A businessman named Rafa Nadal: This is how his business became outside the court | a job

It’s a decision my body made, I didn’t.” So Rafa Nadal announced last May that he would take time off the slopes to recover from the injury he sustained during the Australian Open at the start of 2023. A necessary pause to take a breath, rebuild and be able to take on what, probably This will be the last year in his sports career, as he intends to bid farewell to the courts and the public who have supported him so much throughout his career.Nadal’s rest in the stadiums will allow him time to continue promoting his other face, the businessman and investor, at the head of the many companies and investment groups through which he managed of making profitable profits since they started playing tennis, and they reported benefits far more than the racket.

The Mallorca tennis player has spanned sectors ranging from real estate to entertainment, through tourism, renewable energy or the well-known coaching academy. He controls it through several companies and businesses in the hands of his father, Sebastia Nadal, and his mother, Ana Maria Barrera. Through the Aspemir Holding Company, with which it achieved profits of 11.4 million euros in 2021, according to the latest accounts presented in the Mercantile Registry, it invests in dozens of companies. The most famous of them is Mabel Capital, which owns 33.3% of it, along with its other partners, Ibizan hotel businessman Abel Matutes Prats and businessman Manuel Campos. It is a company with presence and assets in five countries and focused, as they themselves explain through their website, on investing and managing the capital of its co-owners in a “diversified way” through real estate assets, private capital and a customer-oriented service industry.

The company’s real estate division has led them to promote luxury real estate developments in Madrid, Marbella, Portugal and Los Angeles. Nadal, together with his partners, owns a building dating back to 1889 located in the Vila de Paris square in Madrid, an ultra-luxury residential project considered the most exclusive in Spain and which, according to some media, has acquired the floor of Marta Ortega, heir to the Inditex empire.

With other investment divisions of Mabel Capital, in the world of communications, the partners have a stake in the audiovisual production company Komodo, which is responsible for organizing the Mad Cool music festival and producing well-known series from the Netflix platform such as Yo soy Georgina, about the daily life of the girlfriend of soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. , or La marquise, which recounts the experiences of socialite Tamara Falco. And precisely with Cristiano Ronaldo, Nadal is involved in one of the most famous businesses of this investment company, Tatel Restaurants, with establishments in nine cities around the world and upcoming openings on the horizon. Its other Totó-branded Italian restaurants plan to leave Spain in the coming months to make the leap to other European cities.

Union with Matotis

Nadal’s union with the Matutes family – owner of the Palladium chain and companies such as Ushuaia and Hard Rock Ibiza – has been fruitful for years and has allowed him to open Tatel branches in cities like Mexico, Doha or Abu Dhabi in a seemingly unstoppable process of expansion. In an interview published by EL PAÍS, Abel Matutes Prats stated that his business union with athletes such as Nadal was born out of the “vicissitudes of life”. “Sometimes you meet them, you start doing things, and they trust you with their savings and start doing projects,” he explained.

It is not the only relationship of the athlete with a large family of Balearic hoteliers. Together with the Escarrer family, owners of Meliá, they start a new adventure in the tourism sector with the creation of the Zel chain, which aims to promote more than 20 establishments oriented towards holiday tourism within five years. For now, the first hotel to start operating will be Hotel Zel Mallorca in July. “We are delighted to finally be able to collaborate, as partners in this project, with such a personal and sporting icon as Rafa,” said Gabriel Escarrer, president of the hotel during the presentation of the project in Madrid last December. 80% of openings will be brand-converted existing hotels and the remainder will be newly established, in both holiday and urban areas.

For Javier Estrada, professor at IESE Business School and partner at Sport Global Consulting Investments, the best investments for athletes like Nadal, regardless of whether they are retired or active, are “passive, transparent, easy to understand, liquid, diversified and low cost”. It is less favorable to investments that are often recommended “with enthusiasm,” such as restaurants, hotels, or gyms, which has led to popular professionals losing a lot of capital on these types of investments. “The statistics on the percentage of athletes who make millions out of bankruptcy a few years after their retirement are terrifying and, in many cases, relate to this very expensive, illiquid and highly uncertain type of investment,” Estrada asserts.

For now, Nadal has managed to protect his earnings and make his investment profitable. One of the great offshoots of his many off-the-slopes businesses is in his hometown, Manacor, where he owns the Rafa Nadal Academy with the support of Telefónica. A huge complex that blends from a sports center with an intensive tennis campus for youth and adults into an international school and residence, which sparked controversy after the approval of an amendment to the Balearic Housing Code that allowed its use as a hotel and in which it is possible to book accommodation on portals such as Booking, for at least three nights, for a little less From 200 euros per day.

Nadal’s assets – the ATP calculated at the start of the year that he had won more than €134 million in prize money alone in his career – also include investments in the renewable energy sector, and multimillion-dollar advertising deals for brands ranging from banking (Santander) to cars (Kia), and an institution in her own name, to which his wife, Maria Francisca Perello, is principally dedicated. “It is absolutely desirable, and indeed necessary, to have a good plan, which is based on a good investment philosophy, and should be fully understood by the athlete. None of this is very difficult to do, but unfortunately that is not the usual way of advising most athletes,” he says. Professor Javier Estrada. This does not appear to be the case for Nadal.

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