Some champions coast into retirement. Rafael Nadal has treated it like the start of a second career.
The hotel bet
Nadal's most visible venture is ZEL, a hotel brand he launched in 2023 as a joint venture with the Spanish hospitality group Meliá Hotels International, CNBC reported. Rather than chase conventional top-end luxury, ZEL sells a relaxed, Mediterranean-inflected idea of the good life — outdoors, active, social — and has expanded from Spain toward the Americas, according to Meliá. The structure is telling: a partnership, not a solo plunge, letting Nadal supply the brand and vision while a large operator brings the scale.
The academy
His other anchor is the Rafa Nadal Academy in Manacor, Mallorca, the training complex he opened in 2016 near his hometown. It has grown into both a business and a template — a place to develop young players that Nadal has since worked to extend to other countries. Together, the hotels and the academy sketch the shape of his post-tennis portfolio: hospitality and sport, built around his name and his sensibility.
His pitch on prize money
For all the business talk, Nadal used the interview to weigh in on a debate roiling his old sport: how the Grand Slams pay players. His preferred fix borrows from the way a company plans. Rather than one-off, year-to-year fights over purses, he has argued, players and the majors should strike long-term agreements — ideally spanning a decade — that guarantee prize money rises by a fair amount each year. The logic is predictability: a stable, growing pot, he suggests, is better for the players and healthier for the sport than perennial brinkmanship.
The through-line
What connects the ventures and the opinions is a preference for structure over improvisation. Nadal built a career on relentless preparation, and his post-tennis moves carry the same stamp — partnerships that spread risk, a brand with a clear identity, and a belief that the sport, like a business, does best when it plans for the long run. Whether the Grand Slams take his advice is another matter. But for a player who spent two decades grinding out points, the second act looks a lot like the first: patient, deliberate and built to last.
