Novak Djokovic’s French Open 2026 campaign has officially begun, and if you were watching Sunday’s first-round match against Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, you probably came away with more questions than answers. He won 5-7 7-5 6-1 6-4, but the numbers on the board looked different from anything we normally associate with the 39-year-old at Roland Garros. So what do they actually mean? Probably less than you think.
Novak Djokovic def. Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard: By the Numbers
The Numbers Look Good With One Big Asterisk
Let’s put the serving stats side by side. Over his entire career at Roland Garros, Djokovic has averaged a 5% ace rate, a 2% double fault rate, 67% first serves in, 71% first serve points won, and 55% second serve points won. Solid, workmanlike clay-court numbers that have helped him win the title three times.
Against Mpetshi Perricard, the headline figures were considerably more eye-catching. He landed 75% of first serves, eight percentage points above his career average. He won 81% of first serve points, a full ten points clear of his historical norm. On second serve, he won 70% of points, fifteen points higher than his career mark. And he hit 12 aces on 107 service points–a rate of roughly 11%, which is double his Roland Garros career average.
So Djokovic is suddenly a different player? Not quite. Here is the asterisk you need to staple to every one of those numbers: his career averages include every match he has ever played in Paris: good ones, bad ones, five-set epics, early exits when he was exhausted, matches where he nursed an injury. That baseline already absorbs his worst days. Any single first-round match is going to look better against it, almost by definition.
The Mpetshi Perricard Problem
There is a second, more significant issue with drawing conclusions from this match, and it has everything to do with who was standing on the other side of the net.
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard is one of the biggest servers on the ATP Tour. His game is built on short, explosive points, big first serves, aggressive returns, minimal baseline exchanges. That style tends to compress rallies, push both players into service games that resolve quickly, and quietly inflate the winner’s serving numbers. Matches against him produce outliers. That is not a criticism of the Frenchman; it is simply what his game does to a stat sheet.
It also means the second serve figure, that 70% points won, needs a qualifier. Mpetshi Perricard generates a lot of unforced errors under pressure. A player can post a brilliant second serve win rate against him less because their second serve was devastating, and more because the returner gave the point away before anything interesting happened.
What We Actually Learned
Djokovic’s French Open started, and he won. That is really the only sentence you can write with confidence.
This is not unusual for him. There is always a calibration element to his early rounds, a process of finding rhythm, testing the body, reading the conditions. The first match rarely tells you where he is. The second match tells you a little more. By the third or fourth round, against players who can actually hurt him, you start to get real information.
His next opponent, Valentin Royer, likely will not provide that information either. It is when Djokovic’s French Open run hits someone in the Top 20, someone who can extend rallies, expose a serve under pressure, and punish any defensive fragility, that the picture becomes clear.
Until then, the only honest conclusion is the one Novak Djokovic himself would probably give you: he got through, and he moves on. Everything else is reading tea leaves from a match that was always going to tell us very little about what Djokovic’s French Open might actually become.
Main Photo Credit: Susan Mullane-USA TODAY Sports
