World number one Jannik Sinner has brought his current season to a close owing to a knee injury, with a return to competition not expected before 2027. A victory over Alexander Zverev in the Wimbledon final handed Sinner back-to-back titles at the All England Club in July, and he has not returned to ATP Tour competition since.

Five consecutive tournament absences — spanning the Canadian Open, Cincinnati Open, US Open, China Open, and Shanghai Masters — were attributed to an ongoing knee problem that kept him off the court throughout that stretch. Having withdrawn from the Shanghai Masters, Sinner brought his season to a close, a decision that stands to cost him the top spot in the ATP rankings.

Around the time Carlos Alcaraz was completing a comeback from four months away with injury, Sinner found himself dealing with difficulties of his own. A wrist problem picked up at the Barcelona Open in April kept Alcaraz off the tour for roughly four months, with his return coming at the US Open late in August.

Injury absences have affected a wider circle of prominent players beyond Alcaraz and Sinner over the past twelve months. Arthur Fils, ranked 11th in the world, told Spazio Tennis that professional tennis places extraordinary physical and logistical demands on players, with competitors moving between different time zones and playing surfaces on a weekly basis throughout a schedule he described as very intense — and that he has noticed something he can only call "strange" unfolding across the tour.

Fils said a schedule filled with back-to-back obligations leaves little margin for pause or recovery, and that injuries tend to follow from such conditions with some regularity. He also noted that injuries among younger players have tended to occur more frequently than among their older counterparts, though the pattern is not fully understood.

Fils drew attention to the pattern of health setbacks affecting Sinner, Alcaraz, Jack Draper, and himself, and expressed hopes for Sinner's recovery. He also remarked on the difficulty of sustaining Sinner's schedule without physical setback, even as the Italian had claimed five consecutive ATP Masters 1000 titles across Indian Wells, Miami, Monte-Carlo, Madrid, and Rome in the same season.

Six trophies came Sinner's way across the season, four of them Masters titles, before a fifth Masters crown and the Wimbledon championship rounded out his haul. Across the full stretch of the season, 44 matches ended in his favour against just three defeats, those losses coming at the hands of Novak Djokovic, Jakub Mensik, and Juan Manuel Cerundolo.