By practically any way of accounting, 26-year-old Alejandro Davidovich Fokina is one of the best tennis players in the world. The Spaniard, currently ranked No. 15, has won 43 matches this year—the sixth-most of any player, including five wins over top-10 opponents (tied for the most after Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner).
With a win in the second round of the 2025 Paris Masters over Arthur Cazaux on Wednesday, he surpassed eight figures in prize money over his career.
And yet he’s never won an ATP singles title.
Let’s go over that again. Alejandro Davidovich Fokina has played in 138 ATP tournaments. He hasn’t won any of them (yet—the Paris Masters is still ongoing), and he’s walked away with a combined $10 million in prize money from those tournaments.
Excluding doubles specialists, no tennis player has ever done that. The next-highest career earnings total from an active title-less player is $6.9 million from American Mackenzie McDonald, who is four years older than Fokina and is on the decline.
In fact, only one other player has eclipsed $10 million without winning multiple titles: 35-year-old German Jan-Lennard Struff has earned just more than $12 million, but he didn’t hoist his first trophy until last year.
Another wild stat: Fokina has a 4-4 head-to-head record with American Taylor Fritz, currently No. 4 in the world, who has won 10 titles. He has a 4-2 record over Hubert Hurkacz (winner of eight titles) and a 3-2 record against Ugo Humbert (winner of seven titles). What does the man have to do to win a title of his own?
Fokina has a brutal history of collapses—or close calls, if you want to be generous—in big matches. Leading 6-3, 1-6, 5-2 in the 2025 Delray Beach Open final in February, Fokina ripped a forehand down the line on match point that would have been a championship-clinching winner had it not landed out by less than an inch. He then squandered a second match point before eventually losing 5-7 in the third set.
In July, Fokina found himself in a similar spot in the 2025 Mubadala Citi DC Open final against Alex De Minaur, attacking with a forehand up the line on match point. This time, his shot went in, but his opponent hit a no-look defensive lob that just landed on the sideline. De Minaur eventually won the point, one of three match points he saved, and beat Fokina in a third-set tiebreaker.
Winning an ATP title is hard, but it’s not uncommon—more than 60 active players have done it. For example, Facundo Diaz Acosta, who has never been ranked higher than No. 47 and has earned just $1.4 million in prize money, managed to get hot for a week and win a single title in Buenos Aires in 2024 before falling outside of the top 200 this year.
For an even more extreme comparison to Fokina, let’s look at Sebastian Baez. He has won seven ATP titles—as many as Frances Tiafoe and Tommy Paul combined—in his career, which has netted him just $5.9 million. Five of those championships came at ATP 250 events, the lowest level tournaments on the tour.
Going deep in marquee tournaments, though, can be more lucrative than winning small ones due to the purse disparity. The biggest payout of Fokina’s career was a final loss at the 2022 Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters, from which he pocketed $497,000. Fokina’s run to the 2021 French Open quarterfinals was also lucrative, earning him his first big payday of $311,000.
That’s more prize money than Baez earned from winning his three titles in 2023: $104,000 at the Winston-Salem Open, $98,000 at the Córdoba Open and $94,000 at the Generali Open Kitzbühel.
“You look at the rankings and you look at certain events, and I know [Fokina] is probably thinking about trying to win that first title just to get that monkey off his back, but what he’s doing is so much better than winning that title, essentially,” De Minaur said to Sportico at the 2025 U.S. Open. “He’s putting up results that are pretty impressive, he’s a top 20 player, he’s a force to be reckoned with … whether he has a title or not doesn’t really change that.”
The increase in prize money in tennis over the past decade, along with inflation, has allowed Fokina to achieve this strange milestone. Steve Denton, an American tennis player in the 1980s, made two Australian Open finals and yet somehow never won a title at any level, but made just over $1 million in his career back in that era (between $3 million and $4 million adjusting for inflation).
Fokina’s label as the sport’s all-time winningest loser comes with a slight caveat: He has won a doubles title, partnering with his fellow countryman Roberto Carballes Baena to win the 2020 Chile Open.
His prize money for that title? $17,080.
