Diego Forlan: The ex-Man Utd and Uruguay footballer playing professional tennis at 45

This story has been updated to reflect news of Forlan’s professional tennis debut at the Uruguay Open in November 2024.

Diego Forlan, the former Uruguay, Manchester United and Atletico Madrid striker, is recalling one of the most high-pressure experiences of his career. It came when he was at United — but it happened on the tennis court, not the football pitch.

Forlan had been a highly promising tennis player as a youngster, and up until his mid-teens had thought about turning professional in that sport. In the end, he opted for football, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, father and brother (the former two were Uruguay internationals, as he would become).

By 2003, having recently turned 24, he was playing for reigning Premier League champions United.

On that summer’s pre-season tour in the United States, the club had access to some of the tennis courts at sportswear giant Nike’s headquarters in Portland, Oregon.

Forlan fancied a hit and he was challenged by one of his United team-mates, Netherlands international striker Ruud van Nistelrooy. The whole squad, which featured the likes of Rio Ferdinand, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, gathered to watch, alongside their manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who, as the story goes, put money on Forlan winning, knowing of his tennis background.

“Everyone just expected me to win, but the pressure was on and nobody knew that inside I was thinking, ‘I have to win!’,” Forlan says now, laughing at the memory. “I was better than Ruud, but you could see that he used to play when he was a kid.

“Sir Alex said, ‘I go for Diego’. He was cheering for me.

“We just played a tiebreak, and I won. It was a relief, because a tiebreak is like a penalty shootout. You can lose sometimes when you don’t really deserve to because it can be one point only that decides it.”

The ultra-competitive Van Nistelrooy, who was said to sulk even if United had won a match but he hadn’t scored in it, was presumably a little less delighted by the outcome than his manager.

The 45-year-old Uruguayan recounted the story from his home in Montevideo, his country’s capital city, as part of explaining how and why he has ended up playing on the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Masters Tour.

Forlan made his debut in the 35+ age category, before moving into the 40+ group. Having turned 45 in May, he has been playing against those aged 45 and over, and now he will make his professional tennis debut in his home city this November. Forlan will partner Argentine Federico Coria in the men’s doubles at the Uruguay Open, an ATP Challenger Tour event one rung below the main ATP Tour — the preserve of Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Novak Djokovic et al.

Forlan has been playing at the ITF 1000 level, the highest on its regular tour. It pits Forlan against former coaches, one-time college-level players and some who won a few ATP points by winning professional matches back in the day. At the lower-level 400 competitions, which Forlan competed in at his first three tournaments, the players are more at the standard of top club players or former state or provincial-level ones.

The ITF Masters Tour is non-professional, but some of its events do award prize money at their discretion. This will most often go to only the winner, sometimes the runner-up, largely just to cover their expenses, and is typically in the hundreds of dollars rather than thousands.

A level up from the competitions Forlan is playing in is the World Championships, the equivalent of the Grand Slams, where Arnaud Clement, France’s former world No. 10 and an Australian Open finalist, has competed in the same age category as the Uruguayan in the past couple of years.

“He’s playing at a very high level of tennis for his age category,” Matt Byford, head of Juniors and Masters tennis at the ITF, says of the Uruguayan.

Forlan, still in excellent shape and with his familiar long hair intact, has played four Masters tournaments (two in Montevideo, one in Punta del Este — another city in Uruguay — and most recently the one in Lima). He reached the quarter-finals in the Lima singles (hammering his opponents in his first three matches) while he and his partner won the doubles title without dropping a set.

He plays tennis four times a week at the club where he grew up in the sport — the Carrasco Lawn Tennis Club in Montevideo, which hosts Uruguay’s home Davis Cup ties and the Uruguay Open Challenger — having asked his good friend and former Uruguayan Davis Cup captain, Enrique ‘Bebe’ Perez, to start working with him to improve his game.

