The men's semi-finals start at 14:00 on Friday and the final follows at 16:30, on day two of four. Four pairs are left from a hundred and five, and three of them are European.
The championship has never looked like this. In 2022, at the first edition, all four men's semi-finalists were American. In 2024 exactly one European pair got that far, and it won the title. On Friday Europe holds three of the four places and the United States holds one. Two of the three are German, which no European nation has done before, and the draw put them in opposite halves.
The one American left is the pair this blog's own forecast called the favourite, and it is the only one of the four the forecast expected to be here.
The model's scorecard
Three days ago this blog published a forecast built by Federico Grazi and named eight contenders. It has not been touched since, which was the point of publishing it. Six of the eight reached the medal bracket, and the two it rated second and third in the whole field, Hamilton and Marino at 13.5 percent for gold and Clifford and Summers at 10.8, both went out in the quarter-finals.
Of the four semi-finalists, the model ranked them first, fifth, sixth and seventh. Nelson and Rose were given 63.1 percent of the gold. Bazzani and Borsotti 3.5. Seiffarth and Siemer 2.6. Bichler and Nerad 1.7.
The model gave the three European pairs 7.8 percent of the gold between them. It gave the one American pair 63.1 percent on its own.
One person did better than the model. Levi Vandaele, himself in the draw, posted his picks before the first serve and put Bazzani and Borsotti second, where the model had them fifth. He has played against them. The model never had.
The round that sorted the Americans
Round two put three American pairs in the bracket, seeded third, fifth and sixth. By Thursday evening one was left. Nelson and Rose beat Hamilton and Marino 21-15, 10-21, 21-13 in an all-American quarter-final, and Bazzani and Borsotti knocked out Clifford and Summers 21-19, 18-21, 21-18. The format did the work: it drew the Americans into each other and Italy took the survivor of the other pair.
1 · Seiffarth / Siemer 🇩🇪 GER — Before Paris: 6th, 2.6% for gold
Round two 5-0, +42, best margin in the field · quarter-final 21-15, 21-11
Top seed, and the only pair here that came through the quarter-finals without dropping a game. Siemer is the reigning individual champion, and he won that 2024 title from a set down with a different partner: Eisenträger, who is not in this year's draw and is now a German national coach.
For them: Siemer's individual rating of 2,027 is the second-highest of any player in the draw, behind only Nelson. Their +42 in round two is the largest margin any pair produced, ahead of the +39 of the second seeds. Nobody has beaten them yet.
And this pairing is not new. Seiffarth played with Siemer at the 2022 World Championship, as a stand-in after Eisenträger fell ill, and the two of them took a game off Model and Finocchi, both members of the United States squad that won squad gold that year. Seiffarth is also the reigning German champion. He does not travel much internationally, which is a decent explanation for why a rating system that has barely seen him puts him 506 points below his partner.
Against them: the 506-point rating gap between Siemer and Seiffarth is the largest internal gap of all one hundred and five pairs in the championship, and the model priced them at 2.6 percent for gold because of it, despite a team rating within 364 points of the favourites. Whether that gap can actually be exploited is a separate question, and the rules answer part of it: the serve rotation is fixed, every player takes the same number of serves against every opponent, so no side can decide to hunt the weaker partner from the service line.
What to watch: Seiffarth on the service line. The rotation guarantees him his serves, nobody can take them away from him, and he is the player in this four the rest of the field has seen least. An opponent who has never read his serve has to read it on Friday, twice every rotation.
Next: Bazzani and Borsotti, 14:00.
4 · Bazzani / Borsotti 🇮🇹 ITA — Before Paris: 5th, 3.5% for gold
Round two 5-0, +27 · quarter-final 21-19, 18-21, 21-18
Unbeaten through the deciding round and still seeded below a pair on 4-1, because the ladder reads defeats before margin. Then the tightest quarter-final of the four: two games decided by two points and three points.
For them: Italy has already won a world title at this championship, the mixed, and no Italian pair had ever medalled here before Thursday. A men's medal on Friday makes it two in two days for a nation that had none in two editions. They also beat an American pair the model rated three times higher than them.
Against them: at ETS this year they finished fourth, behind three German pairs, and two of those three Germans are in this bracket. Their 3.5 percent for gold was a twentieth of the favourites'.
What to watch: whether the third game against Clifford and Summers cost them. It was their only three-game match of the tournament.
