Two streaks, one trophy to claim: Andreeva and Kostyuk meet on Madrid’s red clay
Twenty-two wins, one loss between them on clay this spring. Mirra Andreeva and Marta Kostyuk meet in Saturday’s Madrid final with two streaks on the line and one trophy to claim (5 pm CET).
Marta Kostyuk and Mirra Andreeva, 2026 | © Tennis Majors / Madrid Tropy Promotion
Twenty-two wins, one loss between them on clay. Mirra Andreeva and Marta Kostyuk may have lined up a surprising Madrid final, given the presence of Sabalenka, Rybakina, Gauff and Świątek in the draw, but they are a dominant force on the Roland-Garros surface, three weeks out from the kick-off of the slam played on the dirt.
Walk it back through the spring and you find a single blemish in the entire ledger of Saturday’s two finalists on red dirt this season. Mirra Andreeva is 12-1. Marta Kostyuk is 10-0. The lone loss, Andreeva’s, came at Stuttgart against Elena Rybakina, who went on to win the tournament. Strip out that one match and these two players have gone a combined 21-0 on clay in 2026 against everyone else than the Race leader on the WTA tour.
Kostyuk, coached by Sandra Zaniewska, has not lost on the surface, full stop. Ten matches, ten wins, beginning with the Rouen title in April and continuing without interruption through her run here. It is the longest winning streak of her career on any surface. She arrived in Spain to dispatch Yulia Putintseva, Jessica Pegula, Caty McNally, Linda Noskova, and Anastasia Potapova, a draw stacked with seeds, navigated without ever truly looking in danger.
Clay court queens
On Tour, only Andreeva has more clay-court main draw wins in 2026 than Kostyuk’s ten.
Andreeva has those twelve. She has been working with Conchita Martínez since last season — which, paired with Kostyuk’s setup, makes this final an ultra-rare championship duel between two players coached by women. A teenager who has lost exactly once on clay all spring, to the player who has been the best on the surface this year. She has carried that form through Madrid in textbook fashion, past Panna Udvardy, Dalma Galfi, Anna Bondar in a near three-hour escape from a set down, Leylah Fernández, and Hailey Baptiste, where she saved three match points before closing it out.
There is a complication, and Kostyuk owns it. They have met once, in January, in the Brisbane quarterfinals. Kostyuk won 7-6(7), 6-3 in 1 hour 47 minutes, eventually reaching the final there before falling to Sabalenka. The H2H reads 1-0 in Kostyuk’s favor, and while the surface that day was hard rather than clay, the psychological deposit is real. Andreeva has lost to Kostyuk once already this season; she also lost to Elina Svitolina at the Australian Open. She is winless against Ukrainian opposition in 2026, and she will not have forgotten that.
First teenager to reach three WTA 1000 finals ?
Brisbane was four months ago. Andreeva has won two titles since – Adelaide in January, Linz in February – and reached a semifinal at Stuttgart. She has had time and reason to study the tape.
For Andreeva, this is a bid to join an exclusive group. Win on Saturday and she becomes the sixth player to win each of her first three WTA 1000 finals since the format’s introduction in 2009, a list that currently reads Kvitova, Svitolina, Garcia, Świątek, Sabalenka. She would also become the first teenager to reach three WTA 1000 finals since the format began, and at 19 years and three days old, the second-youngest Madrid finalist in the tournament’s history.
The numbers on her side are almost embarrassing: a record in WTA finals of 5-1, a Madrid winning percentage of 83.3% trailing only Serena Williams and Sabalenka, projected world No. 7 by Monday regardless of the result.
For Kostyuk, a title would push her career-high ranking from No. 16 to a projected No. 15. Her record in WTA finals is 2-3, and she will be looking for the kind of validation a player chasing it doesn’t always get.