Forlan admits he can’t help but be very competitive on the court. Even if he’s now performing in front of only a few hundred tennis obsessives, rather than 50,000-plus football fans.

Forlan during his latest ITF Masters tournament, where he reached the quarterfinals (Kevin Santamaria/Tenis al Maximo)

Forlan the footballer was extremely fit, technically accomplished and two-footed. His two and a half years with Manchester United, between January 2002 and summer 2004, saw him eventually earn cult-hero status among their fans, as he overcame a dreadful start where he didn’t find the net until eight months (and 27 appearances) after arriving from Independiente of Argentina.

He went on to score a famous double at Anfield in December 2002 to beat fierce rivals Liverpool, and won hearts and minds with his unquestionable commitment.

After United, he enjoyed prolific spells in Spain with Villarreal, who he helped reach the 2005-06 Champions League semi-finals, and then Atletico Madrid.

He won the Pichichi Trophy — the award for the top goalscorer in a La Liga season — at both clubs. With Atletico, he scored twice in the 2009-10 Europa League final to defeat Fulham 2-1, having scored in each leg of the semi-final as old foes Liverpool were beaten 2-2 on the now-scrapped away-goals rule. In that summer’s World Cup, Forlan’s five goals helped Uruguay reach the semi-finals.

Forlan ultimately scored more than 300 goals in a career that also took him to Italy, Brazil, Japan, India and Hong Kong, and won the Golden Ball (for the best player) having been joint top goalscorer at that 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

He eventually retired in August 2019, aged 40, and despite having management and various ambassadorial stints to contend with, has found time to rewire his brain to make sense of a new, but old, sport for him, after two decades of professional football. He is the owner of a Uruguayan third-division football club, and is an ambassador for United, Atletico and La Liga, making foreign trips on behalf of the former and staying in touch with some former team-mates.

He is a regular goalscorer for a local amateur team, but these days prefers playing tennis and padel, another racket sport which he also played as a youngster. Away from his athletic life, Forlan’s four children, three boys and a girl aged between eight and three, also keep him occupied. The kids play regular football and tennis too, so don’t be surprised if there’s a fourth generation of Forlan sporting excellence in a few years.

Forlan expected to spend much of his retirement honing his golf game, but instead has found himself drawn back to tennis. Nothing else gives him the same satisfaction as the sport that, along with football, he excelled at in his youth.

Forlan scoring against the Netherlands at the 2010 World Cup (Lars Baron/Getty Images)

“I need something where I can run,” he says. “Golf, you play in beautiful places — I like it and I still do it, but I need something different, something more similar to football. I started training and playing tennis and I was getting better and better.

“At first, I would play the top players at the club and players from around Uruguay and it was easy for them to beat me. Then it became more difficult. Now I can win. At the club tournaments, I was losing in the first round, now I’m winning a lot of them.”

Like one of his tennis idols, Spain’s Rafael Nadal, Forlan is right-handed in everything else he does, but a leftie in tennis. When he was about three years old, his brother told him to put the racket in his left hand, and the idea stuck (he is right-footed, but very comfortable using his left boot).

Forlan was always playing tennis in his youth and says that now: “If you see me play, you will think, ‘This guy has played since he was a kid because the technique is more of a tennis player. Of course, not a professional tennis player. But it looks like he played tennis his whole life’.

“I’m not saying a good player, but if you see me play nowadays you will see a tennis player, not an ex-football player.”

Byford agrees — “You can tell he played a large amount of tennis in his formative years. He put in those hours on the tennis court as a junior, so the technical skills are there” — and also points to the crossover between the two sports.

Roger Federer played to a high level in his native Switzerland until focusing on his tennis at age 12, leading Scottish club Rangers once offered a 14-year-old Andy Murray a trial, and Nadal comes from a football family — his uncle, Miguel Angel Nadal, is a legendary former Barcelona and Spain defender — and is a very good player himself: he put a double hat-trick past Spain’s then goalkeeper Iker Casillas in a charity match in 2008. One of football’s greatest-ever defenders, Paolo Maldini, qualified for the Milan Challenger event in doubles seven years ago, losing in the first round.

