Rafael Nadal will join Carlos Alcaraz in the Netflix tennis documentary rush. The streaming giant is producing a documentary series based on Nadal’s 2024 season, his last before retiring from tennis at the Davis Cup.

Directed by Zach Heinzerling and produced by Skydance Sports, it is the latest in a clutch of post-retirement tennis media promising “unprecedented access” to elite athletes — on the implied basis that they are at least somewhat in control of what that access reveals.

Netflix executives say the series, as yet untitled and without a proposed air date, will offer “an intimate glimpse into his (Nadal’s) journey to cement his legacy.”

Nadal’s final year on tour ended with defeat to Botic Van de Zandschulp of the Netherlands at the Davis Cup, and included a final match against long-time rival Novak Djokovic at the 2024 Paris Olympics which Nadal also lost.

A series of persistent injuries prevented a concerted comeback, though he managed to say emotional farewells to the Barcelona Open, Italian Open in Rome, Madrid Open and French Open, where he lost to Alexander Zverev in three sets after receiving perhaps the most difficult possible first-round draw available.

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But the documentary will also “show how my life and my tennis career developed through the years,” Nadal said in a statement. That defeat to Zverev at Roland Garros in Paris was only his fourth in 116 matches at the Grand Slam tournament that brought 14 of his 22 major titles.

Nadal’s emergence in the early 2000s and subsequent rivalry with Roger Federer and then Novak Djokovic defined men’s tennis for two decades and, alongside the dominance of the Williams sisters catapulted the sport into the global cultural firmament.

Its contemporary place in the popular imagination has received further boosts from the watchability and prominence of Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka and Iga Swiatek, as well as “Challengers,” the Zendaya movie released earlier in 2024. But Netflix’s tennis documentary, “Break Point,” was pulled after two seasons of disappointing viewing figures.

Those top stars did not comply with offering up access that they could not use as their own intellectual property; the series itself failed to circumvent that by turning lesser-known top players into exciting personalities in the way that “Drive to Survive,” the Formula One equivalent, did so well.

As tennis media approaches a crossroads with so many of its former stars calling it quits, Netflix will now hope that Nadal and Alcaraz — whose own series, “My Way,” is slated for 2025, can turn things around.

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‘There’s grist for something special here’

Analysis from senior tennis writer Matthew Futterman

Let’s be honest — Nadal’s final season was an emotional slog.

It began with hints of promise in Australia, as some nice early wins in Brisbane showed flashes of the old power and zip. But after his third match, a loss to Jordan Thompson, Nadal reported a new pain near his hip.

In short order he was pulling out of the Australian Open and really setting up the plot line that dominated the year: Could he ever make himself healthy enough to become some resemblance of his old self?

He found the answer over the course of a series of matches through the early spring to the Paris Olympics, all on his beloved red clay, and it turned out to be the heart-breaking no that has told so many players that this is the end. Anyone who had followed Nadal’s career could see that the violent twists that gave him so much power and spin — and that made his serve a strength rather than a weakness — were now enfeebled ghosts.

By his final match in Malaga, Nadal was struggling to get his forehand to land in the neighborhood of the baseline. Through it all, he knew it all, which is why he decided to stop chasing the thing that ultimately eludes everyone.

He wanted to keep playing. His body would not allow it.

Rafael Nadal waved goodbye to the French Open for the final time this year. (Clive Mason / Getty Images)

How much Nadal delves into that plot line will determine whether this hybrid of autobiography and documentary delivers a study in the human journey that even the greatest of athletes has to confront, or a gauzy, nostalgia-filled commercial for the Rafa brand, to use the lingo of the managers and handlers that surround nearly every big star these days. There’s grist for something special here, but also for something anodyne and treacly.

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Though he was usually careful not to speak ill of his competitors, Nadal could be brutally honest about himself. Who can forget his “I did a disaster” comment on his final match in Rome, a one-sided loss to Hubert Hurkacz. He blew off a post-match celebration. Keep your bouquets.

After Djokovic pummelled him at the Olympics, he made sure to let everyone know what he knew — that he no longer had the tools or the level to stay with his biggest rival, even on the court at Roland Garros that came to be known as his living room.

The moment was sad and inevitable and democratic all at once, and deeply painful for Nadal. If he lets the world see that vulnerability, how he struggled through a year that was supposed to be a warm valedictory, his film could be something more than what all the other ones are – movie-length adverts that serve all the happy hero-worshippers.

For 20 years Nadal did things his own way. Hopefully he will at the end, too.

(Miguel Medina / AFP via Getty Images)

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