennisDB, she was 21-16 (56.8%) at WTA level heading into the US Open, and 15-10 on hard courts. She reached a then-career-high No. 38 on August 24 and moved to No. 34 after New York. Some of the defeats are razor-thin: in Prague she lost to Lanlana Tararudee 7-6(4), 3-6, 7-6(6). She also has six ITF titles, and at 6 feet tall, she is one of the tallest players in this part of the rankings.

There is no final on her record yet, but the profile is unusual for 20: three third rounds at majors in a single year, including two wins over Czech Grand Slam champions' territory at Wimbledon (Siniaková, then a loss to Krejčíková), and a top-35 ranking before her first tour-level final. For Bartůňková, a first title looks like a question of timing, not level.

Gibson's rise is the most abrupt on the list. She started 2026 at No. 118 with a stated goal of cracking the top 100, which she did in March, reached a then-best of No. 55 in May, and slid back to No. 63 before Singapore. She now sits at No. 37, an 81-place climb since January, after a week that began with her first 500-level match wins. She has 12 ITF singles titles, and this was her first tour-level final.

The route to the final had two very different halves. She beat Fiona Ferro and Viktoria Morvayova in straight sets, then upset No. 7 seed Maria Sakkari, a former world No. 3, 6-1, 4-6, 6-2 in just under two hours. Her semifinal opponent, Tatiana Prozorova, withdrew with a concussion sustained in doubles, handing Gibson a walkover. In the final, she twice recovered from service breaks and had a set point at 5-4 before Fernandez took over.

The caveat is the majors. Gibson has never advanced past the second round of a Grand Slam, reaching the second round at the Australian Open in 2025 and 2026 (this January she lost to Diana Shnaider 3-6, 7-5, 6-3) and losing in the first round everywhere else. Her ranking is built entirely on tour-level results, which makes Singapore both her best week and the clearest sign of what she still has to prove.

Wang, who turned 25 last Saturday, has come closest to this list's finish line in terms of quality of opposition beaten. Her 2025 run in Berlin as a qualifier included four straight top-20 wins: No. 16 Daria Kasatkina, No. 2 Coco Gauff, No. 10 Paula Badosa (via retirement) and No. 20 Liudmila Samsonova. In the final she lost to Markéta Vondroušová 7-6(10), 4-6, 6-2. Vondroušová was ranked No. 164, the lowest-ranked champion in the tournament's history.

The second final came this January in Auckland, where she lost to Elina Svitolina 6-3, 7-6(6), Svitolina's 19th WTA title. It was not the first time Svitolina had ended one of Wang's best runs: in 2024 Wang beat Pegula, then world No. 5, for her first top-10 win on the way to the Wimbledon fourth round, and lost there to Svitolina. Her best Grand Slam results are three fourth rounds: the 2023 US Open, Wimbledon 2024 and the 2026 Australian Open, when she climbed to a career-high No. 30 the following month.

Wang is also the most decorated player of the five without a singles trophy. She won the 2023 French Open women's doubles title with Hsieh Su-wei, an Olympic silver medal in mixed doubles with Zhang Zhizhen in 2024, and has four WTA doubles titles and a doubles career high of No. 16. Nine places below her February peak in singles, she has the résumé of a player who wins big matches often but has yet to convert them into a singles trophy.

Baptiste is the only one of the five who has never reached a final, and the only one whose case rests on a two-tournament burst. In Miami she reached her first WTA 1000 quarterfinal by beating three top-30 players in a row: Samsonova, No. 9 Svitolina and Jelena Ostapenko.

In Madrid, she went one better and reached her first WTA 1000 semifinal by beating world No. 1 and defending champion Aryna Sabalenka 2-6, 6-2, 7-6(6), after saving six match points. Earlier in the year, she reached the semifinals in Abu Dhabi, losing to Ekaterina Alexandrova in three sets.

The 24-year-old from Washington, D.C., has built this from an unusual base. She only cracked the top 100 in March 2024, and got her first top-10 win a few months later in Wuhan, beating Barbora Krejčíková as a No. 102-ranked qualifier, making her the first player ranked outside the top 100 to beat a top-10 opponent at that tournament since its inception. Her best major result is the fourth round at Roland Garros last year. She has four ITF singles titles and a WTA doubles title.

Her ranking tells the most incomplete story of the five. Baptiste reached a career-high No. 25 on May 4, after Madrid, and now sits 15 places lower, the widest gap between peak and present in this group (Kalinskaya's is 11, Wang's nine). That distance is the point: she has already shown twice this year what a No. 25 player looks like, but the baseline behind those weeks hasn't yet held.