“A lot of tennis players are very good footballers because the skills are very transferable,” says Byford. “Athletically, the movement is pretty similar — forwards and backwards, left and right. You need to have a very good balance between speed and endurance, and be well distributed between their lower and upper body.”

Forlan fits this mould. Even though he is on the shorter side for a tennis player at 5ft 11in (180cm), his balanced physique is as Byford describes, while as a footballer he had an excellent blend of speed and endurance.

Forlan playing in the Champions League for Atletico in 2009 (Jasper Juinen/Getty Images)

He is an aggressive baseliner, having played the majority of his tennis on clay courts, and has worked hard on making his serve more consistent, and cutting out the double faults from his younger days. Tennis is popular in Uruguay, with Pablo Cuevas making the world’s top 20 in the 2010s, but football is certainly the dominant sport in the small South American country which has a population of around 3.4million.

As a footballer, Forlan had to contend himself with following tennis from a distance. He remembers watching the thrilling 2001 Wimbledon final — when Goran Ivanisevic, another leftie, beat Pat Rafter in five sets — while on a pre-season tour with Independiente. As a teenager, Forlan always watched Uruguay’s Davis Cup ties, and then, as his professional career took off, he became gripped by the rivalry involving Federer, Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Murray.

Once he moved to Spain, Forlan was lucky enough to get to hit with a couple of former world No 1s — Russian Marat Safin and Carlos Alcaraz’s fellow Spaniard and current coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero. He met them through Perez, who worked with players including Ecuador’s Nicolas Lapentti, a one-time world No. 6, and Spain’s two-time French Open finalist Alex Corretja.

“I could keep up with the pace of their shots because they were not hitting their hardest,” Forlan says of hitting with Safin and Ferrero. “I could have good rallies with them. And the tennis I was playing then, 15 years ago, was nothing compared to what I’m playing today.”

Forlan went to the French Open in Paris and the Madrid Open whenever he got the chance, and while at Villarreal also struck up a friendship with Spanish golfer and eventual Augusta Masters champion Sergio Garcia, who had dated former tennis world No. 1 Martina Hingis.

Forlan at the 2011 Madrid Masters, won by Djokovic against Nadal (Europa Press/Europa Press via Getty Images)

“We are very close friends,” Forlan says of Garcia. “We played a very tight game in Spain. I beat him and he said, ‘Now, we have to play another game’. When I played my retirement game in Uruguay in 2019, he came out and we played again.”

Forlan adds with a smile: “I beat him again.”

When he had been retired from football for a few years, Carlos Obregon, a fellow Uruguayan who plays in the competition’s 65+ category and a friend of Forlan’s, convinced him to give the ITF Masters a go — but warned he would have to train properly.

Forlan didn’t need a second invitation. He stepped up his training efforts and made his debut in the over-35s in Montevideo last July, reaching the second round. At the start of this year, he took things up another level, enlisting the help of his friend Perez, Uruguay’s Davis Cup captain for almost 20 years, who coaches young players at Forlan’s club.

“I said to him, ‘I’m stuck with my tennis. I need to improve. I want to improve and do more’,” Forlan says. “So we started between two and three days a week, one hour and a half. Then we bring some players at Challenger level, some in the U.S. at a university. Then I sometimes train with the 15, 16, 17-year-olds at our club, like I used to do when I was a kid.

“Now it’s four days a week, because it’s the only way to improve. The other players that I play against, they’ve been playing all their whole life. So I need to catch up.”

On the day he spoke to The Athletic, Forlan had a two-hour afternoon hitting session with Perez and some of the youngsters he coaches.

