Despite being a perennial member of the Top 30, Leylah Fernandez remains an enigma.

Watching Fernandez, I think, “Damn, she is way too good to not be winning loads of big tournaments.” The Canadian’s 2021 US Open final is not that far in the past, nor is her run to the Roland-Garros quarterfinal in 2022 on a fractured foot. Now, as the 2026 campaign is winding down, she is finally finding her form. With her title in Singapore and a final in Ningbo, I again wonder why her game doesn’t click like this more often. 

Still only 24, Fernandez owns six titles, including three WTA 500, an objectively already impressive string of results. But when she’s in a flow state, she seems to possess Top 10 skills. She’s not the tallest and the strongest, but is Maja Chwalinska? Was Dominika Cibulkova? And so many others. It would be unfair to wonder about all this if Fernandez weren’t openly wondering the same, not satisfied with where she has landed, always wanting more. As 2026 is coming to a close, Fernandez is again showing that she still has a lot of upside.

Leylah Fernandez cares. She cares about winning, about delivering her best game, and about what people think. “That’s what people will remember, that’s what people will see on the internet. Whether you win or lose. It doesn’t matter what you feel. It doesn’t matter what happens,” she told me earlier in the season. It’s a lot of pressure summed up in a few sentences.

She had a horrific Grand Slam year until the US Open, having lost in the first round in Melbourne (Janice Tjen), Paris (Alycia Parks), and Wimbledon (Tjen). She struggled to get going anywhere else, either, except for a quarterfinal in Stuttgart, Madrid, and Strasbourg and a fourth round in Toronto after losing her Washington title in the second round. Enough to stay afloat but nothing to satisfy her ambitions. Fernandez cried a lot after these Grand Slam losses when it was time to talk about them. The distress of someone knowing how good she can be but being made to look at how she can’t make it again and again, without understanding why. I’ve had that talk so many times with her that we ended up cracking up (a good distraction from the tears). Is it a coach issue? Having a parent in that role is never easy. Does she need to reinvent her game? Is it a confidence issue? A fitness issue? A serve issue? Fernandez would sigh and shrug and repeat that she trusts her team, has sat down with them many times, and that everything had regularly been put on the table. She tried everything and has been working incredibly hard.

She takes the blame on herself, about playing “horribly” and not doing what she’s supposed to do. And she can get tired of it all: “I’m a little tired of the defeats,” she told me at Wimbledon. “It’s really about finding the solution as soon as possible, and to go back to good feelings. Right now I’m not playing well, so I’m not very happy.” It would echo what she said at Roland-Garros: “I’m a perfectionist. If something doesn’t work, I fight against myself. Sometimes I have to calm down and see the positive. There will be days when nothing works, but you have to find a way. No matter what you feel, no matter the situation, you have to move on to the next round. Some players go through difficult things off the court, but they know how to put that aside and move on to the next round.”

Fernandez is a bundle of energy, with one of the fastest left arms out there and incredible footwork. She’ll hit angles some don’t even know one can reach, and will do it at the speed of light. She has great hands, as also shown by her doubles résumé. Once on PlayStation mode, she’s a force to be reckoned with. And so we’re seeing it again, as once more in her young career she’s trying to get closer to the light at the end of what has, for her, felt like a tunnel. She was unstoppable in Singapore after reaching the third round at the US Open. She defeated Mirra Andreeva and Maja Chwalinska on her way to the title. A trophy welcomed with relief: “It’s about time! There’s been a lot of work and a lot of adversity faced this year. It’s just a lot of pride. I worked very hard to get my confidence back, my movement back, keeping healthy, not only physically but also mentally. It’s also been a lot of hard work in finding that right balance between attacking and defending, and then today everything just clicked in the right place at the right time.”

Everything just clicked. And that’s exactly what’s been missing: the click. Completing the puzzle. So she’s back to chasing. Right now she’s anchored to it with a fourth round in Wuhan and a final in Ningbo, where Fernandez was finally stopped in the final by Elena Rybakina, a player she still has beaten twice in four matches despite the obvious contrast in power. 

Fernandez cares about it all, and tennis people care about her journey too. For many reasons, but also as it seems to defy logic that you can be that good and still be struggling. It’s even as if she needs to make it for many others to keep believing they can too. Like Chwalinska, Fernandez has a different game and a different type of athleticism, which tennis also needs. You watch her hit these crosscourt angles at the highest speed, and you again watch her ranking and Grand Slam achievements since 2022 in disbelief. 

“Growing up, I was a crybaby,” she said in Singapore. “Even now I’m a little bit of a sore loser, but that also drives my competitiveness to not forget the losses but to use them as fuel to keep training. My dad has always said, from the very beginning, you win a match because of you, you lose a match because of you, and the very next day, you start from zero.” She starts from zero so much that one could think she lost a lot of confidence along the way. When the results are the only judge, it’s a slippery slope. That inner fire that can light up a draw at any moment is the reason why she can be struggling and remain a Top 30 player. That tells you what she could achieve without the struggles. Will the end of 2026 be the click that sticks?