Rafa Nadal faces his retirement from professional tennis after a long and successful sports career with his whole future open in another area where it has been taking increasingly ambitious steps for a decade: business.
Throughout his career as a tennis player, the ‘manacorí’ earned more than 130 million dollars exclusively from the prizes received for his participation in ATP circuit tournaments, a figure that adds to the assets that his image as a champion allows him to accumulate in sponsorships.
The athlete He began his foray into the business world with the inauguration of the Rafa Nadal Academy in October 2016.a tennis education and preparation center with an obvious pull of its personal brand.
The management of the academy was carried out by his uncle and coach for many years, Toni Nadal, who was chosen as the director of the sports center from its creation until 2023. In this line of trust in the responsibility of his parallel activities in the circle of his family, the Rafa Nadal Foundation has his wife, Mery Perelló, as director.
The academy has expanded the list of young people enrolled in recent years and has hosted the ATP Challenger circuit tournament since 2018, held between the end of August and the beginning of September.
In the same year, Nadal began international expansion with the creation of a training center in Cancún (Mexico) and in the following years opened new offices in Halkidiki (Greece), Kuwait, Hong Kong and Durres (Albania).
The player expressed that he thinks it is “interesting” to expand the “method” and the concept of the center he founded in his hometown to more countries.
The Rafa Nadal Academy project also hosts the Spanish U23 Championship, a World Padel Tour tournament and the entry of the Spanish fund GPF as an investor.
The tennis player has stated on many occasions that he considers the Manacor academy as his “second home” and he always showed his enthusiasm for an initiative to which he could devote more attention after his retirement from the slopes.
Another of his projects in which he has been deeply involved since 2022 is the development of the hotel brand ‘Zel’. with the help of Meliá, with the aim of opening approximately twenty hotels in Europe, America, Asia and the Middle East.
The new hotel brand opened its first hotel in Mallorca last year and in 2024 it has developed a new hotel establishment in Costa Brava (Girona), in both cases in pre-existing hotels that have been completely renovated to include them on a new line.
Of the first 20 ‘Zel’ hotels, these are renovated establishments and the remaining four are new-build properties.although the idea is that this proportion changes and the brand includes most of the new hotels in the future.
One of the future locations already announced for opening hotels is Mexico, and the chain’s intention is to focus mainly on vacation tourism destinations and establish 20 percent in cities with a strong tourist component. like Paris, London or New York.
The Balearic tennis player is not the only well-known athlete in recent years who has expanded into the hotel world, with a friend of his like Cristiano Ronaldo who has already been introduced to the field thanks to the Pestana CR7 Lifestyle Hotels chain or like Leo Messi in MiM Hotels.
Source: La Verdad
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