Flavio Cobolli opens his 2026 US Open campaign on Tuesday against Francisco Comesana, a first-round matchup that closes Day 3 as round one winds down at Flushing Meadows. Cobolli arrives in New York as the No. 5 seed, looking to turn a French Open final run into another deep surge.
That seeding is not a small detail. It means Cobolli enters this tournament with a career-high ranking and the expectation that he should handle an opening match that, on paper, looks manageable. He also owns a 1-0 head-to-head edge over Comesana, and Tope has already picked Cobolli to win in four sets, which is the kind of forecast that fits a player coming in with momentum and confidence.
But Comesana is not the sort of first-round opponent that hands over matches. He is a battle-tested baseliner who has been this deep at Flushing Meadows before, and that history is what keeps this from looking like a clean walk-through. If Cobolli starts slowly, Louis Armstrong Stadium can turn into a real fight, and the match could become the first real test of how firmly his recent rise has carried over from the French Open to New York.
The prediction context matters because this is not being written after the fact; it is part of the Day 3 conversation around who moves through round one and who gets dragged into a longer night. Cobolli has the ranking, the seeding and the head-to-head edge, but Comesana has the kind of baseline resistance that can punish lapses. Tuesday will show whether Cobolli’s form travels cleanly or whether the opener becomes a warning that the gap between a favorite and a survivor at the US Open is smaller than it looks.
