INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — There’s so much noise around João Fonseca that it can be easy to lose sight of the facts.
Fonseca is a tennis player. He is Brazilian. He is 19. He has won two ATP Tour titles. He ended his full debut year on the main tour as world No. 25, higher than Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, his idol, managed in their first full seasons at the top level.
Fonseca has started 2026 managing a chronic back injury. He has taken some rough losses. He has groundstrokes that can leak errors as much as they can detonate winners.
He has been tipped as a future major champion and world No. 1. He is happy to be where he is.
“If you’d said to me that I was going to be top-40 now, and top-25 in the end of the last year, I’d be like, ‘No way,’” he said Saturday during an interview at the BNP Paribas Open.
“So yeah, I’m very happy the way that I am right now, but of course I want more.”
Fonseca was speaking after being greeted by a dozen or so adoring fans, as he walked over from a broadcast interview. He dutifully signed autographs and posed for photos, just as he had done at the end of his thrilling three-set win over Karen Khachanov earlier that day.
As ever, Fonseca had been playing in front of a frenzied crowd, which made it feel as though this part of California had suddenly been transformed into Rio de Janeiro. The hype and expectation around him has, for some, become a strange stick to beat Fonseca with, because he is yet to fully realize the tremendous potential that his top level transmits.
Sunday night, he served a reminder of that top level by destroying Tommy Paul, the world No. 24 and a former top-10 player, 6-2, 6-3, for a second top-25 win in 24 hours.
Fonseca’s ability to thrill crowds with these kinds of wins is an extraordinary gift. During his breakout win, a dismantling of Andrey Rublev at the 2025 Australian Open, the crowd on Rod Laver Arena was in such raptures that one fan screamed out: “Fonseca, you’re not human!”
By the next round, there were lines around the grounds trying to get onto court for Fonseca’s match against Lorenzo Sonego, which Fonseca lost in a performance strewn with the errors that can afflict a teenager with more power than they sometimes know what to do with.
At Indian Wells, Fonseca’s reward for beating Khachanov and Paul is a last-16 meeting with Sinner, the world No. 2, a four-time Grand Slam champion, and the player to whom many have compared Fonseca, given they share a sledgehammer forehand and phenomenal timing and purity of strike from the back of the court.
It will be the first time Fonseca has played one of Sinner or Carlos Alcaraz, and the feeling that his potential marks him out as a future challenger to them explains some of the hype around him, as well as why the more immediate rises of others in his age group have caused some murmur, if not consternation.
“I think Fonseca got a lot of spotlight, which is nice for him, but I think the other guys (Learner Tien and Jakub Menšík, both 20) deserve that too, because of the results and everything they have been showing in the last couple of years, particularly in the last 12 months,” Novak Djokovic said in a news conference last week.
Ahead of facing Tien, who is ranked No. 27, at the Australian Open in January, Alexander Zverev, a former teen prodigy himself, said: “He’s the same age as some other young guys and they are talked about more, but I think he’s the one that performs right now.”
Tien has six top-10 wins to one for Fonseca, as well as leading him in the rankings. Mensík has won the biggest title of the three, at last year’s ATP Masters 1000 Miami Open. Tien’s game is more even-keeled and difficult to destabilize than Fonseca’s, and his court craft and unexpected power and angles are more difficult to adapt to at first sight, but Fonseca’s ability to blast winners is more easily digestible to casual fans.
There are echoes here with how Alcaraz was perceived by some when he first broke through at the start of the decade. Back when Daniil Medevedev called him “the famous Carlos Alcaraz” ahead of a news conference at Indian Wells in 2023.
Fonseca, like Alcaraz, has a thrilling game and an absurdly high top level. Against Paul, he hit winners on both wings from improbable angles, and had the many Brazilian fans chanting his name in a way that has already become familiar around the world: “Jooooããããooo Fon-seca. Jooooãããooo Fon-seca.”
The fan element is another complicating factor for Fonseca and the tournaments that he plays, because his fandom outweighs his tennis achievements so far, in a similar way to Alex Eala of the Philippines on the women’s side.
João Fonseca has become a star while he is still growing as a player. (John Cordes / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
At last year’s Miami Open, where Eala reached the semifinals in her breakout run, there were so many Brazilians at Fonseca’s win over Tien that the American, supposedly a home player, was relegated to the antagonist role. Tien set the location for his Instagram post about the defeat to Rio de Janeiro.