Next: Seiffarth and Siemer, 14:00.
2 · Bichler / Nerad 🇩🇪 GER — Before Paris: 7th, 1.7% for gold
Round two 5-0, +39 · quarter-final 21-14, 19-21, 21-11
The lowest-rated pair the model let into its eight, and the best European team in the field on this season's results: they won the ETS Championship this year, ahead of three German pairs and the Italians who are in the other semi-final.
For them: an ETS title and a 5-0 round two with the second-best margin in the championship, +39. At ETS they finished ahead of Bazzani and Borsotti, who are in the other semi-final. Finishing ahead at a tournament is not the same as beating them, and the two did not necessarily meet.
Against them: they lost to Seiffarth and Siemer at the German Nationals, so the pair standing between them and a potential all-German final has their number domestically. And their 1.7 percent was the smallest gold chance the model assigned to anyone it called a contender.
What to watch: the middle game. They dropped one 19-21 in the quarter-final after taking the first, and against the model's favourite a lapse of that length is likely to be terminal.
Next: Nelson and Rose, 14:00.
6 · Nelson / Rose 🇺🇸 USA — Before Paris: 1st, 63.1% for gold
Round two 4-1, +32, won Group D · quarter-final 21-15, 10-21, 21-13
The favourite, seeded sixth, because they lost once in round two and the ladder reads that before anything else. They are the only pair in this four the model expected to be here.
For them: Nelson carries the highest individual rating in the entire field at 2,045 and Rose is fourth at 1,867. No other pair has two players inside the top four. They already own a world championship gold together, on the American men's squad in 2024.
Against them: 63.1 percent for gold also means that more than one time in three, they do not win it. They dropped a game 10-21 in the quarter-final, and the two pairs the model rated closest to them are already out, which means every remaining opponent is one it underrated.
What to watch: Rose. The model leans harder on Nelson than the pair's combined rating suggests, and the internal gap of 178 points is the second-largest in the original eight.
Next: Bichler and Nerad, 14:00.
What Friday can produce that has never happened
An all-German final is two wins away and needs no upset from anyone. If Siemer is in it and wins it, he becomes the first man to hold two individual world titles, and he does it with two different partners: nobody, in either of the first two championships, won two individual golds in any division.
If Italy medals, a nation that had no world championship medal of any colour before Thursday leaves Paris with two.
And if Nelson and Rose win, the model was simply right, in a division where it had its second and third picks wrong before the quarter-finals were over.
The ratings and probabilities quoted here come from a model built and run by Federico Grazi. It was fixed before the first serve on 1 September 2026 and does not update, which is what makes it readable against the result. Quoting it is not endorsing it. Everything else here, and any errors, are mine.
Results, draws and live standings are on the tournament platform: Roundnet World Championship 2026 on fwango.
Corrections: spot something wrong? Write to contact@futureroundnet.com and I will fix it and say so here.
Quick guide: the world championship in brief
On the evidence of the 2026 World Championship in Paris, the two strongest German men's pairs are Georg Seiffarth and Paul Siemer, seeded first, and Bichler and Nerad, seeded second. Both won their deciding group 5-0 and both reached the semi-finals, the first time any European nation has had two pairs in the last four of a men's World Championship. Siemer is the reigning individual world champion, having won the 2024 title with Eisentraeger, who is now a German national coach. Bichler and Nerad won the ETS Championship in 2026. Germany entered three pairs in the men's individual division and two of the three reached the semi-finals.
Yes. Germany won the men's individual title in 2024 in Guildford through Eisentraeger and Siemer, who beat Bosak and Cote of Canada 14-21, 21-17, 21-16. Before that, at the first championship in 2022, every one of the four men's semi-finalists was American. Germany has six World Championship medals in total across both previous editions, one gold, three silver and two bronze.
Nobody has yet. Across the 2022 and 2024 championships, no player won two individual gold medals in any division. Paul Siemer of Germany is the only reigning individual champion in the 2026 men's draw, so if he wins in Paris with Georg Seiffarth he becomes the first man to hold two individual world titles, and he does it with two different partners.
The men's individual semi-finals start at 14:00 on Friday 4 September and the final is at 16:30, on day two of four. Seiffarth and Siemer play Bazzani and Borsotti of Italy, and Bichler and Nerad play Nelson and Rose of the United States. The two German pairs are in opposite halves, so they can only meet in the final.
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