{"id":107528,"date":"2026-07-01T07:00:21","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=107528"},"modified":"2026-06-30T23:09:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T03:09:43","slug":"tsitsipas-and-his-father-will-they-wont-they-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2026\/07\/01\/tsitsipas-and-his-father-will-they-wont-they-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Stefanos Tsitsipas and His Father: Will They Won’t They, Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stefanos Tsitsipas stood at Wimbledon this week and announced, with carefully chosen words<\/a>, that his professional relationship with his father Apostolos Tsitsipas is over. He said he loves him, he said his father has given him everything he possibly could, he said the day-to-day energy of their work together was no longer what he needed, and he said he had left a window open last time but would not be doing so again. It was a mature, considered statement from a 27-year-old who has clearly thought hard about this and means every word of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

He also meant every word of it in August 2024, when he told his father to leave the coaching box mid-match in Montreal<\/a> after a tense exchange, then released a formal statement saying the collaboration had come to an end. He meant it in 2023 when he hired Mark Philippoussis and left his father behind for the first time in his career. He meant it each time the split was announced, the statement was released, and the new chapter was declared open.<\/span><\/p>\n

The chapter always circles back. In July 2025, less than a year after the Montreal split, Tsitsipas announced on Instagram that he had reunited with his father, writing that some journeys have a way of circling back to where they began. The reunion came after a brief two-month stint with Goran Ivanisevic ended with Ivanisevic publicly declaring he had never seen a more unprepared player in his life. Before that, in 2023, he hired Philippoussis and split from him two months later before returning to his father. The pattern is now so established it has its own rhythm: departure, outside coach, return. The only variable has been the name of the interim coach.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Stefanos Tsitsipas’ History Actually Says<\/b><\/h3>\n

Tsitsipas won 11 Tour-level titles under his father’s guidance, including the ATP Finals in 2019, which represents the peak of what he has achieved as a professional and the period in which he was most consistently dangerous at the Grand Slam level. The argument for Apostolos is not entirely without merit: the player who reached the Roland Garros<\/a> final in 2021 and the Australian Open<\/a> final in 2023 was coached by his father throughout. Whatever the dynamic cost them personally, it produced the best tennis of Tsitsipas’s career.<\/span><\/p>\n

What it has not produced since 2022 is anything close to that level, and the ranking tells the story without requiring much else. Tsitsipas is currently ranked 88th in the world, down from a career high of third. He has not reached a Grand Slam final in five years. His former physiotherapist Jerome Bianchi described their working relationship<\/a> as harmful and not sustainable for years, and revealed that Tsitsipas’s mother repeatedly intervened when the player wanted to separate from his father earlier, inducing guilt that pulled him back each time. Bianchi also noted that some players stopped training with Tsitsipas because his father was such a dominant presence that he left his son zero oxygen.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is a damaging portrait, and it comes from someone who was inside the team for years. The fact that it took until the Montreal incident in 2024 for the split to finally happen, and that even then it lasted less than 12 months before Tsitsipas was posting selfies with his father on Instagram and describing the reunion as the boldest step forward, tells you everything about the emotional structure of this relationship and why outside observers have been right to be sceptical of each announced separation.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Can Anyone Take This One Seriously?<\/b><\/h3>\n

The honest answer is not really, and the reason is not cynicism. Tsitsipas said in August 2024 that he preferred to keep his father in his role as a father, and only as a father. He returned to him as coach within eleven months. Now he says his father has already given everything he possibly could to him, that there is no window left open, and that he is thinking about himself and what is best for him. These are strong words but they are also almost word for word the sentiment expressed in previous separations, and the sentiment has not previously survived.<\/span><\/p>\n

What makes this iteration different, if anything does, is the specificity of the language about comfort. Tsitsipas said explicitly that having his father by his side gave him a sense of comfort but that comfort was not the solution he needed. That is a more analytical framing than the previous splits, which tended to emerge from acute conflict rather than reflection. The Montreal split came after a public argument on court. This one appears to have come from a place of self-assessment. Whether that makes it more durable or simply better articulated is impossible to know from the outside.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is possible to know is that Tsitsipas at 27, ranked 88th, has a narrowing window to find a coaching relationship that produces results. The Ivanisevic experiment lasted two months and ended in public humiliation<\/a>. The Philippoussis experiment lasted two months and produced nothing. The returns to his father have produced increasingly diminishing results each time, culminating in a ranking that puts him outside the top eighty for the first time in years.<\/span><\/p>\n

The talent that produced three Grand Slam finals before he turned 23 has not disappeared. What has gone is the competitive edge that translated talent into results, and no coaching change, with or without his father, has yet shown any evidence of bringing it back.<\/span><\/p>\n

This split may be permanent. The previous ones were supposed to be permanent, too. The tennis world will believe it when it sees a coach other than Apostolos still in the box six months from now, and a ranking that reflects the player Tsitsipas should still be capable of becoming. Until then, this is another chapter in a story that keeps ending and starting again, and the only thing that has consistently changed between editions is how much time Tsitsipas has left to make it matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Main Photo Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stefanos Tsitsipas stood at Wimbledon this week and announced, with carefully chosen words, that his professional relationship with his father Apostolos Tsitsipas is over. He said he loves him, he said his father has given him everything he possibly could, he said the day-to-day energy of their work together was no longer what he needed, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5393,"featured_media":80943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2,6],"tags":[11448,846,304],"class_list":["post-107528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atp","category-featured","category-wimbledon","tag-goran-ivanisevic","tag-mark-philippoussis","tag-stefanos-tsitsipas"],"modified_by":"Yesh Ginsburg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107528"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107802,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107528\/revisions\/107802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}