The grass season continues this week in Berlin, where the WTA 500 has drawn seven of the world's top 10. Aryna Sabalenka headlines, with a possible quarterfinal against Coco Gauff already looming in the opening quarter, while Wimbledon and Australian Open champion Elena Rybakina anchors the bottom half alongside one of the form players of the season, Elina Svitolina. The draw splits cleanly into a top half built around Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula and a deeper-looking bottom half.
Sabalenka and Pegula lead a loaded top half
Top seed Aryna Sabalenka opens her grass season here at 31-4 on the year and as the clear headliner. Last summer brought the highs and lows of her grass game in quick succession: a Wimbledon semifinal, her best result there, ended by Amanda Anisimova, and a Berlin run that included a 7-6(6) 3-6 7-6(6) win over Elena Rybakina in which she saved consecutive match points in the deciding tiebreak, before Vondrousova stopped her in the semifinals on the way to the title. Berlin is her first event since a quarterfinal loss to Diana Shnaider at Roland Garros capped a clay season without a single semifinal and several defeats to lower-ranked players. Her grass numbers read 7-2 over the last 52 weeks and 35-19 on the main tour for her career. She has a first-round bye and opens against Ekaterina Alexandrova or Anastasia Potapova, a first round with its own weight. Alexandrova is an accomplished grass player at 38-20 for her career but arrives in dismal form, on a five-match losing run and eight losses in her last ten. Potapova had the better clay season of the two, with a Madrid semifinal and a 14-3 clay record, but is more modest on grass and retired ill in her last match in 's-Hertogenbosch, trailing 1-6 0-2 against Zeynep Sonmez.
Fifth seed Coco Gauff sits in Sabalenka's quarter, setting up a possible meeting between the two. Grass has been Gauff's hardest surface: she has never gone beyond the fourth round at Wimbledon despite reaching it three times, and her best grass results are Berlin semifinals in 2022 and 2024. Last year she lost her opening match here to Xin Yu Wang, who went on to reach the final. She is 26-10 on the season but 0-2 on grass over the last 52 weeks, with a 21-12 career main-tour record on the surface. She opens against Nikola Bartunkova, who reached the main draw through withdrawals but arrives with form to respect, a WTA 125 final in Birmingham and a win over Madison Keys on clay this season. The other first round in this section pairs two capable grass players, Elise Mertens, 9-3 on the surface over the last year, and Liudmila Samsonova, 7-4 on grass over the same span despite a difficult 7-14 season overall.
Third seed Jessica Pegula anchors the other top-half quarter and is one of the more unpredictable grass players in the field. She won Berlin in 2024 and took the Bad Homburg 500 last year by beating Iga Swiatek in the final, yet in between lost her opening match here to Samsonova in a third-set tiebreak and fell in the Wimbledon first round to Elisabetta Cocciaretto 2-6 3-6. She is 28-7 in 2026 with a 22-14 career grass record. She has a bye and opens against a qualifier or Diana Shnaider, the Roland Garros semifinalist, should Shnaider win her first-round match; Shnaider is 13-7 on grass for her career.
Seventh seed Karolina Muchova completes the half and has not built on a strong clay start that included a Stuttgart final, losing her opening match in Rome and reaching only the third round at Roland Garros. A two-time Wimbledon quarterfinalist in 2019 and 2021, she struggled badly on grass last year, with a single win at Queen's over a player outside the top 150 and a first-round Wimbledon exit. She is 24-7 on the season but 1-2 on grass over the last 52 weeks. She opens against a qualifier. The same section holds the most accomplished career grass player of this group in Madison Keys, 52-19 on the surface for her career, who meets Xin Yu Wang, last year's Berlin finalist and a 7-3 grass player over the past 52 weeks, in the first round.
Across the top half, the past year's grass profiles favour Xin Yu Wang and Pegula. Wang rates highest on the power index, a reflection of her run to the Berlin final last year, with strong return and break-point numbers. Pegula is a contrast, her best marks coming on her serving lines while her return rates lower. Alexandrova's grass game shows up in her aces, though her double faults pull the other way.
Rybakina and Svitolina feature bottom half
Fourth seed Amanda Anisimova leads the third quarter as last year's Wimbledon finalist, where her run ended in a 6-0 6-0 final loss to Iga Swiatek. Her 2026 has been broken up by injury; she returned at Roland Garros without going deep and then lost to Iva Jovic in three sets at Queen's. Even so, grass is comfortably her best surface, with a 13-4 record over the last 52 weeks and 24-11 for her career, and she carries a first-round bye. The rest of her quarter waits on qualifiers: eighth seed Linda Noskova, wild card Paula Badosa and Clara Tauson each open against a player still to come through qualifying. Noskova has had a solid season with quarterfinals in Stuttgart and Madrid and a Rome fourth round before a first-round Roland Garros exit, and played well on grass last year with a Bad Homburg semifinal, a Nottingham quarterfinal and a Wimbledon fourth round, sitting at 8-3 on the surface over the past year. Badosa is back on a wild card but has been unable to climb back toward the top, with poor results across surfaces. Tauson is working through a spinal hernia that forced retirements in Miami and Rome; she lost in the first round at Roland Garros and then dropped her opening grass match to a 17-year-old Czech, and is 8-12 on the year.
Second seed Elena Rybakina anchors the final quarter, the 2022 Wimbledon champion and the 2026 Australian Open champion, though her recent weeks have brought some unexpected losses and she arrives directly from a defeat to Katie Boulter in London. Her section is stacked. She has a bye and would meet either Donna Vekic, who has reached at least the semifinals in London as a lucky loser, or Alexandra Eala, the WTA 125 Birmingham champion, in the second round. Eala's grass record reads 16-5 over the last 52 weeks, but that figure rests on lower-level results; on the main tour she is 5-4 on the surface.
Sixth seed Elina Svitolina has been one of the best players on tour this season at 32-8 with a WTA 1000 title in Rome and a recent Roland Garros quarterfinal. She knows how to play on grass, with a Wimbledon quarterfinal last year and a semifinal there in 2023, though her only previous Berlin appearance, in 2021, brought a single loss. She opens against Anna Kalinskaya, the 2024 Berlin finalist who also reached the Wimbledon fourth round that year. Kalinskaya's grass story is one of late development: she failed to win a tour-level grass match from 2017 through 2021, won two in 2022, then broke through in 2024 with seven wins from nine matches on the surface.
Across the bottom half, the grass profiles from the past year point to Rybakina and Anisimova. Rybakina leads the group on the power index behind a strong serving line, a serve-led profile with her lowest marks on break-point conversion. Anisimova rates highest on match efficiency with strong return and break-point numbers, a contrast in style. Svitolina's standout figure is her dominance ratio, built more on control than on serving weapons, while Eala's profile leans heavily on her return and clean serving, the serve-power categories aside.
