Behind every tennis player with 22 Grand Slam titles there's usually a story the media rarely hears first-hand. Mery Perelló, Rafa Nadal's wife, has for the first time spoken at greater length about how it all began - and the story is more interesting than any match.

"Our families knew each other even before we were born," Perelló recounts. The two families have been intertwined for decades: she attended Rafa's first communion when she was only six. They met through Maribel, Nadal's sister, who was her classmate at college in Manacor. The Balkan reader gets this well - in smaller places, ties are built generations before they become relationships.

And when they're asked who won over whom, the answer is direct and without false modesty: "He was the one chasing me at that point," she says of the early days when they were teenagers and went out one summer. Twenty years on, after 14 years together, they married in October 2019 in Mallorca.

Today they have two sons - Rafael, born in 2022, and Miquel, born in the summer of 2025. The second name isn't an accident: Mery's father, Miquel, died in April 2023, and the child carries his name. That's the kind of family detail that says more than any interview about fame.

Nadal retired from professional tennis in October 2024, and that's exactly when the second half of the story begins - the one without the spotlight. Behind the athlete the world celebrated for two decades stands a woman who asked nothing of that fame, and a family that existed long before the front pages. Sometimes the most stable relationships are precisely the ones that didn't start as news.