US Open 2026 pages
Sports · US Open 2026 · Men's Singles · Semi-finals
Alexander Zverev vs Karen Khachanov
Friday, September 11, 2026 · Semi-finals
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ESPN Deportes · ESPN app
My pick: Alexander Zverev to advance · locked 2026-09-10 12:10 UTCPrediction
The US Open's own model has this at 83-17 and I am shading it down, because two of the three numbers that decide a mirror match belong to the underdog. Khachanov has saved 72.4% of the break points he has faced here to Zverev's 65.2%, and he has converted 58.2% of his own to Zverev's 32.1% — a gap that wide is not noise across five matches. He has lost 59 games in the tournament, fewer than any of the four men left, and the last time an unseeded player reached a major semi-final having conceded the fewest games of anyone in it was Andrei Medvedev at Roland-Garros in 1999. The last completed match between them went to Khachanov, in the Canada semi-final thirteen months ago, from a match point down. I still take Zverev, for the two things that survive all of that: the serve — 72 aces, 68.3% of first serves landed, held in 31 consecutive games through the quarter-final — and the fact that he has now made the semi-finals of all four majors this season and won one of them. Khachanov has to break a man who has been broken eight times in five matches and never once since Sunday.
The case for Alexander Zverev
76% to winZverev is the top seed and, since June, a Grand Slam champion — he won Roland-Garros over Flavio Cobolli, the first German man to take the French title in the Open Era and the first to win any major singles title in more than thirty years. He then lost the Wimbledon final to Jannik Sinner, and by reaching this round he has made the semi-finals of all four majors in a single season, the ninth man in the Open Era to do it and the only player of either tour to manage it in 2026. He leads the tour with 51 match wins, and his 23 Grand Slam match wins this year beat Boris Becker's German record of 22 from 1989. He has been here twice before, losing the 2020 final to Dominic Thiem from two sets up and two points from the title, and the 2021 semi-final to Novak Djokovic. This fortnight began badly — back-to-back five-setters against Lorenzo Sonego and Quentin Halys, two points from defeat in the first — and has straightened out completely: three straight-sets wins since, 72 aces, and not a service game lost in the quarter-final.
The case for Karen Khachanov
24% to winKhachanov is ranked No. 50, the lowest-ranked player in either singles draw, and unseeded at a major for the first time in thirty Grand Slams. He arrived in New York 16-18 for the season and on a four-match losing streak, having gone out in the first round at Los Cabos, Montreal and Cincinnati. Since then he has beaten the No. 3 seed Félix Auger-Aliassime in the second round — the biggest upset by seed of the tournament — and come from two sets to one down to beat Learner Tien over five in the fourth round, the first man ever to beat Tien in a five-setter. He has lost 59 games in five matches, fewer than any other semi-finalist, and saved 72.4% of the break points he has faced. This is his third Grand Slam semi-final and his second here, four years after Casper Ruud beat him in the 2022 last four; the other was the 2023 Australian Open. He owns a Masters 1000 title in singles and one in doubles, and an Olympic silver medal — won in the Tokyo final, against the man across the net on Friday.
Both cases written 2026-09-10, before the first ball — frozen into the record exactly as written, whatever the result. The percentages are mine — opinions with a percent sign on. They add to 100 because tennis has no draw to hide the rounding in.
Tale of the tape
Alexander ZverevKaren KhachanovPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-04.
Career head-to-head: ATP Lexus Head2Head; official US Open head-to-head feed · as of 2026-09-10.
The briefing
Storylines
- A win puts Zverev one match from becoming only the fourth man in the Open Era to win his first two major titles in the same calendar year.
- There will be a new US Open champion whatever happens. Jannik Sinner, the world No. 1, withdrew injured before the tournament; the defending champion Carlos Alcaraz lost the quarter-final to Ben Shelton in a five-setter that finished at 3:33 a.m.; and Zverev is the only man left in the draw who has won a major at all.
- Zverev is the No. 1 seed but not the world No. 1 — he is No. 2 behind Sinner, who is not here. It is the first time in his career he has been top seed at a major, and only the third time a German man has been, after Gottfried von Cramm in 1935 and Boris Becker.
- Khachanov has lost 59 games in the tournament, fewer than any of the four semi-finalists, and is the first unseeded player to concede the fewest games of anyone in a major's last four since Andrei Medvedev — also 59 — at Roland-Garros in 1999.
- This is a rematch of the Tokyo 2021 Olympic gold-medal match, which Zverev won 6-3 6-1 and which is the only reason Khachanov's silver medal exists.
- Zverev has spent 16 hours 40 minutes on court getting here, the most by any man reaching a US Open semi-final since the ATP began timing matches in 1991. Khachanov has spent 12 hours 30.
- Zverev has said publicly that he finds the schedule strange: he plays the afternoon semi-final, second on after the women's doubles final, while Tiafoe and Shelton get an extra day off and the night session. "In my twelve years on tour I have never experienced that."
- Nothing about the men's No. 1 ranking is at stake — Sinner is out of reach at 11,500 points whatever happens — which is the opposite of the women's draw, where Elena Rybakina clinched No. 1 by reaching the semi-finals and ended Aryna Sabalenka's ninety-nine-week run.
Head to head
Nine meetings, Zverev leading 6-3, and eight of the nine on hard courts — where all three of Khachanov's wins came, at Paris in 2018, Canada in 2019 and Canada again in July 2025, that last one a semi-final Khachanov won from a match point down. Zverev won the only clay meeting, the 2018 Roland-Garros fourth round, in five sets. Their biggest match was the Tokyo 2021 Olympic gold-medal final, 6-3 6-1 to Zverev; their last was the 2025 Cincinnati fourth round, which Khachanov retired from at 5-7 0-3. They have not met in 2026. A source that excludes Olympic tennis prints 5-3 over eight meetings.
Source: ATP Lexus Head2Head; official US Open head-to-head feed · as of 2026-09-10.
Watch: The semi-finals are on ESPN, with ESPN Deportes carrying the Spanish-language call — Juan Martín del Potro has been in that booth since the quarter-finals — and every court streaming in the ESPN app on an ESPN Unlimited plan. ABC's three Sundays this fortnight were opening day, the round of 16 and the men's final, so this one is cable and app only. (ESPN press-room release and listings, as of 2026-09-08)
Court & schedule: Arthur Ashe Stadium, Friday 11 September. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before; this one is on the board. (Official US Open order of play, as of 2026-09-10)
Weather: Thursday's men's doubles semi-finals open on a slight shower chance and clear to mostly sunny at 85°F, the warmest day left, and the women's semi-finals play through a mostly cloudy evening at 72°F with a 20% shower chance late. Friday — the men's semi-finals and the women's doubles final — starts damp at 78°F with a 19% shower chance and turns mostly sunny, then a mostly clear night at 68°F. Saturday's women's final is mostly sunny and 75°F, and then it turns: showers are 53% likely after dark on Saturday and thunderstorms 53% likely through Sunday's men's final at 78°F. Ashe and Armstrong close their roofs and play on; everything else waits. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-10)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.
At this Stage
The semi-finals are the last four, played on Thursday for the women and Friday for the men. Everyone still here has won five matches on these courts. Two of the four go out inside two days; the other two play the final.
Quarter-finals
Final