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After the Spanish tennis sensation Rafa Nadal said goodbye to playing professionally on 19 November in Malaga, the path is now clear for the city to have a tennis club with his trademark name on it.
It is a sports and leisure centre promoted by the Marbella developer Sierra Blanca, together with the tennis player and his family, which has its sights set on the current facilities of the Inacua racquet centre, next to the athletics stadium, to expand them and transform them into an ambitious project dedicated to tennis.
As SUR has previously reported, the plan to take over the racquet centre and convert it into a tennis club with the Nadal brand was complicated, as these sports facilities are in the hands of Serveo, Ferrovial's services company, which ten years ago was awarded the contract for the construction and operation of the tennis and paddle tennis centre for 20 years, on land owned by the city hall.
Therefore, the company, whose shares were sold by Ferrovial to the Portobello fund, had ten years of operation ahead of it, and the only way out for the Sierra Blanca and Nadal project to materialise is for Serveo's concession to be terminated in some way, so that the door would be open to a new tender to cede this land to a company that would renovate and operate this sports facility in the western part of Malaga city.
Now, as SUR has learnt, following an agreement reached between Sierra Blanca and Serveo, everything is ready for this company to give up the operation of the centre for the next ten years of the concession. In order to reach this point, Sierra Blanca and the Nadal family have presented to the planning department the proposal with which they want to transform and expand the current racquet centre to convert it into a first class club. This project has already received a positive report from the council's sports department, which endorses its interest for the city.
The agreed plan between all parties to ensure the success of this operation is that urban planning informs the current concessionaire of the support from the sports department for the proposal presented by Sierra Blanca and the Nadals. Serveo will formally submit its resignation to continue operating the facilities on the land granted to it by the city council, in mutual agreement with urban planning. Furthermore, the Marbella-based developer has agreed with Serveo on a compensation package for its withdrawal.
This opens the door for the council to call a new tender for the transfer of this land for which Sierra Blanca aspires to become the winner with an intervention designed with the ambition of developing one of the most important sports centres at local and regional level.
This area at the western end of Malaga city is set to undergo a major transformation in the coming years with the campus planned here by the Alfonso X El Sabio university, and the various housing projects that have already been and will continue to be developed on land such as Torre del Río, La Térmica or El Pato, in what is already known as the 'golden mile' of the Malaga coastline.
The current racquet centre has 19 padel and seven tennis courts, two of which are clay courts and have been unused, semi-abandoned, almost since their inauguration due to their costly maintenance. The construction of a central tennis court with a capacity of between 3,000 and 4,000 spectators, as requested in the tender conditions resolved in 2014, has yet to be completed. The absence of this court has meant that the most significant competitions hosted by the centre so far have had to be held using temporary stands placed around some of the existing courts.
The remodelling of the complex to become a 'franchise' of the Rafa Nadal academy could facilitate the organisation of high-level tournaments. However, the promoters of the project have insisted that it is a tennis club and not an academy like the one in Manacor, Rafa Nadal's home town. That one has some 80,000 square metres, 500 employees and a residence for young tennis players with 95 rooms, where top tennis players also regularly come to train.
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