How do Wimbledon seedings work?

What is seeding in tennis?

Seedings in tennis is the ranking a player receives before entering a tournament. Seedings are awarded to the highest ranked WTA and ATP players and are crucial to ensuring a more balanced draw.

Seedings also prevent the top players from competing against each other until the later rounds of a tournament. For example, the top four seeds wouldn't meet each other until the semi-finals of a Grand Slam. 

How Wimbledon seedings work

Wimbledon seeding is determined by a player’s position in the world rankings in the lead up to the tournament. The cut-off date for seedings is usually a week or so ahead of the tournament’s start date.

For the men’s draw, seedings are determined by a player’s ATP Tour ranking, while the WTA Tour rankings are used for the women’s event. Players are seeded in the exact order in which they rank in their respective Tour rankings.

Occasionally, a player’s seeding can be higher than their actual ranking if higher-ranked players withdraw from the tournament.

Similarly, seedings are also given to doubles teams across the men’s, women’s and mixed doubles competitions, as well as wheelchair and quad draws.

The history of seeding at Wimbledon

Seeding at Wimbledon was first introduced in 1924, although it looked quite different from the system in place today. At the time, up to four players from each nation were placed in separate quarters of the draw to avoid early match-ups between players from the same country.

In 1927, the format shifted to rank players according to their ability, rather than their nationality. By 1975, Wimbledon has begun using computerised rankings to determine seedings for the women's and men's draws.

Between the years of 2002-2019, seeding for the men’s singles and women’s singles draws followed two different systems.

For the men’s draw, the top 32 players in the ATP world rankings were given guaranteed seeded spots, but their exact placing could be adjusted based on how well they’ve performed on grass courts over the past two years. This helped form a better reflection of their form and abilities on that particular surface, which could have an impact on the overall draw.

For the women’s singles, seeding mostly followed the WTA rankings list. However, in rare cases, a committee were able to make changes to the seedings if they felt a player’s grass court skills and credentials weren’t accurately reflected in the rankings.

In 2021, seedings for both the men’s and women’s singles draws changed to be determined solely on ranking.