Lorenzo Musetti walks out of Rod Laver Arena halfway through a match, his face tightened with pain. It is the third time this season he has broken down and the press conference that follows is predictable. The questions come fast: is it mental, are you feeling the pressure? Musetti, as ever polite, deflects. The narrative, though, hardens. (See for example Il Corriere della Sera “Musetti il mistero degli infortuni”)
The truth is less comfortable than the version newspapers like to sell and, at the same time, simpler: over the past ten months Musetti has not only improved his tennis, he has played as if he were on a different tour. The numbers tell a story that has nothing to do with psychology: since Monte Carlo 2025 his body has entered a measurable phase of competitive overload, driven not by a lack of character but by brutal arithmetic.
Here is what happened.
The tournament that never ends
Professional tennis is always hard, but there is hard and then there is a sudden shift in the regime. You do not see it only in the raw match count: Musetti played 67 matches in 2025, only slightly fewer than the 75 he played in 2024. What changed is density.
It is one thing to spread matches across many months and get through two or three rounds on average.
It is another to pack four or more matches into the space of each tournament, then start again. It is a metabolic sprint disguised as an endurance sport. Here we will call it a “deep run” (≥4 matches in the same tournament) and for most of Musetti’s career it was occasional.
In 2023 it happened once. In 2024 it happened three times. In the last 10 months, in fact a little less, from 13 April 2025 to 28 January 2026, it happened nine times.
List (≥4 matches in the same tournament):
- Monte Carlo Masters, final
- Madrid Open, semi-final
- Italian Open, semi-final
- Roland-Garros, semi-final (retirement)
- US Open, quarter-final
- Chengdu Open, final
- Hellenic Championship, final
- Hong Kong Open, final
- Australian Open, quarter-final (retirement)
This is not incremental growth, it is a sharp displacement.
The table below shows the progression.
Three deep runs in twelve months are not extraordinary for a top-15 player. What was not manageable for Musetti was quadrupling that load while moving from ATP No 15 to No 5 in less than ten months.
Context: those nine deep runs, three of them best-of-five (two quarter-finals and one semi-final Bo5), arrived in a time window from which you must subtract the injury stoppages. It is a snake eating its tail: the more tournaments you miss, the more match density increases, but that is exactly when the body is most vulnerable (it is under ten months, injuries included).
Sports science has a term for this: “load compression”, weeks of stoppage followed by sudden peaks in intensity. It is the physiological equivalent of braking hard, then accelerating again. It is one reason pros dislike the extended Masters 1000 format: recovery and preparation windows shrink and the load becomes chronic.
The surface problem
There is a second variable at play, more subtle and, in Musetti’s case, less controllable (again for the same snake-and-tail reason): the surface shift. Players talk endlessly about clay, grass and hard courts, usually in terms of tactics or feel. What they talk about less is the biomechanical cost.
Hard courts do not give. On clay you can slide into the ball and dissipate force through movement. On grass there is a little elasticity. Hard courts are unforgiving: every plant, every rotation, every stop sends force straight through the ankle and knee. Over time, repetition accumulates.
In 2023 Musetti played 39% of his matches on hard courts.
In 2025 that share rose to 64%.
The table below breaks down the shift.
The grass season has virtually disappeared: one match in 2025, against 15 the year before. Meanwhile hard courts have gone from a minority surface to two thirds of his competitive load. It is not only a change of scenery. It is a change in the mechanical stress his body absorbs week after week.
On this point there is a simple, measurable signal: in ATP matches the incidence of matches ending in a retirement is higher on hard courts than on clay and grass. In a large analysis based on games played, hard courts come out highest, clay close behind and grass clearly lower. It is not a diagnosis and it is not “all of injury medicine”, but it is consistent with a higher physical cost when margins narrow.
The mechanism is simple: less ability to slide, more braking force, more load through connective tissue. Musetti’s last ten months have not only been denser, they have been heavier on his joints.
What the research says
There is nothing hypothetical here. The relationship between training load and injury risk is one of the most documented phenomena in sports science. In 2016 the International Olympic Committee published a consensus statement on the subject, distilling decades of research. The conclusion is straightforward: rapid increases in load, especially after periods of reduced activity, raise injury risk in a meaningful way.
The key metric is the acute-to-chronic workload ratio, in simple terms how much you are loading beyond the average of the past month. The point is not only the spikes, it is the lack of real breaks: injury stoppages are not recovery and often worsen the return because they turn the comeback into another spike. When that ratio goes above ~1.5, meaning weekly load is much higher than the recent baseline, several studies show the risk increases sharply. In tennis the signal is consistent, especially when peaks follow periods of reduced activity and there is no progressive return.
A study on elite juniors used session Rating of Perceived Exertion, sRPE, a measure that combines duration and intensity, to track weekly loads. Players who had sudden load increases, even after relatively light weeks, suffered musculoskeletal injuries far more often than those on a stable, manageable progression.
This period, a little under ten months, fits that pattern almost perfectly. The nine deep runs were not evenly distributed. They clustered around returns from injury, creating exactly the spikes the literature warns about.
