Zizou Bergs was always the prospect the tour kept rescheduling. Named by his parents after French footballer Zinedine Zidane, who carried the nickname, he started taking tennis lessons at age three in Lommel, turned pro in 2018, and built his ranking the slow way — a Challenger apprenticeship that yielded titles in St. Petersburg, Lille and Almaty in 2021, then Tallahassee, Drummondville and Yokkaichi. A former World No. 12 junior, he broke into the Top 200 in July 2021 and the Top 100 in June 2024. The delay had a diagnosis: his team last year solved a longstanding battle with cramping that had hindered him since age 15, dating to the Under-16 European Championships. The fix, it turned out, came down largely to hydration.
The game is built around a right-handed first strike. Bergs dictates with aggressive baseline play and powerful groundstrokes, with the serve as a significant weapon that earns free points and sets up the offense. Over the last 52 weeks he's serving 6.6 aces per match, up from a career average of 5.9 — but the return remains the limiting factor, with just 18.6% of return games won. Off the court he's become known as quite the showman, and his social-media presence — managed alongside girlfriend Jirth Maesen — has turned him into one of the tour's more visible personalities.
The breakthrough landed in 2025. In just his second tournament of the season, the ASB Classic in Auckland, Bergs qualified and reached his first ATP Tour final, losing to Gaël Monfils. At the Miami Open he beat Andrey Rublev for his maiden top-10 win, prevailing in straight sets — his first in seven attempts against top-10 players — to reach a Masters 1000 third round for the first time. The peak came in the fall: a career-best Masters run at Shanghai, beating Sebastian Korda, Casper Ruud, Francisco Cerundolo and Gabriel Diallo to the quarterfinals before falling to Novak Djokovic. That run carried him to a career-high No. 39 in October 2025. He'd already reached the US Open third round and helped Belgium to the 2025 United Cup semifinals with a win over No. 5 Félix Auger-Aliassime.
Now 26 and ranked just outside the top 40 as the top-ranked ATP player from Belgium, Bergs heads into the grass swing with the cramps behind him and a clear next target: turning these signature scalps into the kind of consistency that holds a top-40 seed.