The nouvelle vague is back in vogue. First, Richard Linklater’s movie Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), about the making of Jean Luc-Godard’s seminal 1960 film À Bout de Souffle (Breathless), premiered earlier this week at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, a new wave of young French male tennis players, led by Arthur Fils and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, will attempt to make waves at the 2025 French Open over its opening weekend.
French Yearning for a Home Male Champion
It is fair to say that France, probably the greatest tennis-loving country in the world (as judged by the number of both clubs and players, including recreational players), yearns for a home male champion at Roland Garros.
Marion Bartoli, the 2013 Wimbledon Women’s Singles Champion, spoke on BBC Radio Five’s French Open preview programme about the transformative effect that Yannick Noah’s 1983 French Open victory had on participation rates and interest in tennis in France over the following 10 years. However, that victory is now over four decades ago. Indeed, it is so long ago that Noah triumphed using a wooden racket.
Given its adoration of tennis, France has produced surprisingly few male winners of its home Slam over the last century. Noah was the first home male Singles champion since Marcel Bernard beat the great Jaroslav Drobný in 1946, the first tournament after the end of World War Two. And before that, the previous French male champion at Roland Garros had come in 1932, when Henri Cochet, one of the legendary “Musquetaires”, claimed the fifth of his French crowns.
Three male French winners in virtually a century is scant reward for France’s love of the sport. However, it is also evidence of the unique pressures involved in competing at, let alone trying to win, a home Slam. Wimbledon famously waited 77 years for Andy Murray to follow in the footsteps of Fred Perry in 1936, but it is now the Major with the most recent home male winner. No U.S. man has won the US Open since Andy Roddick in 2003. And the last Australian man to win the Australian Open was Mark Edmondson in 1976, nearly half a century ago. Clearly, winning your home tennis Major as a man is one of the hardest things to achieve in all of sport.
Nevertheless, French hope springs eternal in the Paris springtime and this year a lot of home attention is focused on two young male players in particular, Arthur Fils and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard.
Arthur Fils
Arthur Fils is probably the brightest young male hopeful that France has produced since Richard Gasquet and Gael Monfils first emerged as professionals, quickly followed by Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Gilles Simon et al, nearly two decades ago. None of that generation could ultimately win a Slam, which is perhaps not surprising in the Era of The Big Three. However, in the post-Big Three Era that we are now definitively in, with only Novak Djokovic remaining active of the three men who bestrode the tennis world like colossi, there is far greater opportunity for more players to win Majors, notwithstanding the current domination of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner.
Fils is still only 20 but has already been around for so long that he has competed at the last two Next Gen Events, albeit without going all the way and winning one of them. A fierce, demonstrative competitor with one of the finest forehands on the ATP Tour, he has the opportunity to become the face of French tennis over the next few years, including at Roland Garros. Before he can do so, however, he must first win at least one match at his home Slam.
Having lost in the first round at Roland Garros in both 2023 and 2024, to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina and Matteo Arnaldi respectively, Fils will have high hopes this year of at least breaking his duck in Paris, as he faces Chile’s Nicolas Jarry in his first match in 2025. Jarry may have reached the final of the Italian Open last year, but he has done little of note since, including during the current European clay-court season, and consequently has slid down the rankings.
Looming on the near-horizon for Fils is a possible third-round match with Andrey Rublev and, if he can win that, a possible fourth-round encounter with the World No.1 and No.1 seed Jannik Sinner. Sinner was hugely impressive in his biggest home tournament, the Italian Open, right up until the second set of the final against Carlos Alcaraz. Nevertheless, Fils must forget all such “horizon-scanning” and focus on the task at hand, which is simply recording a first win at the French Open.
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard
Over the last week, in the run-up to the start of the French Open this weekend, many French (and even non-French) tennis fans would have been dismayed by the absence of Lyon from the considerable number of warm-up tournaments staged before Roland Garros. It was removed from the ATP Tour after last year’s edition, meaning that France has no significant men’s warm-up event in the week before the French Open starts. Instead, male players must travel to Hamburg or Geneva for any last-minute fine-tuning of their game.
That sense of loss was heightened by the fact that Lyon’s last two winners were none other than probably the two best young male French players. Fils won it in 2023, beating Argentinian clay-court specialist Francisco Cerúndolo in the final to claim his maiden ATP title. Then, even more surprisingly and spectacularly, Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard won it last year, defeating another far-higher ranked Argentinian, Tomás Martín Etcheverry, in a classic final that was only settled by a third-set tie-break that Mpetshi Perricard won 9-7. A softly-spoken giant at 6 feet eight, but with a lovely single-handed backhand, Mpetshi Perricard is a pretty unique player.
That maiden title for Mpetshi Perricard was the springboard for an extremely successful 2024 summer, as he backed it up by reaching the last 16 of Wimbledon, despite having lost in qualifying. He was lucky enough to gain entry to the tournament proper as a lucky loser and duly became the first lucky loser in nearly 20 years to reach the fourth round, where he won the first set against eventual semifinalist Lorenzo Musetti before losing in four sets.
Nothing that Mpetshi Perricard has done over the last 12 months has quite matched the heights of his performances at Lyon and Wimbledon last year. Nevertheless, his progress up the rankings has been sufficiently steady for him to be seeded at Roland Garros for the first time (he is the 31st seed) and he has a very winnable first-round match against the much lower-ranked Zizou Bergs of Belgium.
Exactly like Fils, Mpetshi Perricard has a tennis iceberg looming on the horizon, in the shape of Carlos Alcaraz, who he is scheduled to meet in the third round if he can get that far. However, just like Fils, he has to forget all such thoughts and projections, and concentrate solely on winning a first ever match at Roland Garros. If he can do that, he can dream of, rather than fear, the bigger matches ahead.
French Hopes For 2025
There are, of course, many other Frenchmen in the 2025 French Open. They range from veterans like Gael Monfils and Richard Gasquet, who might just be making their farewell appearance at Roland Garros, to younger players like Ugo Humbert, who has shown signs over the last year, in particular during his run to the final of the Paris Masters at the end of 2024, that he can achieve a real breakthrough.
However, it is this duo of truly young male players–Fils and Mpetshi Perricard–who probably offer the greatest long-term hope for French tennis fans that they can have another home male champion before a half-century passes. They won the Boys’ Doubles title at Roland Garros together in 2021, but the difficulty of their draws this year means they are unlikely to create major waves. However, they can at least begin their senior Roland Garros career by winning some matches and producing the ripples that might become floods of success in the future.
Main Photo Credit: Susan Mullane-USA TODAY Sports
