Rafa Nadal’s Break from Tennis: A Focus on Business and Investments

It is a decision that my body has made, I have not made it ”. This is how Rafa Nadal announced last May that he was taking time away from the slopes to recover from the injury he had suffered during the Australian Open at the beginning of 2023. A necessary stop to take a breath, rebuild and be able to face what, presumably, it will be the last year of his sports career, in which he intends to say goodbye to the courts and the public that has supported him so much throughout his professional life. Nadal’s break on the courts will leave him time to continue promoting his other facet, that of businessman and investor, at the helm of various companies and investment groups through which he has been able to make profitable the profits obtained since he began playing the game. tennis. And that they have reported many more benefits than the racket.

The Mallorcan tennis player has extended tentacles in sectors ranging from real estate to leisure, through tourism, renewable energy or his well-known training academy. He controls them through various companies and companies in the hands, mainly, of his father, Sebastià Nadal, and his mother, Ana María Parera. Through the Aspemir holding, with which he achieved profits of 11.4 million euros in 2021, according to the latest accounts filed with the Mercantile Registry, he invests in a dozen companies. The best known is Mabel Capital, of which he holds 33.3%, together with his other two partners, the Ibizan hotel businessman Abel Matutes Prats and the entrepreneur Manuel Campos. It is a company with a presence and assets in five countries and focused, as they themselves explain through their website, on investing and managing the capital of its owner partners “in a diversified way” through real estate assets, capital private and customer service oriented 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 from 1889 located in the Villa de París square in Madrid, a super-luxury residential development considered the most exclusive in Spain and in which, according to some media, he has acquired a floor Marta Ortega, heir to the Inditex empire.

Through the other investment divisions of Mabel Capital, in the world of communication, the partners have a stake in the audiovisual production company Komodo, which is in charge of organizing the Mad Cool music festival and producing well-known series of the Netflix platform such as Yo soy Georgina, about the day-to-day life of soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo’s girlfriend, or La marquise, which narrates the experiences of the socialite Tamara Falcó. Precisely together with Cristiano Ronaldo, Nadal participates in one of the best-known businesses of this investment company, Tatel restaurants, with establishments in nine cities around the world and upcoming openings on the horizon. Its other Italian restaurants under the Totó brand plan to leave Spain in the coming months to make the leap to other European cities.

Union with the Matutes

Nadal’s union with the Matutes family —owner of the Palladium chain and businesses such as Ushuaia and Hard Rock Ibiza— has been fruitful for years and has allowed him to open Tatel branches in cities such as Mexico, Doha or Abu Dhabi in a process of expansion that seems unstoppable. In an interview published by EL PAÍS, Abel Matutes Prats stated that his business union with athletes like Nadal had come about due to “vicissitudes of life”. “Sometimes you meet them, you start doing things, they trust you with their savings and they 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, he has started a new adventure in the tourism sector with the creation of the Zel chain, which aims to promote more than 20 establishments geared towards holiday tourism in five years. For now, the first to start up will be the Zel Mallorca hotel this July. “We are happy to finally be able to collaborate, as partners in this project, with a personal and sporting icon such as Rafa,” said Gabriel Escarrer, president of the hotel during the presentation of the project in Madrid last December, where he explained that the 80 % of the openings will be existing hotels converted according to the brand and the rest will be newly created, in both holiday and urban areas.

For Javier Estrada, a professor at IESE Business School and a 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”. He is less in favor of investments that are often “enthusiastically” recommended such as restaurants, hotels or gyms, which have led renowned professionals to lose a lot of capital on these types of investments. “The statistics on the proportion of athletes who, having earned many millions, are bankrupt a few years after retiring are terrifying, and, in many cases, have to do with this type of expensive, illiquid, and highly uncertain investment” , emphasizes Estrada.

For now, Nadal has managed to safeguard his earnings and make his investments profitable. One of the big branches of his many off-court businesses is in his hometown of Manacor, where he owns the Rafa Nadal Academy with support from Telefónica. A huge complex that mixes from the sports center with intensive tennis campuses for young people and adults to an international school and a residence, which came with controversy after an amendment was approved in the Balearic housing law that allowed its use as a hotel and in which it is possible to book a stay on portals such as Booking, for a minimum of three nights, for just under 200 euros per day.

Nadal’s assets —the ATP calculated at the beginning of the year that he had won more than 134 million euros in prizes alone in his career— also adds investments in the renewable energy sector, million-dollar agreements to advertise brands ranging from banking ( Santander) to automobiles (Kia), and a foundation with its own name, to which his wife, María Francisca Perelló, is mainly dedicated. “It is absolutely recommendable, and actually essential, to have a good plan, based on a good investment philosophy, and it must be perfectly understood by the athlete. None of this is very difficult to do, but unfortunately it is not the typical way of advising most athletes”, says Professor Javier Estrada. It does not seem to be the case for Nadal.

Follow all the information on Economy and Business on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter

Five Days agenda

The most important economic appointments of the day, with the keys and the context to understand their scope.

RECEIPT IN TU CORREO
2023-07-01 03:45:00
#businessman #named #Rafa #Nadal #business #court #Business