Arthur Fery did not have a ranking that belonged in the second week of a Grand Slam, let alone the last four. The British wild card was No. 114 in the world when Wimbledon began and had never been inside the top 100. On Wednesday he beat the ninth seed, Flavio Cobolli, 6-4, 7-6(4), 6-0 to reach the semifinals, and the numbers around the run are as striking as the result.
Fery is the lowest-ranked man to reach a Wimbledon semifinal since Goran Ivanišević, then No. 125, won the title as a wild card in 2001. He is only the third man ranked outside the top 100 to reach the last four at the All England Club in the past 40 years, alongside Vladimir Voltchkov in 2000 and Ivanišević. In the Open era, per ESPN, only Jimmy Connors at the 1991 US Open, Henri Leconte at the 1992 French Open and Ivanišević had previously reached a major semifinal as a wild card.
The game behind the run. Fery’s rise is not a big serve carrying a limited player. The 23-year-old, who stands 5-foot-9, won 76 percent of his points at the net against Cobolli, and the timing of those forward moves was decisive — as it had been in his five-set fourth-round comeback against Grigor Dimitrov. His baseline game held up across three sets against a player who had reached the Roland Garros final only a month earlier.
A college pedigree. Fery played collegiately at Stanford, where he was a two-time All-American and the 2023 Pac-12 Singles Player of the Year, and he grew up about a mile from the All England Club. Former college players rarely go deep at majors. ESPN noted that no former collegian has reached a Grand Slam final since Kevin Anderson at Wimbledon in 2018, and that the last to win a major singles title was Stanford’s John McEnroe in 1984. Fery would match the first of those marks with a win on Friday.
What the run has already changed. He has become British No. 1 for the first time, overtaking Cameron Norrie, and is projected to climb from No. 114 to No. 36 — and to No. 26 if he beats Alexander Zverev. He is the fifth British man to reach a Wimbledon semifinal in the Open era, after Andy Murray, Tim Henman, Roger Taylor and Norrie, and the first unseeded British player, man or woman, to do so. He is also the last home player left in the draw.
Fery, who faces the Roland Garros champion Zverev in the second semifinal on Friday, has kept the same posture throughout. “It just seems to be getting better and better every match,” he said.
