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“They’re very different, but they’re quite similar.”

Riccardo Piatti is talking about Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic, and as the only person to have coached them both, he should know.

Piatti, 66, met Sinner when his compatriot was 12. He started working with him soon after, until they parted ways following an eight-year partnership in 2022. He coached Djokovic for just under a year between 2005 and 2006, until just after the 24-time Grand Slam champion turned 19. Djokovic asked Piatti to coach him full-time, but Piatti did not take up the opportunity and they split.

Piatti worked with Sinner, now 23, and Djokovic, now 38, in their formative years, always suspecting that one day they would both be competing in matches like Friday’s Wimbledon semifinal against one another.

“In tennis, you always have to think about what the sport will look like in 10 years,” Piatti said in a recent video interview.

“And I thought in 10 years, they will be tennis. The sport is always changing, and if you’re not watching the younger players, you don’t understand it.”

Part of what made both stand out was the way they were pushing the boundaries with their athleticism and consistency off the ground. But, Piatti said, their attitude was exceptional, too.

“The mentality of both was always very strong,” Piatti said. “But when I say strong, it means that they are very focused. Focused on what they want to do. (Maria) Sharapova and (Ivan) Ljubicic were the same.”

Piatti also worked with five-time Grand Slam champion Sharapova and former world No. 3 Ivan Ljubicic, as well as 2016 Wimbledon finalist Milos Raonic. His academy, the Piatti Tennis Center in Bordighera, Italy, has around 60 players training there, from the age of 10 upwards.

Both Djokovic and Sinner provided Piatti with particular matches in which he sensed something special in his young charges. With Djokovic, it was at his first U.S. Open in 2005. He came through a marathon five-setter against Gaël Monfils, also 18 at the time, in sweltering heat and oppressive humidity.

“Unbelievable,” Piatti said about a match for which Djokovic was criticized for at the time, after he took multiple medical timeouts and bathroom breaks.

“I knew he had the quality and the movement, but the first quality they have to have is to be able to suffer and fight for the win. Even if you lose, you’re thinking: ‘Tomorrow I want to play again to beat this guy.’

“Novak was very, very mature. He was 17 years old, but it was like he was 23 or 24.”

Sinner had a similar maturity and determination, even if temperamentally he was calmer. Piatti first saw a 12-year-old Sinner losing heavily in a junior Italian national championship. The red hair stood out, but so did the youngster’s perseverance.

Sinner later contacted Piatti, wanting to train with him, and so they met in Monaco, where the coach was living at the time. Piatti knew this was a player with rich potential, and the 13-year-old Sinner left his home near the Austrian border, a six-and-a-half-hour drive away, to join up with him in Bordighera.

Sinner instantly reminded Piatti of one of his former pupils.

“Having coached Novak for many years before, I liked a lot the position Jannik stayed in the court, with the legs always staying down when he was hitting the ball,” Piatti said.

“And he was hitting it very well and always had the mentality that he wanted to do something with his shots.”

Piatti took a young Sinner to the Italian Open in Rome, where he hit with the veteran doubles player Julian Knowle. Like Djokovic, Piatti wanted Sinner to avoid junior events and instead cut his teeth on the second-tier ATP Challenger circuit as quickly as possible.

It’s there, up against experienced players who are desperate to put young upstarts in their place, that youngsters sink or swim. And it was there that Piatti saw the kind of resilience in Sinner that he had seen in Djokovic in that U.S. Open win over Monfils.

In the first round of the Villena Challenger in Spain in April 2019, he was 3-0 up in the third set, but lost it 6-3. In his next match, at the Barletta Challenger in Italy, he trailed 6-0, 1-0 to Gian Marco Moroni (currently ranked No. 159), meaning he’d lost 13 straight games across two matches. That he came back to beat Moroni showed Piatti that he was able to suffer and fight in adversity. He said that Sinner, a skier who would enter a different plane of concentration after putting on his helmet, did the same when he popped his cap on for a tennis match.

That Villena defeat also hasn’t aged too badly. Sinner’s opponent was a 15-year-old named Carlos Alcaraz.

The subsequent struggles Sinner has had against Alcaraz — he’s lost their last five meetings — compared to his recent successes against Djokovic — he’s won their last four — is because, according to Piatti, his game is much more similar to Djokovic’s. Piatti pointed to both having such a good backhand down the line, the linearity of their hitting, the way they both move so well and are able to get down so low to the ball as some of their many similarities. Piatti said both men were always obsessed with the idea of improving their serves and that will no doubt be a feature of Friday’s match.

Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic practice side-by-side at Wimbledon in 2025. (Ben Whitley / PA Images via Getty Images)

Both players have spoken throughout the tournament of their similarities with each other, and when the Italian was breaking through on the tour, Djokovic would invite Sinner to hit with him.

Piatti also has no concern about Sinner’s ability to thrive on grass, saying it’s a more consistent surface than clay, where Sinner has not always been a natural, though he is now so effective that he came within a point of winning the French Open against Alcaraz last month.

By the time Sinner moved on from Piatti in February 2022, he was a top-10 player and had won six ATP titles. But he wanted to make the breakthrough at a Grand Slam, which arrived two years later at the Australian Open. Piatti was disappointed, but insisted that he has made peace with the split now and isn’t surprised by Sinner’s rapid rise that has seen him win three majors and become the world No. 1.

His focus now is on his academy. Piatti mentions 19-year-old Frenchman Gabriel Debru, a former junior world No. 1 before having to undergo wrist surgery; the 17-year-old Indian Manas Dhamne; and Italian 16-year-old Filippo Francesco Garbero as some of the promising talents there.

All dream of being the next Sinner or Djokovic, who on Friday will try to demonstrate the qualities that made Piatti sure, even when they were teenagers, that they were destined for Centre Court.

(Top photo: Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images)