Rafael Nadal was eight minutes late for a video interview on a Monday night because he was busy putting his two sons to bed. The 22-time Grand Slam champion and record 14-time French Open winner joined from his home in Mallorca to promote his upcoming exhibition in Las Vegas, and he apologized for the delay with a shrug. “Sorry,” Nadal said. “That’s the world of being a dad.”
Although he no longer plays professional tennis, Nadal still travels widely for his business interests, promotes his foundation and tennis academy, and accepts awards. When he is home, though, his family comes first.
“It’s strange to say, but not much golf, not much fishing,” he said of his typical day at home. “I have two small kids. I have work to do.”
Nadal described a routine built around school runs and the gym. “When I’m at home, normally I try to bring my kids to the school at 8:30 in the morning,” he said. The school sits at the Rafa Nadal Academy on his home island of Mallorca, Spain. “Then I normally try to go to the gym and stay in the office during the whole morning. Try to pick up the kids at 3:30 and then try to spend the afternoon with them.”
He added that most days at home are quiet. “I don’t have that many because I am traveling, I am doing stuff, I have events. But most of the days when I am at home and nothing to do, I do that.”
Back on the court
Nadal, who turned 40 in June, said he was playing “almost zero” tennis before he picked up his racket for an exhibition with Andy Murray and others a month ago. The event marked the 10-year anniversary of his academy.
His next appearance is “The MGM Slam presented by Capital One” at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on Feb. 28. The match will mark his first time playing in the United States since he retired two years ago. In 2024, he faced Carlos Alcaraz in a Vegas exhibition during his final year on tour.
Organizers will announce the additional players and the 2027 format in the coming weeks. The event is slated for just before the ATP 1000 tournament in Indian Wells, California. Last year, eight players competed in a tiebreaker format.
Nadal said he was “not in the mood” to commit to the Vegas exhibition when it was first proposed. “But then, in some way, that’s an obligation for me to start practicing again, to start doing my things,” he said. “I’m still hitting the ball quite well, to be honest. The movement is another story.”
He had surgery nearly a year ago to treat pain and regain mobility in his right hand. He said he was “not able to do much” for four months. Throughout his career, he also dealt with chronic pain in his left foot, hip issues and many other physical ailments.
“I need to go step-by-step,” he said about getting back into shape. “Because if I want to avoid injuries … the old body requires time and patience.”
When asked whether the exhibition was meant to let his sons watch him play, Nadal said he does most things for them, but not this one. “Now I just do it for myself,” he said. “Almost everything I do, I do it for them. But this, I do it just because I want to enjoy the preparation and then the feeling of playing again tennis in front of a good crowd.”
Rethinking the surfaces
His Netflix documentary “Rafa,” released this year, gave fans a fresh look at the immense pain he played through during his career. With Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner both missing large portions of this year due to injury, the sport’s physical toll has drawn renewed attention.
Nadal was asked whether he ever wished for fewer hard-court matches and more clay and grass events. He said it was hard to push for that while he was on tour, because people would have assumed he simply wanted to exploit his dominance on clay, “or even grass, that I think was my second-best surface.”
“But now I can say: I don’t see a lot of professional sports playing on that kind of surfaces. That’s the truth. In tennis, we’re playing most of the time in a very, let’s say, aggressive surface for the body and for the joints. And then we pay the price.”
Nadal also renewed his call for a rolling ranking system based on two years of results instead of the one-year system tennis uses now. He argued that a two-year system would “give the players a little bit more freedom to make better decisions,” and that when players get injured, they have more time to recover without watching their rankings drop rapidly. He also said that extending Masters 1000 tournaments to two weeks was “a mistake.”
Coaching questions
Nadal runs an academy that employs up to 700 workers at a time, along with other business interests. This year, the academy celebrated six players in the top 100 of the rankings, led by No. 17 Alex Eala on the women’s side and No. 23 Casper Ruud, whom Nadal beat in the 2022 French Open final for his last Grand Slam title.
Might Nadal return to the circuit as a “super coach” the way Murray has worked with Novak Djokovic and Jack Draper? He left the door open. “Never say never,” he said. “But not now.”
“I have two small kids and I cannot commit to stay full time with a player,” he added. “Today, I am not the coach that I (would) pick up if I was a professional tennis player.”
For now, that trade-off is simple. Nadal will not be on tour, and he will be home for bedtime.