In the next round, the demand to watch Fonseca was such that tournament organizers moved his match against Ugo Humbert from the Grandstand to the main stadium at the last minute. Many Brazilian fans, who had already secured seats in the Grandstand, started scrambling to leave the court in the middle of a match between Jack Draper and Menšík, effectively casting Draper, who had just hammered Fonseca en route to that year’s BNP Paribas Open title, as a support act.
Fonseca won that too, and then fell to Alex de Minaur, the No. 11 seed, in another match that resembled a carnival, and another match in which he, the lower-ranked player, was the star.
It is easy to understand why there would be some unnecessary resentment toward Fonseca — especially in a sport in which certain players get preferential treatment all the time.
But spend any time in Fonseca’s company, and his clear-headedness is evident. “I’m the guy that, I’m very chill,” he said in a corridor at Indian Wells.
“I don’t look very much to expectations of what people are saying, and more to what I need to do to improve. I think that’s my mentality, that’s the way that I was taught, so yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do.
“I’m a self-confident guy, and I think I can do great things, but also I need to put my feet on the ground, be humble, keep working quietly, so that’s what moves me forward.”
After losing his second-round match to Draper at Indian Wells last year, Fonseca zipped across the desert to Phoenix and won the Arizona Tennis Classic, an event on the second-tier ATP Challenger Tour. He is gradually upending other preconceptions too, learning to rein in his power and mix in other types of shots.
Sunday against Paul, 28.2 percent of his shots were what Tennis Viz defines as variation shots, taking in sliced groundstrokes, short slices, drop shots, angles and net shots. This was a significant increase on his average for the previous year of 21.7 percent, and the tour average of 21.3 percent.
It had the effect of disrupting Paul, and it was telling that it was the American rather than the supposedly erratic teenager who was losing patience in rallies and spraying errors: Partly because he knew he had to prevent Fonseca from unleashing in baseline rallies.
This is a significant change. Diego Schwartzman, one of South America’s preeminent male players of the past two decades, remembers warming up with a 15-year-old Fonseca ahead of the Rio de Janeiro Open final against Alcaraz in 2022, and being struck by both the cleanness of the youngster’s strike and its inaccuracy.
“He was special hitting the ball, how clean it was,” Schwartzman said in a video interview. “He had a lot of power like he does now, but he was not controlling that power at that moment. Every ball was going out. But the hitting was not normal for a 15-year-old.”
As Fonseca grows and develops his game, his body — principally his back and his still-developing movement — is becoming the next limiting factor he needs to work on.
João Fonseca’s forehand is a wrecking ball — sometimes for his chances as much as those of his opponents. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
“I think that he needs to do what Jannik Sinner did, which is to add more muscle to his legs,” Jim Courier said during an interview at the U.S. Open in August.
“He’s a little bit like a colt, the way that Jannik was when he first came out on tour, where changing directions is a weakness, not a strength. But that is simply a matter of putting the work in and biding your time for your body to develop.
“Some people take longer … I think Fonseca is two years away from really being physically where he’ll need to be, and at that point we’ll have a better idea of the rest of his game — and most importantly, his mind, and his ability to maintain that red-light playing status (delivering on the biggest stages) and stay calm in big moments.”
His next big moment is Tuesday’s match against Sinner, in which Fonseca has the chance to show he’s learned lessons from some of his defeats to top players last year, such as at the French Open, again to Draper.
Draper repeatedly exposed Fonseca’s movement with clever drop shots, and drew mistakes when Fonseca pulled the trigger too much. Draper, who was generally full of praise for his opponent after a one-sided straight-sets win, said in a news conference afterwards that “maybe he feels like he needs to do too much.”
Everyone’s in agreement that there’s no shortcut other than gaining experience, though Coco Gauff, herself a teen prodigy, said in a news conference at last year’s French Open that “obviously the shortcut is being naturally talented … which he already kind of has.”
Ahead of facing Sinner, Fonseca said in a news conference after beating Paul that “of course” he believes he can one day challenge Sinner and Alcaraz.
“I think I have the level. I’m playing really good. So, I think I can get there. It needs time, I need to (improve) mental, physique (and) technique.
“So, yeah, there is a lot to improve, but I think I’m on the right path.”