Gaël Monfils to retire from tennis at end of 2026 season: ‘I am tremendously at peace’

French legend Gaël Monfils will retire from tennis at the end of the 2026 season, he announced in a statement Wednesday.

In an emotional message, the 39-year-old Monfils thanked his family, colleagues, fellow players and fans for supporting his career, which will come to an end shortly after he turns 40 in September next year. He thanked his fellow elite player and wife Elina Svitolina, and their daughter, Skaï, for their invariable support, and told his mother and father to “look how far we’ve come.”

“To every person who ever cheered or shouted ‘Allez, Gaël!’ in real life or at a TV screen: your energy and love are truly everything to me,” he wrote.

Monfils has 13 ATP Tour titles to date and earlier this year became the oldest man to win one. The Frenchman beat Zizou Bergs 6-3, 6-4 in January to win the ASB Classic in Auckland at 38 years, 4 months, and seven days old, overtaking Roger Federer’s record that had stood since 2019.

The Frenchman reached a career-high ranking of world No. 6, and made two Grand Slam semifinals, at the 2008 French Open and the 2016 U.S. Open. In the final years of his career, he has emphasized that he feels no regrets about not going higher or even winning a major. Monfils draws and then thrills a crowd like few players on tour, producing impossible acts of tennis escapology and delivering winners from all corners of the court.

At this year’s French Open, Monfils performed one of his signature resurrections, coming from two sets down to beat Bolivia’s Hugo Dellien and sending Court Philippe-Chatrier into a frenzy in the process.

“I’ve been called ‘The Showman’ over the course of my career but I want you to know that it was never just a show put on for the crowd. What you see is joy, pure joy, spilling over,” he said in his retirement announcement.

“My passion and enjoyment on the court are real and their energy electrifies me at each and every match.”

He has plenty of tournaments left to feel it once more.

‘Monfils’ legacy will live on well beyond his retirement’

Analysis from tennis writer Charlie Eccleshare

Few players have made such an impact on tennis without winning one of the sport’s biggest titles.

Over the course of more than two decades, Gaël Monfils has enriched the sport in so many ways. From his entertaining play, to his sportsmanship, to how inspiring he has been to a generation of Black players, Monfils’ legacy will live on well beyond his retirement next year.

There was a time when Monfils could have been characterised as an underachiever. In 2004, he won three of the four junior Grand Slams and seemed destined for greatness. Instead, it was the winner of the other boys’ major that year, Andy Murray, who went on to have a Hall of Fame career.

But that underestimates both the level of competition then — being a contemporary of the Big Three is not ideal in that regard — and how few players make the jump from junior prodigy to serial winner. Reaching two Slam semifinals and a career-high ranking of No. 6 is a dream for most players.

Monfils was also mischaracterized at times as focusing on entertaining rather than winning. This misread how desperate Monfils was to succeed, and had he been a little more aggressive in some of his biggest matches, he might have made that Grand Slam breakthrough. The strange 2016 U.S. Open semifinal when he tried to moonball Novak Djokovic is the salient example, but he was similarly conservative in a fourth-round match against Rafael Nadal a few months later at the 2017 French Open. There were times when Monfils was happy to get involved in lengthy exchanges from the baseline because he knew he had the physical gifts to do so, when he might have been better off using some of his similarly exceptional shotmaking.

When Monfils exited that phase of his career, during which time he achieved that career-high ranking in November 2016, and started going deep at the majors again, he began one of the most enjoyable periods. Over the last few years, Monfils has thrilled crowds pretty much wherever he’s been, drawing awestruck reactions from people disbelieving at how someone in their mid- and now late 30s can be producing such spellbinding tennis. At the Australian Open in January, he beat the No. 4 seed Taylor Fritz in the third round with a stunning performance, having become the oldest winner of an ATP Tour title the week earlier.

During an interview with Monfils a year ago, I was struck by how content he was with everything he’d achieved in tennis.

“Living in not the best area of Paris, I had this dream. And now here I am, talking to you. You know my name. It’s impossible. I made it.”

(Top photo: Quality Sport Images / Getty Images)

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