The 38-year-old Spanish tennis ace is retiring after the Davis Cup, but he’ll still have a robust portfolio of investments and endorsements.
By Brett Knight, Forbes Staff
Spain is set to face the Netherlands in the Davis Cup quarterfinals this week, and that means Rafael Nadal is ready to bid farewell to competitive tennis. The 38-year-old superstar announced in an emotional video on social media last month that he would retire following the tournament, 19 years after he won his first Grand Slam title—and 25 after he signed his first major endorsement deal, with Nike.
Over that quarter-century, Nadal has been more successful than just about anyone who has ever picked up a tennis racket. His 22 Grand Slam singles titles set a men’s record—since surpassed by Novak Djokovic—and his $134.9 million in career prize money is second in ATP Tour history, again behind only Djokovic. Nadal also earned in excess of $415 million from endorsements, appearances and other business endeavors, for more than $550 million in total pretax earnings, according to Forbes estimates.
That leaves him well behind the $1.1 billion that his other great rival, Roger Federer, piled up in his own extraordinary career before retiring in 2022, and it puts him roughly level with Djokovic, who continues to thrive on tour at age 37. But no other tennis players—and few athletes from other sports—come close. Even Serena Williams, who won 23 Grand Slam singles titles and helped set a new standard for female athlete pay before leaving the sport in 2022, finished roughly $120 million behind Nadal.
Big Three: Roger Federer, Nadal and Novak Djokovic are the only three tennis players ever to cross $500 million in career pretax earnings.
Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images
“I think he’s still printing money,” one tennis agent says of Nadal, who made an estimated $23 million off the court over the past year. “He’s not doing anything unless it’s big money. He’s still Rafa Nadal.”
While he didn’t quite change the marketing game like Federer (one of only seven athletes to have crossed $1 billion in earnings while still active) or Williams (who became one of America’s richest self-made women, with a net worth Forbes now estimates at $340 million), Nadal has maintained a robust sponsor portfolio that is also unusually stable by the standards of tennis, where players often swap out brand partners every few years.
In addition to his long relationship with Nike, Nadal has been tied to Kia since 2004, the year before his breakout win at the French Open, and he has played with Babolat rackets since he was a 9-year-old junior in 1995, signing his first international contract with the company in 2001. He picked up Richard Mille watches in 2010 and Spain’s Telefónica in 2014, with Infosys, Louis Vuitton and Subway among the more recent additions to a stable that runs more than a dozen brands deep.
“A lot of them came through injuries when he wasn’t front and center, and that says a lot about what he did for the brand,” says Joe Favorito, a longtime marketing consultant and former WTA Tour executive. “Nobody ran away.”
In the early years, Nadal’s somewhat halting English may have limited his global appeal, but he began to gain new traction with marketers around 2011, when he first cracked $20 million off the court after winning four majors in five attempts. “The one thing that Rafa had more than anybody else is his emotion, and he wore it on his sleeve,” says Favorito, who also notes that Nadal’s sense of fashion—down to the color of his shoes—made him instantly recognizable. Sponsors were particularly drawn to his ongoing battle with Federer, and smaller tournaments were willing to pay each of them upwards of $1 million in appearance fees just to show up.
“Roger was more of the classic elegant star, and Rafa was more the scrappy, cut-the-sleeves-off, Mediterranean long hair kind of rival to that, and I think they dovetailed really nicely,” says Stuart Duguid, cofounder of talent agency Evolve, who represents current stars Naomi Osaka and Nick Kyrgios. “I don’t think you probably would have had one’s career without the other in many ways.”
And Nadal is on a different level in his native Spain. “He’s probably bigger than LeBron James is in the U.S.,” Duguid says, noting that Nadal had the kind of consistent visibility that most of the country’s other star athletes, coming from team sports, never could. Favorito, who remembers seeing Nadal at a previous Davis Cup tie in Spain, is even more concise about his place in the country’s pantheon: “It’s god-like.”
Many, if not all, of Nadal’s sponsors should continue to support him in retirement. He has already shown he can be a relevant pitchman when he isn’t playing—injuries have limited him to nine tournaments over the last two seasons, including just two of the past eight Grand Slams—and Federer’s experience is instructive. The 43-year-old Swiss legend was still collecting an estimated $95 million annually when he walked away from tennis, and he continues to work with the vast majority of his partners from his playing days.
Retirement also offers one advantage for marketers. Active players, working around tennis’ year-round tournament schedule, typically try to cram all of their brand commitments into just a few days. Nadal will suddenly have a lot more time on his hands to commit to his partners, if he chooses to.
And that is an important caveat. Nadal will have to work to stay in the spotlight—the way fellow sports icons Tom Brady and David Beckham have—lest he wind up the next Pete Sampras, overshadowed by a new generation of tennis greats. Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz are already laying the groundwork for an era-defining rivalry, with six Grand Slam titles between them before either has turned 24.
Nadal will also have to keep his reputation clean, after he made perhaps the first branding misstep of his career when he became an ambassador for the Saudi Tennis Federation in January. The deal is believed to pay him multiple millions annually, but fans—particularly in Spain—have criticized him for participating in a sportswashing campaign that diverts attention from the Kingdom’s history of human rights abuses.
Nadal is also taking control of his own fate with more entrepreneurial pursuits, however, acquiring equity stakes and launching businesses of his own. He recently invested in Playtomic, a startup that helps amateur tennis players book time at courts, and is reportedly developing luxury residential real estate on Spain’s Costa del Sol. He is an owner of an electric boat racing team in the E1 series and of Tatel restaurants alongside Pau Gasol and Cristiano Ronaldo, and he partnered last year with Meliá Hotels to create a resort brand called Zel.
Perhaps closest to his heart, he runs a tennis academy in his hometown, Manacor, on the Spanish island Mallorca, which has earned admirers around the sport and helped mold Casper Ruud, now a mainstay in the ATP’s top 10.
“I don’t think it’s an option that’s available to most athletes—it’s really reserved for the elite or the especially relevant,” Duguid says of Nadal’s evolving approach to business, with less of an emphasis on traditional endorsements. “I think it’s inspired probably by Kobe, LeBron, people like that who have been able to take positions in companies and take risks that have paid off tenfold or more down the line.”
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