Two of the most accomplished grass-court players in the men’s field will start Wimbledon without a seed beside their name, a consequence of the tournament’s seeding rules that has left the 2026 draw carrying early danger for the players ranked above them.
Matteo Berrettini, the 2021 finalist, enters at No. 49 and unseeded. Hubert Hurkacz, a semifinalist that same year, sits at No. 95 and is also outside the 32 seeds — and was drawn against No. 11 seed Casper Ruud in the first round.
The rule behind it. Wimbledon seeds its men’s singles draw on ATP ranking alone and has done so since 2021. For most of the period from 2002 through 2019, it was the only Grand Slam to adjust its men’s seedings for grass-court form, taking a player’s ranking points and adding a bonus weighted toward recent results on the surface.
The All England Club retired the formula ahead of the 2021 Championships, citing the narrowing gap between grass and the rest of the tour and the decline of single-surface specialists. The practical effect is that a player’s record on grass now has no bearing on where he is placed.
A finalist and a semifinalist, unseeded. Berrettini opens against Stan Wawrinka, the three-time major champion playing on a wild card in what he has said will be his final Wimbledon. Berrettini reached the final here in 2021, the first Italian man to do so, and holds four grass-court titles — Stuttgart in 2019, Queen’s Club in 2021, and both again in 2022.
He made the Roland Garros quarterfinals this month before withdrawing injured. Hurkacz’s run to the 2021 semifinals included a quarterfinal win over Roger Federer, the last singles match of the Swiss’s career. A knee operation in 2025 and a slide from a career-high ranking of No. 6 have since pushed him well outside the seeded group.
What the old formula did. Under the retired system, both players’ grass-court histories would have counted toward their placement. The formula’s most cited outcome came in 2019, when it lifted Federer above Rafael Nadal to the No. 2 seed despite Nadal holding the higher ATP ranking, sending the two into opposite halves of the draw. Pure ranking removes that adjustment, and pedigree on the surface no longer earns a player protection in the bracket.
The case for the change. The All England Club’s position is that grass has homogenized with the other surfaces since the courts were slowed in the early 2000s, and that the transition from clay to grass is now far easier than it once was, making a surface-specific bonus harder to justify. Both Berrettini and Hurkacz also carry fitness questions that may weigh on their draws as heavily as their seeding, with each having lost stretches of recent seasons to injury.
The bottom line. For the seeds, the result is a draw in which ranking and grass-court pedigree have come apart, and the sharpest early-round threats sit in the unseeded tier. Play begins Monday.
