PARIS – Leaving the defending champion off the centre court on his return to the tournament is unusual, but Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz played down the decisions made by Roland Garros: he is confident of lifting the trophy again and, in the meantime, is imagining what his life as a tennis player would be like with some of the benefits enjoyed by footballers.
‘What I like about football is that you can have a home for a long time,’ said the world number two, when asked by CLAY after defeating Italy’s Giulio Zeppieri 6-3, 6-4, 6-2 on Monday. The match was played at the Suzanne Lenglen court and not at the Philippe Chatrier centre court, where the Spaniard attended Rafael Nadal’s farewell on Sunday. His second-round opponent will be Hungary’s Fabian Marozsan.
As a teenager, Alcaraz scored goals galore in a futsal championship in his native Murcia. He was what the Spanish call a ‘pichichi’, the top scorer.
Alfredo Sarriá, coach and coordinator of his club, now renamed the Carlos Alcaraz Academy, recalled a story from those years to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
“Carlos was 13 years old, he changed categories, he lost his training group and was alone in many classes. He spent a season like that. At the same time, he had started playing futsal, he was the pichichi of the team and his schoolmates went to cheer him on. I remember him saying: ‘I want to quit tennis and switch to futsal. Here he won a point, I look around and there’s no one there. In futsal, I’m with my friends.’ Luckily, his father encouraged him to keep going and, well, the rest is history.”
On Monday, Alcaraz said he had never considered giving up tennis for football, something he will eventually have to discuss with Sarriá, but he did dwell on the advantages footballers have over tennis players.
‘What I would like (about being a footballer) is to be able to have a home for a long time,’ said the Spaniard, who in December 2024 surprised everyone by wearing an Argentine club Boca Juniors shirt at a football match at Juan Carlos Ferrero’s tennis academy.
He is not the first: Nadal treasured the Estudiantes de La Plata shirt given to him by his friend Juan Mónaco.
But what does Alcaraz mean by ‘a home’?
‘Footballers (…) usually always end up going home to sleep. We have to go from hotel to hotel, week after week, and we can’t get used to where we are. I’d probably take that from football.’
