At the end of the 2017 season, Jack Sock made it to the semifinals of the ATP Finals, the year-end showcase for the best men’s tennis players in the world. Not even six years later, he made his debut as a professional pickleball player. I can’t imagine there will ever again be a falloff quite this dire. But it’s also a testament to how dim the ATP Finals lineup was in 2017: That was Novak Djokovic’s crisis year, so he missed the cut completely; Rafa Nadal bowed out of the group stage with an injury; Roger Federer made the semifinalists, as did David Goffin, Grigor Dimitrov, and the aforementioned Sock. Rounding out the cast were Sascha Zverev, Dominic Thiem, Marin Cilic, Pablo Carreno Busta. Some of those names aged better, but you have to remember, this was the 2017 version of each. Looking at the field of players at the culmination of my first full season writing about professional tennis, I remember feeling somewhat crestfallen. And I suppose I feel similarly about this year’s cast. 

I’m loath to make cross-era comparisons, or join in on complaints about watching a “weak era” of the sport. I think there are too many variables. And I think that the overall athletic demands of the sport are increasing monotonically over time, and the global talent pool has deepened significantly. I suspect that if you managed to rise to the top 10 in the present era, you probably have some underlying traits of raw physicality and tactical adaptability that would have made you successful in many previous eras. But I also like being a lazy hater sometimes, and it is sort of crazy to see an ATP Finals field half-populated by first-time qualifiers: Arthur Fils, Flavio Cobolli, Frances Tiafoe, Rafa Jodar. As much as I enjoy the flavor that all these players add to the tour…this feels like being served a sandwich consisting entirely of condiments. We can’t be living like this.

Over the past three seasons, I’ve enjoyed watching the rise of Cobolli. He’s in that Tommy Paul, Carlos Alcaraz vein of all-around athletes blessed with otherworldly hand-foot-eye coordination who seem capable of picking up any sport on a whim—and in Cobolli’s case this is not hypothetical, given that he grew up playing soccer in the AS Roma youth academy before making the switch to tennis. Unsurprisingly, given that history, it’s the movement and footwork that jump out, particularly if you have a chance to see Cobolli play in person, as he dances around his backhand, rips glorious passing shots on the run, or nimbly redrops every drop shot sent his way. At six feet flat he doesn’t boast the size that has come to dominate the ATP, but as he put it himself, “my game is real easy: stay close to [base]line and play [there],” and this aggressive court positioning serves him quite well across all surfaces. Never as well as this season, which saw him go 36–24 and achieve many firsts.

A first career hard-court title, in Acapulco. A strong clay season, which saw his first win over a top 5 player (Sascha Zverev), and a much more consequential rematch where Cobolli came within one set of the Roland-Garros title, his first appearance in a Slam final. After that match he entered the top 10 for the first time. He followed that up with a nice quarterfinal run at Wimbledon, and then after losing his first match post-Wimbledon—an Umag loss he would later describe as one of the worst matches of his career—he got his first cornrows. Days later he shaved them off. In Cincinnati he made his first Masters 1000 semifinal. Just now he qualified for the ATP Finals for the first time. This year has held so much for the 24-year-old.

And yet, despite all these positive notes, Flavio Cobolli also achieved something very strange along the way. As Jeff Sackmann of Tennis Abstract observed this week, Cobolli is on track to finish the season as the first top 10 player to lose more points than he won, since 1991 when those stats first became available. (This full list of top 25 finishers with sub-50% points won makes for a grimly fascinating read.) As Sackmann pointed out, of current top 50 players, his percentage of total points won is third-worst. Cobolli, an infamously streaky player, was excellent this year, but he concentrated that excellence into a small handful of events. Ten different times he lost his opening match at a tournament. He beat four top 10 players this year; he also lost 12 times to players ranked outside the top 50. He will eternally be Grand Slam finalist Flavio Cobolli, but he’s still lacking the week-to-week gravitas a fan might expect from a player of such high rank.

Okay, I’d be remiss not to mention: He has a knack for producing nail-biting matches and killer highlights; he seems to be a sincere and emotional guy beloved by his colleagues; he has keen comic timing, as evidenced by multiple colorful remarks about his own toilet breaks. He’s also just 24 years old! Lots more good tennis to come from this guy. But something about Flavio Cobolli just screams: A stellar No. 14 in the world, but if he’s No. 6 in the world—and he is—something is not quite right with the tour.