Forlan loves the atmosphere at the tournaments and the thrill of competing again — even if there are only a few hundred people in the crowd. He says supporters have been pleasantly surprised by his standard of play, and while most of his opponents have enjoyed the greater buzz generated by his profile, some have found it a little discomfiting.

Does Forlan, who spent his career scoring goals in huge stadiums in front of tens of thousands of fans, get pumped up for these matches in front of a few hundred?

“Yeah, yeah,” he says instantly. “I like competition. I like a challenge. The adrenaline and everything is like when I was playing football. Everyone says that when you retire from football, you are not going to have anything compared to it. I’m doing it because I like tennis. I would do it just playing socially, but it has taken me to a place that I get that adrenaline.”

Forlan is also relishing the improvements he’s making by playing regularly and studying the sport.

Forlan having a hit in Madrid in 2010 (Europa Press/Europa Press via Getty Images)

He watches Nadal, and name-checks Canada’s former world No 10 Denis Shapovalov, saying that he used to play with a single-handed backhand. An injury a few years ago weakened his left shoulder, and Forlan was forced to switch to two hands; he’s using the left-handed slice serve out wide onto what’s known as the ad side (into a right-hander’s backhand) more, and he is getting to the net to finish off points. He says he is “starting to know and understand the game” and while his forehand is stronger, he has a good slice as a result of hitting a one-handed backhand for so long.

While Forlan often has big athletic advantages in matches, he is facing opponents with much more tennis experience, and one of the biggest challenges in adapting has been mental. Having spent his entire footballing career focused on trying to get shots off as soon as there was an opportunity, he had to rewire his sporting brain for the patience tennis demands.

“I said to my coach, ‘You need to understand that my whole life, if I get any small gap to shoot, I would do it quickly’,” he says. “In tennis, it’s about waiting for the right ball. When I started, I was hitting every ball. I was losing many matches — it didn’t matter if I was in the right position, I was just looking for the gap on the other side. My opponents would hit balls really hard near the baseline, and I would have about a five per cent chance of hitting a winner, but it didn’t matter, I would still go for it.”

He says he has now changed how he thinks, learning to pick the best chance to strike, rather than focusing on volume. “I’m hitting a rally, and sometimes I go for it and I think, ‘Come on, you know that you have to wait one more’.”

Switching sports has also meant understanding a new balance between personal performance and end-result. “In football, there were so many games that I didn’t play well, but I scored,” Forlan says. “A goal was worth much more than a point. In tennis, it’s not like you lose a point and then say, ‘OK, the match is over’. There’s always time.

“It’s like Carlos Alcaraz when he won Roland Garros (the French Open in June) — he didn’t always play the tennis that he wanted to play, but he won. And that’s something you have to understand.”

Alcaraz won the 2024 French Open without being at his top level for much of the tournament (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Forlan has spoken to several tennis players about these mental challenges. “That’s why now I’m getting better. When I got onto the football pitch, I knew how to deal with frustration. Now I’m trying to deal with that in tennis. I feel like now, I can win or lose but I’m not going to be ashamed,” he says.

His ITF ranking for the 45+ category, out of around 2,000 players competing in multiple tournaments, is No. 108 for singles and No. 88 for doubles, which should go up as he plays in more tournaments. “I want to play among the good ones, and be competitive,” Forlan says, “knowing that if they are going to beat me, they will have to work it out.”

In a 1000 tournament in Lima earlier this year, he lost to Antonio Amaro da Silva Filho, who was ranked No. 28 and has been as high as No. 2 in a different age group, in straight sets, but feels he learned a lot against an opponent who six years ago was playing in the qualifiers of a professional Futures event in Brazil.

Forlan has made rapid improvements, and now just wants to keep working hard and improving his game.

He dreams of being at Wimbledon next summer, having never gone to the London-based Grand Slam.

That would be as a spectator, of course, not as a player. That might be a step too far even for this sporting polymath.

(Top photo: Kevin Santamaria / Tenis al Maximo)