Is 2025 a make-or-break year for Holger Rune?

As we make our way toward the 2025 season—which begins Friday, December 27 with the United Cup—our writers and editors tackle the most important questions of the new year.

Eighth question: Is next season make-or-break for Holger Rune?

Scroll down past this article to read more Burning Questions on 2025.

DAVID KANE: For an ATP season defined by the rise of young talent, Holger Rune, a young talent long at the forefront of any and all Next Gen conversation, found himself on outer margins of the tapestry—ceding substantial ground not only to childhood rival Carlos Alcaraz but also Jannik Sinner, who leapfrogged over the Dane with a hard-court major sweep and finish atop the rankings.

Rune would have done well merely to maintain the Top 8-status with which he began 2024. Even that ultimately proved difficult as he tumbled as low as No. 17 in the rankings. While he showed flashes of the player capable of competing with his Next Gen cohort, injuries, inconsistency, and frequent personnel changes seemed to prove his undoing. He made several headline-grabbing hires but quickly parted with both Severin Luthi and Boris Becker, and briefly reunited with Patrick Mouratoglou before reuniting with childhood coach Lars Christensen.

Tennis is also about playing in different conditions every week. We have different weather, outdoors or indoors, clay or grass, whatever...The best players in the world are the best at adapting. Holger Rune

All of this spoke to a level of chaos not conducive to top-flight tennis, and the results bore that out: he failed to pass the fourth round at any of the major tournaments in 2024.

Rune is still 21 and even younger in tennis years as he prepares for his fourth full season on tour, but with multiple contemporaries racking up majors, he cannot afford to repeat last year's shenanigans, and will need to hit the ground running to prevent Sincaraz from creating further distance between themselves and the field. The good news for Rune is that this pugnacious nature is a perfect foil to his more placid rivals. Few else in their age group can shake the apple cart quite like him. But he needs to get his hands back on the cart if he hopes to shake anything up come January.

STEPHANIE LIVAUDAIS: Holger Rune is way too young for tennis experts to already be making that declaration about him. Sure, he has yet to fully live up to the prodigy status that he was tipped for a few years ago—but maybe it’s those high expectations that are distorting the current view.

Let’s keep things in perspective: Rune is only 21, the same age as Carlos Alcaraz and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. He’s only a year younger than the promising Jack Draper, and one year older than fast-rising Arthur Fils. The Dane is in good company, and still has plenty of time to figure things out.

Instead of a make-or-break season, hopefully 2025 becomes the year when Rune makes concrete changes. He’s admitted that he hasn’t always “put the right work in” when it comes to training, but he’s already showing improvement after reuniting with childhood coach Christensen. With the right team around him and with the right mindset, Rune can find the explosive, world-beating tennis that excited fans in the first place.

MATT FITZGERALD: Simply put: no. It’s true Rune didn’t win a title in 2024. And he slid back in majors by finishing 7-4.

Yet at the end of the day, Rune is just 21. The Dane simply needs to run his own race (S/O Grigor Dimitrov) and not get caught up in the career pacing of multiple major winners Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. Rune still won 45 matches in 2024—he arguably didn’t win the right matches.

Reducing how often frustration negatively affects his work product would go a long way. As would upping his presence as a returner. A competitor of Rune’s caliber bringing exceptional movement and a toolbox boasting firepower and finesse should not fall outside the Top 50 in return games won on a year-end leaderboard.

Stay tuned for Tuesday's question: Which player that we're not talking about right now will surprise the most?