How exceptional was the Big Three era? Extremes and persistence in men's professional tennis

Abstract

Three players won 66 of the 81 Grand Slam titles contested between 2003 and 2023, and their era is widely held to be the most dominant in the history of tennis. Assessing it means comparing players who never met, so that every comparison passes through the opponents each did face. We measure dominance by how far a player stands above the field of his own day, how many stand there at once, and how long they remain, the last through averages over fixed windows rather than through unbroken runs, which are unstable when the strengths beneath them are themselves estimated. Strengths come from a Bayesian dynamic Bradley-Terry state space model, and dominance is characterized through exceedances of a high threshold. Applied to 197,926 matches played between 1968 and 2025, only Djokovic separates from the field on peak strength, Federer and Nadal being indistinguishable from Borg, McEnroe and Lendl. What distinguishes the recent period is not how high its best players stood but how long three of them stood there together. At its height three players held a top-three position in at least four fifths of all weeks, where in the strongest comparable decade of the past those positions were shared among four. The sharper anomaly lies between: for twelve years from 1990 the upper tail was not merely unoccupied but compressed.