When Iga Swiatek parted ways with Wim Fissette after Miami in late March, the question was less whether she would find a new coach than how quickly she would find one she could build something with.
The answer came in mid-April, and the name was a familiar one to anyone who has followed the men’s tour for the past two decades: Francisco Roig, Rafael Nadal’s long-time second coach.
The way that partnership came together was, by common consent on tour, pretty hard for another pro player. Roig had only just begun working with Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard at Indian Wells in March, after parting ways with Emma Raducanu in January. The arrangement was meant to run at least through the grass-court season. Less than a month in, Roig was gone – to Swiatek – and Mpetshi Perricard learned the news not from his coach but from his own agent.
“I think we have the same vision of how I should play, and he’s helping me to achieve that”
“I had never seen anything like it before,” the Frenchman told L’Équipe, suggesting the Swiatek deal could not have been “put together in 24 hours”. The episode drew sharp criticism from voices on tour, Brad Gilbert and Nick Monroe among them, for the way Roig handled the exit.
A productive training block at the Nadal Academy in Mallorca followed, with Nadal himself joining her on court at one stage — and the partnership was effectively launched.
“I feel we understand each other very well,” Swiatek said of Roig in her pre-tournament press conference at the Foro Italico. “This feels more natural and more solid and I would say kind of disciplined.”
She expanded on the working dynamic in similar terms. “I think we have the same vision of how I should play, and he’s helping me to achieve that,” she said. The unspoken contrast with the Fissette period does the work on its own. Hired in October 2024, the Belgian hasn’t even maintained the consistency she had built under her previous long-term coach Tomasz Wiktorowski.
Miami tears
By the time she lost in the second round of Miami in March to Magda Linette, ending a 73-match opening-round winning streak on the WTA Tour, Swiatek herself was reaching for a vocabulary that was the opposite of “natural, solid, disciplined.” “Tennis feels complicated in my head,” she told reporters in that press conference. “I know it’s supposed to be simple.”
The early on-court evidence is mixed but not discouraging. Swiatek went 2-2 across Stuttgart and Madrid – the Madrid week cut short by the stomach bug that swept through the women’s locker room – and arrives in Rome having had to delay the proper start of the Roig era by a week. The numbers don’t yet tell a story; the words do.
Rome will be the first proper test. Swiatek has won the Internazionali BNL d’Italia three times (2021, 2022, 2024) and historically loves these conditions. She opens against Caty McNally, and is in the same quarter as Jessica Pegula. Whether the Roig effect shows up this week, next week or only at Roland-Garros is not yet clear – but for the first time in months, Swiatek is talking about her tennis in a way that suggests she knows where she is heading.