Top seed Arthur Fils, Newcomer of the Year Jakub Mensik land in same Next Gen ATP Finals group

Top seed Arthur Fils was handed a tough round-robin assignment for next week's Next Gen ATP Finals in Jeddah, as he hopes to complete a run to the title that he fell just short of last year. The Frenchman landed in the Blue Group with recently-crowened 2024 ATP Newcomer of the Year Jakub Mensik; American Learner Tien, who won three ATP Challenger titles among seven trophies this year; and Brazil's Joao Fonseca, who this year was the youngest ATP Challenger champion when he won in Lexington in July at age 17.

Fils, 20, the 2023 ATP Newcomer of the Year, was runner-up at the Jeddah event last year to Serbia's Hamad Medjedovic, and is tops among the eight competitors at the season-ending championships for the tour's best young talents after finishing in the year-end Top 20. He won two ATP 500 titles in 2024 in Hamburg and Tokyo, and also reached the fourth round of Wimbledon.

Nineteen-year-old Mensik, meanwhile, cut his ranking by more than 100 spots in 2024 thanks to a run to the Doha final in February, a third-round effort at the US Open, and his first ATP Masters 1000 quarterfinal in Shanghai.

Tien, 19, posted a 28-match winning streak this summer en route to cutting his ranking from outside the Top 450 to a November career-high of No. 114. Rounding out the group is 2023 junior No. 1 Fonseca, who in February became the first man born in 2006 to win an ATP tour-level match on the way to the quarterfinals at his home event in Rio de Janeiro.

American Alex Michelsen, a two-time ATP finalist this year, is seeded No. 2 in a field that also includes Chengdu champion Shang Juncheng, Fils' countryman Luca Van Assche, and a third American, Nishesh Basavareddy, who won the USTA's Australian Open wild-card challenge this fall.

Fils, Michelsen and Van Assche are all competing for a second year in a row after making their tournament debut in 2023.

Blue Group

• Arthur Fils
• Jakub Mensik
• Learner Tien
• Joao Fonseca

Red Group

• Alex Michelsen
• Shang Juncheng
• Luca Van Assche
• Nishesh Basavareddy

The Next Gen ATP Finals feature innovative rules including best-of-four-game sets with no-ad scoring, no on-court warm-up between competitors and live in-match coaching. This year's edition lowered the age eligibility for competitors to 20-and-under from 21-and-under, leaving defending champion Medjedovic ineligible to defend his title.

The Next Gen ATP Finals presented by PIF begins on Wednesday, with the final scheduled for Dec. 22. Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and Stefanos Tsitsipas are among the event's previous champions.