Naomi Osaka splits with coach Patrick Mouratoglou ahead of tennis hard-court swing
Osaka confirmed the split on social media ahead of the WTA 1,000 Canadian Open in Montreal, as the tennis season moves onto the hard courts where she is most comfortable.
'Merci Patrick. It was such a great experience learning from you. Wishing you nothing but the best. You are one of the coolest people I've ever met and I'm sure I'll see you around,' she wrote in a statement.
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Mouratoglou did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Osaka, 27, started working with Mouratoglou, who most famously coached Serena Williams, following the 2024 U.S. Open. Their time together has been an up-and-down sequence of promising signs and frustrations with either injury or close-run defeats for Osaka, who said that Mouratoglou would be left wondering 'what the f— this is ' after a tight first-round loss to Paula Badosa at this year's French Open.
Ahead of that tournament, Osaka played a second-tier tournament in Saint Malo, France, after an early loss at the Italian Open in Rome. She won the WTA 125 event in France. reflecting afterward how missing matches due to physical issues — and three frustrating retirements with injury during promising contests in Beijing, Auckland and Melbourne in late 2024 and early 2025 — had left her lacking reps in tight moments.
But at the French Open against Badosa, and then at Wimbledon against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, Osaka went through the kind of encouraging but ultimately dispiriting match that has marked much of her time with Mouratoglou. Prior to a 6-4, 6-2 defeat to Emma Raducanu at the D.C. Open that proved to be their last match together, six of Osaka's last seven matches had come in three sets, with all of the deciders ending 6-4 against or in a tiebreak.
Following the defeat to Pavlyuchenkova, Osaka said that her response to it was entirely removed from her emotions in Paris, where she had to briefly leave the interview room in tears.
'In Paris, I was very emotional. Now I don't feel anything, so I guess I'd prefer to feel nothing than everything,' she said in London.
Osaka will play Canadian qualifier Ariana Arseneault Monday in her first match at the Canadian Open.
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Fernandez wins DC Open fuelled by Shake Shack, de Minaur takes men's title
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And so Palace are taking their case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), asking the so-called 'supreme court' of worldwide athletic endeavour to overturn UEFA's decision. Palace have also named Nottingham Forest and Lyon in their appeal, as their fellow Premier League side have been elevated from the Conference League to the second-tier Europa League at their expense, while their disputed stablemates from Ligue 1 have been left in the Europa League, as their higher domestic league finish of the two sides trumps winning the FA Cup. Steve Parish, Palace's chairman, will not mind which of those clubs CAS demotes, as long as what he views as the 'terrible injustice' of his team being removed from the Europa League is reversed. He believes he must take this fight on for Palace's players, staff and fans, as well as others who might find themselves in this position one day. 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Palace's starting point is likely to be that Textor, whose Eagle Football Group still contains his controlling stakes at Brazilian side Botafogo, Belgian's RWDM Brussels (rebranded from Molenbeek earlier this year) and Lyon, did not have what UEFA calls 'decisive influence' at Selhurst Park, and that they have never been part of his multi-club group. Advertisement This, you would think, is supported by the fact he has just sold his 43 per cent stake in Palace to Woody Johnson, the billionaire owner of the NFL's New York Jets and former U.S. ambassador to the UK. Furthermore, that 43 per cent stake only gave Textor one of four voting shares at Palace, with Parish and two other American investors, David Blitzer and Josh Harris, also holding one each. As Textor has previously explained to The Athletic, decisions at Palace very rarely, if ever, went to a vote, as Blitzer and Harris are silent partners who trust Parish to run things. 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'But if the panel decides the rules are clear, and therefore a strict and literal approach needs to be applied, the chances for a successful appeal will be minimised,' explains Ioannidis. While each case is considered on its own merits, precedents can be helpful, and two CAS panels have recently made very quick decisions on MCO cases involving Slovakian team FC DAC 1904 and Drogheda United from the Republic of Ireland. Both were blocked from playing in the Conference League by the CFCB and then lost their appeals, DAC unanimously and Drogheda on a majority verdict. The two cases were different but both argued they simply did not have enough time to create the separation UEFA requires between them and their MCO sister clubs. As MCO groups have proliferated across Europe, UEFA has given owners two options: reduce your stake in one of the clubs that want to compete in the same competition to less than 30 per cent, step down as a director and halt whatever player-trading strategy you are pursuing with the two teams, or put one of into a blind trust, so you have no influence over day-to-day operations. Crucially, UEFA moved the deadline for doing one or the other of these workarounds from early June to March 1. DAC, Drogheda and Palace all missed this memo. However, in both the DAC and Drogheda cases, the CAS panels backed UEFA. Advertisement 'What is of immense importance here is the panels' findings that the current regulations do not require evidence of actual influence, but rather only the possibility of such influence,' says Ioannidis. 'This, in conjunction with the finding on the procedural aspect of submitting the changes in the club's ownership structure on time (or not), may cause serious difficulties for those arguing Palace's case.' Parish has explained in recent interviews that Palace were too busy playing Championship neighbours Millwall in the last 16 of the FA Cup on March 1 to be thinking about what might happen if they were to win the whole thing and play in Europe for the first time in their history, but Duval says the deadline argument is doomed. 'It seems to me that a possible argument about the new deadline has already been rejected, thus the main focus will probably be on whether Textor had decisive influence,' he says. 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The argument, presumably, would be that Evangelos Marinakis, owner of both Forest and Greece's Olympiacos, did not place the former in a blind trust until the end of April, a move he reversed when they eventually failed to join their cousins from Athens in next season's Champions League. It is a moot point now but Marinakis seemed to miss the UEFA deadline, too, and, if literal readings are important, you either meet it or you don't. If Palace wanted to be really mischievous, they could ask what Marinakis was doing on the pitch at the end of Forest's home draw against Leicester City on May 11. While he may well have been checking on the health of an injured Forest player, the episode suggested the Greek billionaire still exerted some influence at the City Ground despite that blind-trust move. And, just to add some further spice to the pot, Parish has suggested that Forest played a part in Palace's demotion to the Conference League. 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