Revealed: Remarkable numbers that show the padel boom is unlike anything else

Telegraph

12-05-2025

If you are wondering why you keep hearing people talk about padel – Britain's latest sporting novelty – then new participation figures might provide the answer.
Data from the Lawn Tennis Association shows that the number of Britons who played padel at least once annually has more than trebled in a year, climbing from 129,000 at the end of 2023 to above 400,000 just 12 months later.
It is a remarkable rise for a sport born in Mexico almost 60 years ago, but is now finding a new audience outside its traditional heartlands of Spain, Portugal and South America.
Yet the LTA – which has run the sport in this country since 2019 – insists that padel has not damaged tennis participation. Tennis's annual participation in 2024 was measured at 5.6 million, the same figure as the previous year.
'The two sports make good bedfellows,' said Alan Douglas, who works for padel's leading booking system Playtomic. 'I consulted with East Dorset Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club when they put up three padel courts last summer, and afterwards I asked their chairman how their tennis players were taking to padel. 'They're not,' he replied. 'What we're seeing is a whole new generation of people who we've never met before.' And the club was able to take that extra revenue and invest it in coaching pathways for their junior tennis players.'
It is possible that this may change. Anecdotally, everyone at a tennis or padel club knows of at least a couple of people who have migrated from the more traditional sport to its brasher rival, especially in the older age groups where court coverage – a padel court is about 25 per cent smaller – becomes challenging.
But one of the intriguing things about padel is that it attracts people without a sporting background of any kind. With its underarm serves, and the way the ball bounces back to you off the walls, it is arguably the easiest racket sport to pick up from a standing start.
The involvement of numerous celebrities also helps provide visibility. Rapper Stormzy and model Elle Macpherson are among those on Instagram who have posted padel content via their accounts, while other enthusiasts include David Beckham and the Prince of Wales.
Whether through influencers or simple word of mouth, the awareness of padel has also more than doubled in the space of 12 months. In 2024, as many as 43 per cent of people surveyed had heard of the sport, up from 23 per cent a year earlier.
Padel still provokes its fair share of scoffing from people who see it as an upstart or a fad. In most cases, those people have not tried it. Its strengths include not only accessibility but a high level of tactical sophistication, once you have mastered the basics.
As well as learning to predict the bounces off the glass walls, ambitious players need to master a variety of different overheads including the bandeja (a slower, defensive shot), the vibora (a slice-heavy kill) and the rulo (a top-spun variation aimed at the side wall). The quest to improve your skill set – and your ranking, which runs from 1.0 for beginners to 7.0 for a professional – soon becomes addictive.
'The number of times that people are playing per week is nuts,' Douglas said. 'That might calm down, but there is something intrinsically fun and accessible about padel. I love tennis but it's a hard game, one of those learned sports like golf. You can go on a padel court for the first time and it's enjoyable right away.'
As regional director for the whole of the UK, Douglas has seen the number of players using Playtomic's app grow exponentially from 31,000 in January 2024 to 152,000 a year later.
While court fees can be expensive in London, the average court-hire fee per hour outside the capital stands at a more reasonable £7 per person: a figure that is likely to come down further as more facilities are built. This is another area of rapid growth, with the LTA's figures identifying 763 courts in the UK at the end of 2024, up from 350 a year earlier.
Access is still not universal, however. Playtomic's data suggests that 80 per cent of people are using courts within a 40-45-minute drive. There are some parts of the country where you would have to spend three hours in a car to find a padel court.
In Douglas's words: 'I speak to Playtomic's other regional managers from around the world, and our view is that there is still probably five years' worth of expansion to come, in terms of court construction.'
The cautionary tale here is Sweden, which experienced a padel bubble between 2018 and 2021, with 300 courts rapidly expanding into 3,500. According to Bloomberg, almost 90 Swedish padel-related companies filed for bankruptcy in 2023.
But Sweden's population is roughly a seventh the size of the UK's. And with planning permission being much harder to obtain here – especially in light of the noise pollution that padel creates – it seems unlikely that we will reach a position of oversupply.
In some quarters, the LTA has been accused of not committing fully to the padel revolution, with critics suggesting a possible conflict of interest with tennis. This argument was cited by the board of Pickleball England – stewards of another growing racket sport – when it won the right to self-govern in December.
But the LTA recently opened a dedicated social-media channel and a new website: ltapadel.org.uk. It also points out that it has invested more than £6 million in the growth of padel across Britain, including £4.5 million towards the development of 80 courts at 42 venues – approximately 12 per cent of all padel courts nationwide.
Private operators welcomed the LTA's data on Friday. 'These new figures confirm what we have long been trumpeting,' said UK Padel's chief executive Nick Baker, 'which is our belief that Padel is the best sport in the world to engage the widest possible range of people to get exercise, stay healthy and build community.'
He added: 'While the LTA's new digital platforms are a positive step forwards, we should acknowledge the role of the private sector in this journey. Private investment in padel facilities is likely to be well in excess of £100 million in the UK to date.'