The 21-Year-Old Tennis Sensation With 120 Million Fans
Alex Eala, the biggest Filipino sports star since Manny Pacquiao, has turned into one of the biggest draws in tennis
- Filipino tennis player Alex Eala has become a major draw in the sport, attracting massive crowds and driving up ticket sales.
- Eala won her first WTA tour title at the DC Open by defeating Jessica Pegula, becoming the first tennis player from the Philippines to win a pro title.
- Following her recent success, Eala entered the U.S. Open ranked world No. 18 and seeded 17th at the tournament.
It was only 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, five days before the U.S. Open singles draw actually started, but spectators had packed the 14,000 seats of Louis Armstrong Stadium to the brim.
Never mind that it was a weekday, or that the competition was a short-format mixed-doubles event, or that the food courts wouldn’t open for another half-hour.
They had come to see a 21-year-old Filipino tennis prodigy named Alex Eala, who was paired up with Canada’s Félix Auger-Aliassime. They greeted her with a roar, cheered every point, and screamed with such deafening volume that her opponents made a string of unforced errors in the middle of a game. Though the match only lasted roughly 39 minutes—and Eala and Auger-Aliassime lost—fans had gotten what they came for: a chance to see Eala in the flesh.
Tennis is hardly a national pastime in the Philippines, ranking far behind basketball and soccer to the archipelago’s population of roughly 120 million. The country’s most famous athlete is, without a doubt, former world champion boxer Manny Pacquiao, who racked up titles in eight different weight classes before briefly serving as a senator. His name remains synonymous with national pride.
Now, in the space of a season, Eala is primed to capture something similar.
“From what I’ve been told it’s very difficult to get courts nowadays,” she said recently. “Online I’m seeing everybody is playing tennis.” French retailer Decathlon reports seeing beginner racket sales surge 66% in their Philippines stores.
Eala, who grew up in Metro Manila and later graduated from the Rafa Nadal Academy in 2023, conducts at least part of every on-court interview in Tagalog. Those who come to watch her play, wave Filipino flags and wear custom T-shirts with her likeness on the front. In Manila, her face is plastered across a billboard on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the city’s longest stretch of highway.
“Eala Mania” began picking up steam just over a year ago, at the 2025 Miami Open. Then ranked No. 140 in the world, she made a charmed run to the semifinals by knocking out three Grand Slam champions in merciless succession: Jelena Ostapenko, Madison Keys, and Iga Świątek, each in straight-set victories. Eala had entered the tournament on a wild card. No Filipina in history had ever entered the main draw of a WTA Masters 1000.
That was merely prologue. Earlier this month, at the DC Open, she delivered her true breakout. She toppled world No. 3 Jessica Pegula in three sets to win her first WTA tour title, becoming the first tennis player from the Philippines to win any professional tennis title.
“Her fans came out in droves every day, from morning until night, just to get a glimpse of her or an autograph,” Mark Ein, the Chairman of the DC Open, wrote in an email. “I haven’t seen anything like it since Rafa came to town.”
At the National Bank Open, held this year in Toronto, Canada, ticket sales for her opening round doubled the number of seats available in the venue she was slotted to play in. Organizers scrambled to relocate her to Centre Court. She beat American Caty McNally in the third round and, at the net, McNally could only thank Eala for allowing her to be a part of the experience.
After the match, Eala told the crowd to “give Caty the flowers.” By morning, McNally had gained more than 10,000 new followers on Instagram, with a heavy Filipino contingent.
The claim that Eala’s fans have staked on her life is occasionally intimate, but Eala doesn’t seem to mind. When she shared an Instagram story wishing her parents a happy wedding anniversary, a flock of attendees arrived at her next match, in Cincinnati, holding up signs also wishing Michael “Mike” Eala and Rosemarie “Rizza” Maniego-Eala a happy wedding anniversary.
During an early changeover in the next round, against the American world No. 10 Amanda Anisimova, a young woman squatted down in the bleachers directly behind Eala’s chair, to have her picture taken with the back of Eala’s head. Eala stared straight ahead and sipped her water.
But those moments are only a fraction of what awaits her in Queens, home to the largest Filipino community in New York. This time last year, she entered the U.S. Open as the world No. 75. This week, she arrived as the world No. 18, and seeded 17th at the tournament.
To honor her inaugural title in D.C., Nike gifted her with a custom shoe, decorated with a graphic of the yellow Philippines sun. Eala has been asked repeatedly if representing the dreams of a nation is ever a burden. Never, she says.
“Pressure is part of my job, and a lot of people ask me how I handle it,” she said earlier this year. “But it’s nothing compared to the pressure that regular, everyday Filipinos have to face providing for their families.”