Four-Time World Open Champion Ali Farag Retires by Rob Dinerman May 28, 2025 ---
Ali Farag, 33, a four-time World Open Champion (in 2019 and from
2021-23) who also won the British Open in 2023, the U.S. Open in 2017,
2019 and 2024, and four Tournament of Champions titles (in 2019, 2022,
2024 and 2025) among his 46 overall Professional Squash Association
(PSA) tournament victories, has announced in a four-minute video
released earlier today that he is retiring from professional squash
after 11 extraordinary seasons during most of the second half of which
he held the No. 1 PSA ranking. The last match of his PSA career
occurred earlier this month in Chicago, where his bid to win a fifth
World Open --- which would have been the third-highest all-time total
(behind only Jansher Khan’s eight and Jahangir Khan’s six) and broken
the record of four by Egyptian players that he co-holds with the
legendary Amr Shabana, while also returning Farag to the No. 1 PSA
ranking --- was denied when he lost in the finals to current PSA No. 1
Mostafa Asal. Farag's retirement comes on the eve of the 2025 Gillen
Markets British Open in Birmingham, where he had been listed as the
No.2 seed.
There were several crossroads moments that Farag successfully navigated
at the outset of his career. The first occurred during his early teens
when, discouraged by the several consecutive losses he had suffered at
the hands of junior players who had abandoned their studies to focus
solely on squash, Farag was on the verge of giving up the sport for
good, until his older brother, Wael, stepped in."He told me, ‘No,
please give me a chance, I’m going to work with you, and you’re going
to be good,’ ” Farag later recounted. Wael Farag himself had had his
last chance at the world junior title ended in the round of 32, a loss
that briefly devastated the Farag brothers before metamorphosing into
an additional layer of motivation. After coming in second to fellow
Egyptian contemporary Amr Khaled Khalifa at the World Junior
Championships in August 2010, Ali Farag entered the British Junior Open
the following January, and this time he came out on top, avenging his
loss to Khalifa with a three-game victory in the finals.
A PERFECT CAPSTONE
To that point, Farag still hadn’t had any wish to leave Egypt for
college, even though his parents had urged him to consider attending
Harvard. But less than a month after his triumph at the British Junior
Open, the Egyptian Revolution changed his thinking and he applied and
was accepted that spring at Harvard, where he won two Intercollegiate
Individual crowns (in 2012 and 2014), the last of which represented a
perfect capstone to a season in which the Crimson, under legendary
Coach Mike Way, culminated a wire-to-wire undefeated season with a 9-0
shut-out over defending champion Trinity College in the final round of
that year’s national team championship. Farag was selected as the 2014
recipient of both the Skillman Award --- the highest individual honor
in men’s college squash, “given annually to a senior men’s squash
player who has demonstrated outstanding sportsmanship during his entire
college career while maintaining a high level of play” --- and (during
the graduation ceremony) the William J. Bingham Award as Harvard’s
outstanding male senior athlete. Farag thereby became only the sixth
squash player in the Award’s 71-year history (previously Anil Nayar in
’69, Michael Desaulniers in '80, Kenton Jernigan in '86, Jeremy
Fraiberg in '92 and Adrian Ezra in ’94) to be honored with this
distinction. “His legacy is going to go down in history,” Coach Way
said upon learning of this honor. “He’s played a brand of squash here
that no one has ever seen in our sport. He’s definitely going to live
on for the guys who have played alongside him, and also for us as the
coaches. As long as we’re in the driver’s seat, we will refer to Ali
and how no one respects the game as much as he does --- respecting
referees, opponents, coaches --- that’s part of his legacy as well.”
Ironically, despite the extraordinary success that Farag had enjoyed
both in junior squash and as a collegian, at the time he capped off his
intercollegiate career by winning his second Individuals (defeating his
former junior-squash rival Khalifa in the finals), he had not been
thinking in terms of continuing his squash career and competing on the
PSA tour. A serious student, he had earned a degree in Mechanical
Engineering and planned to return to Egypt and embark on a career in
that field. But Coach Way and Farag’s then-girlfriend Nour El Tayeb
(whom he married in 2016), herself a top-tier player on the PSA women’s
tour, encouraged him to give the pro circuit a shot, citing his
successful advance one month earlier through a tough qualifying bracket
into the main draw of the prestigious Tournament of Champions event ---
and the rest is history.
LEAP OF FAITH
What followed was an exhilarating sprint --- especially during a
winter/spring of 2019 surge during which he won his first-ever
Tournament of Champions and World Open titles and was a British Open
finalist --- that enabled Farag to ascend to No. 1 on the PSA rankings,
where he has remained throughout almost all of the half-dozen years
that have followed. In addition to the aforementioned 12 combined World
Open/British Open/Tournament of Champions/U.S. Open championships,
Farag has been a U.S. Open finalist in 2022 and 2023, a British Open
finalist in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2024, and, as noted, a World Open
finalist in 2025; served multiple terms as PSA President; received a
number of awards, most notably “Male Player of the Year For
Sportsmanship ‘Spirit of Squash’ ” four times during the
five-year period from 2017-21; and played No. 1 on Egyptian teams that
have won the biennial World Team Championships the last four times that
the event has been held. Indeed, Farag won the clinching match of the
2024 edition of this event against his longtime rival Mohamed El
Shorbagy (representing England) in the World Teams final, in the
immediate aftermath of which (i.e. within seconds after hitting the
final winner) he scaled the back wall Spiderman-like --- representing a
seven-foot leap of faith --- and was embraced by his jubilant teammates
after landing on the floor outside the court.
In 2017, he and El Tayeb became the first married couple to win the
same major sports title on the same day when she won the women’s U. S.
Open, a feat they would have duplicated in 2019 had El Tayeb been able
to win the fifth game of her final-round match against Nouran Gohar.
Although for many years it had been thought that anyone who attended
college was thereby giving up any realistic chance of success on the
PSA tour due to having foregone those four years of PSA experience,
Farag’s outstanding achievements permanently punctured that myth and
set the stage for the considerable success that Ivy League graduates
Amanda Sobhy (Harvard ’15), Olivia Fiechter Weaver (Princeton ’18),
Gina Kennedy (Harvard ’19) and Aly Abou Eleinen (Penn ’22) have
realized as well.
“I COULDN’T IMAGINE A BETTER AMBASSADOR FOR OUR SPORT”
Farag won his 46th and last PSA title as recently as last month, when
he captured the Grasshopper Cup in Switzerland with a four-game
final-round victory over Diego Elias. He will be remembered not only as
clearly one of the greatest players in the history of men’s squash, but
also (witness the host of awards he has received) for his truly
outstanding sportsmanship and citizenship. Perhaps his Harvard
classmate/teammate Tommy Mullaney best summarized Farag’s overall
impact and squash persona when he stated, “Ali was the guy who --- for
all his success and accolades --- simultaneously had the grace and
humility to go out of his way to sit with visiting friends and family
to explain the game so that they felt welcome at matches. I couldn't
imagine a better ambassador for the sport.”
