With Carlos Alcaraz ruled out by injury and the draw thrown wide open, Jannik Sinner arrives at SW19 as an overwhelming favorite. But Ben Shelton’s form on grass, a resurgent Aryna Sabalenka, and a British women’s contingent full of belief could make this the most compelling Championships in recent memory.
Action at the All-England Club opens on June 29 — and for the first time in three years, Wimbledon begins without Carlos Alcaraz among the names on the board. The two-time champion withdrew in late May with a wrist injury, a development that has fundamentally restructured the betting landscape and the conversation around who can lift the trophy on July 12.
What that absence does not do is make the tournament simple. Wimbledon rarely rewards assumption. The surface rewards players who manufacture their own pace, hold their nerve at the net and win the small moments before a match finds a rhythm. Jannik Sinner does all three better than anyone currently in the draw. Whether he does them consistently enough across two weeks is the question the market is pricing at 7/5.
The Championships will carry a record prize fund of £64.2 million in 2026, a 20 percent increase on 2025 and the largest year-on-year uplift in the tournament’s history. Singles champions each receive £3.6 million.
Sinner: The Weight of the Number One Shirt
Jannik Sinner enters as defending champion and world No. 1. His 2025 title arrived via a four-set victory over Alcaraz, a result that settled any remaining debate about whether his flat, penetrating ball-striking translates from hard courts to grass.
His build-up has been uneven, though. He exited Roland Garros in the second round against an opponent ranked outside the top 50 at the time, a result that sat uneasily alongside his Rome title from earlier in the spring. On grass, where first-strike tennis either works or leaves you exposed, inconsistency in the preceding weeks carries more weight than it would on clay.
Despite this, Sinner still leads the free bet market at 7/5 — ahead of women’s favorites such as Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek at 11/4 and Elena Rybakina at 3/1. One analyst told Freebets.com, “Sinner’s game is built for this surface, but the French Open showed that when the first-strike tennis doesn’t click immediately, he becomes vulnerable. On Centre Court, you must create your own energy from the first point. That’s where the question marks sit.”
Shelton: The Danger Coming From Stuttgart
The most significant form story of the pre-Wimbledon swing belongs to Ben Shelton. The 23-year-old American defeated Taylor Fritz 6-4, 2-6, 6-4 in the Stuttgart final on June 15, claiming his first career title on grass and his third of the season. He is the only player besides Sinner to have won three or more titles in 2026.
What makes Stuttgart notable is the way he won it. He dropped the first set in every single match he played that week, saved two match points against Jiri Lehecka in the semifinals, and recovered from losing the second set 2-6 to Fritz before closing out the third. That pattern, backing himself under pressure and resetting after a difficult set, is the mental profile required to go deep at a Grand Slam on grass.
His serve is already a structural weapon on this surface. When Shelton is operating at the level he found in Stuttgart, the delivery is short enough to set up a free first strike — and his left-handed action creates awkward angles into the ad court that opponents with flat returns struggle to absorb. He is priced at 33/1, a number that looks worth a second look once the draw is confirmed.
“Being tough and getting through the tough matches, day in and day out, is the first step to getting where I want to be,” Shelton told reporters after the final. He became the first American since Sam Querrey in 2010 to win titles on hard, clay, and grass courts in the same season.
The Women’s Draw: Open at the Top
Iga Swiatek enters as defending champion at 11/4, sharing top billing with Sabalenka in a market that reflects genuine uncertainty. Swiatek won her first Wimbledon title last year after years of questions about her grass-court game, a result that rewrote a narrative she had been carrying for most of her career. Defending on the surface that exposed those doubts most sharply will require a different kind of mental resource.
Sabalenka, world No. 1 heading into the tournament, arrives with unfinished business. Her 2025 semi-final exit remains a sore point, and her power game suits the surface in a way few players in the field can match. She hits through the ball with a pace that allows her to bypass the grinding exchanges grass can produce, and her serve is capable of winning points outright in clusters.
Rybakina sits at 3/1, a reminder that the 2022 champion has never looked out of place at the All England Club. Her flat, deep ball-striking keeps opponents pinned behind the baseline, and her serve remains the hardest to read in the women’s game on this surface.
For British fans, the most compelling storyline is Emma Raducanu. She reached the Queen’s final in the weeks before Wimbledon, form that has been building across the grass swing and that has fuelled genuine optimism. Raducanu is priced at 40/1, a number that reflects her inconsistency over the past three seasons but does not fully account for what she produced at Queen’s Club. Katie Boulter’s semifinal at the same event added another layer to the British narrative, and Boulter has developed a consistency on grass that matches her ranking progression.
Alongside those two, the LTA has confirmed a 50-strong British contingent entering across all events, with wild cards awarded to Arthur Fery, Toby Samuel, Jack Pinnington Jones, and Jake Fearnley in men’s singles.
The Angle the Markets May Be Missing
Alexander Zverev arrives fresh from winning Roland Garros, which makes him the French Open champion entering the grass-court major with more Grand Slam momentum than anyone in the draw. He is priced at 16/1. The question mark with Zverev at Wimbledon has always been the same: his second serve is attackable on faster surfaces, and his movement does not carry quite the same authority when the footing becomes unpredictable.
Novak Djokovic at 8/1 will attract attention from punters who remember that he has won this title seven times and that grass remains the surface where experience can overrule everything else. His path through the draw will matter enormously. If he lands in a quarter of the bracket where he avoids Sinner until the semifinals, a run is entirely plausible.
Wimbledon rewards serve-and-volley instincts, net presence and the ability to absorb pressure on return games without becoming passive. The players who threaten the favorites will be the ones who take early serves into the corners, follow them in and force errors at the net. Shelton does this. Rybakina does this. So — on her best days — does Raducanu.
The draw is confirmed on June 26. At that point, contenders become opponents and the theoretical becomes concrete. This tournament shapes up as one of the most genuinely open in recent years, not because there is no clear favorite, but because the player behind the favorite has enough of a game to make every match on Centre Court worth watching closely.