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The fast-growing racket sport of padel could overtake tennis in Britain just as it already has in Spain, according to our greatest doubles player Jamie Murray.
The total number of padel courts in this country is now close to 1,700, according to some sources, which continues an exponential pattern of growth from less than 100 at the start of the Covid pandemic.
And Murray told Telegraph Sport that the accessibility of padel – a sport in which absolute beginners can enjoy a match within minutes of picking up a bat – makes it a more attractive proposition than tennis for many people.
“It’s a fun sport, a very sociable sport,” said Murray. “It’s a lot easier to get started in the game than tennis. Every tennis club should have padel as an offering to current members and for getting new members into the clubs, because tennis clubs are largely pretty dead in our country.
“That comes with complications because people say it’s noisy and our tennis clubs are built around mainly residential areas, but you run the risk of padel taking over tennis. It’s probably a better business model, and more likely to get bigger numbers playing the sport over time.”
In researching this article, Telegraph Sport built a graphic of court locations from iPadel, a directory website where clubs can register to be listed. It conveys the remarkable growth we have seen over the first half of this decade, as well as the room for further expansion.
There are still significant areas, especially in Wales and eastern counties such as Lincolnshire and Northumberland, without access to courts. Provision could also be improved, for different reasons, in central London, where property prices and concerns over noise pollution mean that you have to travel to fringe areas like Earl’s Court, Wandsworth or Canary Wharf to get a game.
There are still those who insist that padel is a fad, and that in cities like Bristol, which already has seven different providers, the sport will run into the same kind of recession that affected Sweden during the pandemic. According to Bloomberg, almost 90 Swedish padel-related companies filed for bankruptcy in 2023.
But Britain’s population is roughly seven times the size of Sweden’s, and there is no sign of any slowdown in construction. In the words of Alan Douglas, whose Playtomic company handles the bookings for the majority of British courts: “Nothing in the data from our more mature markets, where padel has grown over the past 15-plus years, would suggest that a downturn is coming.”
So is Murray right? Can we expect padel to eclipse tennis in the long run? Most operators think that, while such an outcome is possible, it would take more than a decade to play out. Douglas believes that there are at least five more years of construction to come, with the potential to follow the pattern established in padel’s heartland of Spain.
“According to recent data, padel has overtaken tennis in Spain,” said Douglas. “It took many years, but the International Federation of Padel (FIP) reports more than 17,000 courts now, with more going up all the time.”
Perhaps surprisingly, tennis courts are more plentiful in this country than they are in Spain. A 2022 report from Tennis Europe placed the UK ahead by 16,800 to 13,500, although it calculated the number of players as fairly similar across the two nations: a little over three million in both cases.
The question is whether some of those players might migrate across to the younger form of the game. Padel involves covering less court, but creates longer rallies, thus – in Murray’s words – offering “more bang for your buck”.
According to Nick Baker, who runs three clubs in Buckinghamshire and one in Cornwall under his UK Padel brand: “My take is that we are unlikely to see the number of padel courts in the UK overtake the number of tennis courts in the medium term. The long term is harder to predict as tennis participation will significantly decline as padel becomes more established.”
The Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) finds itself in an interesting position here, as it is also the governing body of padel. There is a possibility that the LTA’s new acquisition, which it took over shortly before the pandemic had boosted tennis’s participation figures out of a long decline, could turn out to be a cuckoo in the nest.
This is not certain to be the outcome, however. In the most optimistic models, padel and tennis complement each other in a virtuous cycle. Playtomic’s Douglas cites the example of East Dorset Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, which put up padel courts last year. According to Douglas, the club chairman told him that, rather than padel cannibalising its tennis members, “We’re seeing a whole new generation of people we’ve never met before.”
New padel events are also coming onstream all the time. Last weekend saw the introduction of the Anglo American Cup, an attempt to create a Ryder Cup-style competition, in north London while the LTA have just announced that the first National Padel Championships will be staged in Bristol in December.
Meanwhile, secondary schools like Trent College in Nottingham are starting to offer padel as one of the sporting options for their pupils.
The one area where the activity has thus far failed to catch on is as a sporting spectacle: there appears to be little appetite in this country for watching professional padel or following the tour. Mind you, badminton sustains an active playing base in British leisure centres without any media coverage, so this need not be a deal-breaker.
The other problem, as already mentioned, is the noise. Barely a week goes by without another case being referred to a local council over residents’ complaints. Not only do padel players tend to be more exuberant than tennis players, owing partly to their close proximity on a small court, but retrieval shots struck off the back wall create a penetrating sound that some have compared to gunfire.
One resident told this newspaper that living next to the Winchester Racquets and Fitness Club was like “being on the Somme”. And while indoor facilities are quieter, they are also much more expensive to build.
Padel’s economics are interesting. It is usually more expensive to play than tennis, owing to the construction costs, which are rarely less than £50,000 per court. To convert a warehouse into an indoor padel centre – the model followed by the Padel Hub brand – requires operators to invest a large initial sum as well as annual overheads of £500,000 or more.
As a result, Padel Hub memberships start at less than £100 per month, although a more typical figure for padel court hire would range from a minimum of £30 per hour to £80 in high-end city locations.
Tennis is comparatively cheap to play, by comparison. You can usually find a public court for £10 an hour or less, while annual memberships for most clubs range between £20 and £40 per month with no extra court fees. Even so, the magnetism of padel is such that – according to LTA figures – more than 400,000 people played it at least once last year, an increase of about 300 per cent on 2023.
The charm of padel is easier to experience than it is to describe, but there are probably three main points that make it extremely addictive. Two of these we have already covered: first, it is easy for beginners to pick up, and secondly it encourages plenty of mid-match banter and conversation because the four players find themselves standing close together in a glass-walled box. The third point relates to the mechanics of the game. There is always another level of technique or tactics to master. Some sources list eight different ways to hit an overhead.
Returning to Murray, he happens to have been the first British tennis player of note to participate in a padel tournament. “I played in a little tournament at the Chelsea Harbour Club about 10 years ago,” Murray told Telegraph Sport. “They had a few pros playing, not necessarily high level. I played in the B category with my friend and coach Alan MacDonald.
“There were two teams that were good, maybe Spanish. I don’t think they had necessarily travelled from abroad to play the tournament. And Category B was a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly.
“At that time there was nowhere else to play in London. They had three courts at the Harbour Club. You could see the difficulty in putting events on and getting people together and growing the game. I’ve been based in London since 2007, when there was a huge international community of people who were desperate to play padel but there were no courts to do that.
“Like my brother Andy, I invested in Game4Padel a few years ago, which I believe is still the leading company in the country in terms of number of courts. It’s an interesting one in terms of seeing how it will play out nationwide, what the numbers end up being, and who will switch over from tennis to padel. I’m sure there’s a lot of people that have already done that.”
