Rafa Nadal He closed his time as a professional tennis player, but he did not slow down. Who for decades got up early to train on the court now gets up early to sit down in front of business meetings, project reviews and the management of a tennis academy that aspires to continue growing. The one of Manacor left the circuit with one of the greatest legacies that sport has seenand now he wants to build another one, this time in the business world, while also educating his children. He’s going to do it like he saw his father do it to him.
The withdrawal did not open a rest parenthesis. Nadal He has been looking at tennis from the outside for some time and thinking about what is coming, and the jump to the business world is a transition that he had been developing since the last years of his career. “I’m not the kind of person who likes to wake up in the morning not knowing what to do. I need to have goals in my life,” he says. That mentality, which led him to win where others gave in, is now applied off the track. The tennis academy that bears his name is one of the axes of that project, a space that he wants to expand and to which he dedicates energy and enthusiasm as if it were a new grand slam.
The father’s legacy
Behind this way of understanding work there is a figure that Nadal He points out clearly: his father. Sebastian Nadal fIt was the first example he had of what it means to build something from nothing with sustained effort, and that imprint was not erased over the years. “My father was a positive example for me because of his dedication and ability to work. Since I was little I saw him work very hard. He was able to build the largest glass company in the entire Balearic Islands starting from scratch.. “His determination and dedication to work have been a huge inspiration for me,” he says. This family model explains a lot of the attitude that Nadal transferred to sport and that he now transfers to his business projects.
Aspermirthe company that brings together a good part of their businesses, is today the area where father and son continue to collaborate. The company functions as an umbrella for different initiatives, and Rafa Nadal He continues learning with someone who was his first reference. “It’s great to work with him because I’m still learning a lot,” he adds. This bond is not only emotional but also practical, and the figure of Sebastian It appears in the day-to-day life of a business structure that the former tennis player wants to consolidate with the same method he used on clay: step by step, without skipping stages.
A life with goals
Those who know Nadal They know that retirement understood as a prolonged break never fit with their character. The tennis player who refused to lose without giving his all is the same man who comes to every conversation about his business with his homework done. The Academy tennis, the projects grouped under Aspermirfatherhood that also occupies a central place in this new stage, everything is part of an agenda that leaves no gaps unfilled. Nadal During the last years of competition he thought about what he wanted his life to be like on the other side, what shape he wanted to give it, and now he is executing that plan with the same concentration that he showed on the most demanding tracks in the world.
Tennis can continue without him active, but Nadal cannot continue without building something. That is perhaps the most revealing conclusion of his first stage outside the circuit: that the sport gave him a way of being, not just a way of playing.