The Hong Kong final and what came next
In January 2026 the signs were already there, the risk was high and conditions were poor (as we have already written). Musetti arrives in Hong Kong for the season-opening ATP 250, reaches the final and looks sharp. A week later he reaches the Australian Open quarter-finals (in hard condition), then his body gives way halfway through against Djokovic, who goes on to reach the final.
Both tournaments were on hard courts. Both demanded a deep run, four matches in Hong Kong and five in Melbourne (best of five) before the retirement. Nine high-intensity matches in two weeks, with minimal recovery, on a surface that does not forgive mechanically. As already noted, not environmentally either.
In the press conference after the Melbourne retirement, a journalist asks whether he has considered sports psychology. I wonder whether the journalist understands sport or is simply building a thesis to delegitimise an athlete: we tend to demonise psychological problems and forgive physical ones, for the avoidance of doubt.
What this analysis is not
This is where we stop, before diagnosis. Without access to Musetti’s medical records, biomechanical assessments and training logs, any attempt to explain why the pain keeps returning to the same area (groin and upper thigh) would be pure speculation. Injury patterns depend on individual anatomy, technique, training history and a dozen variables you cannot see from the outside.
What is visible and measurable is the change in competitive load and the shift in surface distribution. These two factors alone create conditions known to increase injury risk. Whether they explain everything is a question for his medical team. They are, though, a far more plausible starting point than vague invocations of mental fragility.
“Lorenzo, non starli a sentire”
So here is what the numbers say, Lorenzo. There is a clear reason why the injuries started in 2025. You played more, not only more matches but more of the kind that wears you down.
Yes, the problem keeps coming back in that area. Exactly why? I cannot tell you that.
But I can tell you one thing: do not listen to anyone who says it is all in your head.
The point is not that you struggle mentally, if anything you have improved.
The point is that you have become strong, Lorenzo. Properly strong. Strong enough to go deep week after week. Strong enough that every tournament you enter turns into a multi-day war. Your body, which for two years had found its comfort zone, suddenly had to face a new reality.
This is not psychology. It is physics.
Your body will adapt. It needs time. In the meantime, Lorenzo, keep your head up.
It is not a weakness. These are growing pains.
Appendix:
A brief parallel with the issues Sinner and Alcaraz had as they climbed the rankings, always keeping in mind that each player is different:
Jannik Sinner, from around the Top 20 to No 1: physical stoppages and consequences
Ranking milestones
- 09/08/2021: rises to No 15
- 01/11/2021: enters the Top 10 (No 9)
- 10/06/2024: becomes ATP No 1
Injuries, retirements and withdrawals
- 16/03/2022: walkover at Indian Wells due to illness
- 30/05/2022: retires at Roland-Garros vs Rublev due to a knee issue (match ended at 2-0 in the third set)
- 07/09/2023: withdraws from Davis Cup group stage, citing insufficient recovery after the US Open and cramps in the previous match
- 02/11/2023: withdraws from the Paris Masters after a match that finished around 2.37am, citing health reasons and insufficient rest
- 01/05/2024: withdraws from the Madrid Open due to a hip issue (withdrawal before the quarter-final, not during a match)
- 04-05/05/2024: withdraws from the Italian Open linked to the same hip issue
- 18/08/2025: retires in the Cincinnati Open final due to illness
- 05/10/2025: retires at the Shanghai Masters due to cramp
Carlos Alcaraz, from around the Top 20 to No 1: physical stoppages and consequences
Ranking milestones
- 25/04/2022: enters the Top 10
- 12/09/2022: becomes ATP No 1
Injuries, retirements and withdrawals
- 09/05/2022: withdraws from the Italian Open after Madrid due to a right ankle injury
- 05/11/2022: season ends with an internal oblique injury, withdraws from the ATP Finals and Davis Cup
- 06/01/2023: withdraws from the Australian Open, semimembranosus injury in training (player statement)
- 20-21/02/2024: retires at the Rio Open after two games due to a right ankle sprain
- 09/04/2024: withdraws from the Monte-Carlo Masters due to a right forearm issue
- 15/04/2024: withdraws from the Barcelona Open due to a right arm injury
- 24/04/2025: withdraws from the Madrid Open due to injury (adductor)
- 30/09/2025: withdraws from the Shanghai Masters due to an ankle injury
- 18/11/2025: withdraws from the Davis Cup Finals due to a hamstring issue
Sources and data:
Match records: ATP Tour official statistics (Player Activity and tournament pages), 2023-2026
Load and injury risk: Soligard et al., BJSM 2016 (IOC consensus)
ACWR and sRPE in tennis juniors: Myers et al., 2020
Surface (cautious proxy): Oliver et al., 2024 (incidence of ATP and WTA retirements by surface, statistical analysis, non-clinical)
Further Reading: Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery by Christie Aschwanden
“there seems to be a plateau effect where at some point the body hits its capacity to improve. At the elite level of human performance, there seems to be some kind of biological performance ceiling—when you’re near the top, there’s only so much room left for improvement.”
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