Mixed Doubles Might Be Racket Sports’ Greatest Commercial Advantage

There are plenty of characteristics that tennis, padel and pickleball share. They are social, relatively easy to understand, can be played across generations and, compared with many team sports, require remarkably little infrastructure to create a game.

Yet there is another shared characteristic that deserves considerably more attention from anyone responsible for growing a racket sports business.

Men and women can play together.

Not simply alongside one another, or on the same programme, but genuinely together in a competitive format where both sexes have a meaningful influence on the result.

Football cannot really do it. Rugby cannot. Basketball rarely does it beyond recreational settings. Cricket has experimented with mixed formats, while golf can create mixed team competitions, but the format remains peripheral to the everyday experience of the sport.

Racket sports are different.

Mixed doubles can be a Grand Slam championship, a television product, a social competition, a club league, a corporate event, a family activity or simply four friends booking a court on a Friday evening.

Commercially, that is an extraordinarily useful characteristic.

And recent developments at the top of professional sport suggest mixed competition could become considerably more valuable than the industry has traditionally assumed.

The US Open has already provided the evidence

Perhaps the most compelling experiment came at the 2025 US Open, when the USTA took mixed doubles out of its traditional position on the fringes of the Grand Slam schedule and turned it into a standalone, star-driven event during Fan Week.

There was plenty of controversy around the decision, particularly among doubles specialists, but commercially the results were difficult to ignore.

The two-day competition attracted 78,000 people to the grounds, sold out Arthur Ashe Stadium on both days and saw more than 20,000 additional spectators access Louis Armstrong Stadium. The competition was distributed through 17 networks across more than 170 countries and territories.

The semifinals and final averaged 343,000 viewers on ESPN2, 31% higher than the previous year's mixed doubles championship, while US Open digital properties recorded 2.2 million visits during the competition, up 115% year-on-year. YouTube generated 12.8 million organic views on the Wednesday alone, at the time a single-day record for the US Open channel.

The USTA had effectively discovered something hiding in plain sight.

Put leading male and female athletes together, give the competition a meaningful stage and promote it properly, and fans are interested.

When announcing the format, USTA CEO Lew Sherr described the opportunity as putting male and female athletes on an “equal stage”, while ESPN's Tim Bunnell said the combination of intensity and camaraderie made the competition an attractive primetime proposition.

The commercial lesson is bigger than one tournament.

For decades, mixed doubles was often treated as the fifth event at a Grand Slam rather than as a potentially differentiated entertainment product. The 2025 experiment demonstrated that the problem may not have been mixed doubles itself; it may simply have been where, when and how it was being presented.

That lesson has continued into this year's US Open, where mixed doubles again attracted major names and significant attention. Serena Williams' return to Flushing Meadows alongside Carlos Alcaraz this week brought more than 10,000 spectators into Arthur Ashe Stadium and generated another wave of mainstream coverage around a competition that, not very long ago, struggled for visibility alongside singles.

Mixed doubles creates match-ups singles simply cannot

There is also something commercially useful about the storytelling.

Carlos Alcaraz partnering Serena Williams immediately creates intrigue that no conventional singles draw can manufacture.

So would Coco Gauff partnering Jannik Sinner, Aryna Sabalenka playing alongside Novak Djokovic or, in pickleball, leading male and female players combining against another star pairing.

It effectively doubles the potential universe of combinations.

It also allows tournaments to combine two fan bases within one match.

A spectator who primarily follows a particular female player suddenly has a reason to become more familiar with her male partner, and vice versa. Their social audiences collide, broadcasters have new stories to tell and sponsors gain exposure across both sides of the sport.

For sports continually searching for ways to reach younger and broader audiences, that crossover has considerable value.

Pickleball has built mixed competition into the product

If tennis is rediscovering mixed doubles, pickleball has arguably understood its potential from much earlier in its commercial development.

Mixed doubles is not a novelty within professional pickleball. It is part of the sport's identity.

Major League Pickleball takes the concept even further. Men and women don't merely appear at the same tournament: they represent the same franchises, and mixed doubles matches contribute directly towards team results.

That creates something unusual in professional sport – male and female athletes contributing equally to the competitive fortunes of the same commercial sporting property.

MLP's wider growth suggests there is a substantial audience for that proposition.

During 2025, the league reported that sponsor revenue more than doubled, ticket revenue increased 94%, attendance grew 52%, minutes viewed on Pickleballtv increased 141%, YouTube views rose 230% and social impressions increased 407%. Its CBS Finals broadcast became the league's most-watched match to that point.

It would be wrong to attribute those numbers solely to mixed doubles, but it is equally important to recognise that mixed competition is built into the product generating them.

That distinction matters.

Pickleball has not treated men and women playing together as an exhibition added around the edges of the professional game. It has made it part of the architecture.

Padel could have an enormous opportunity

Padel is perhaps the most interesting case.

According to the International Padel Federation's 2025 World Padel Report, the sport has now passed 35 million players globally, with more than 24,600 clubs and 77,300 courts across 150 countries.

Even more interestingly, FIP data presented by Premier Padel suggests approximately 47% of padel players are female.

That is an extraordinarily valuable demographic characteristic for an emerging sport.

Premier Padel is simultaneously building an increasingly serious global media business. Live tournament viewing across its first ten events of 2025 reached 48.6 million views, while the tour expanded distribution into 244 territories.

Yet professional padel remains overwhelmingly separated into men's and women's competitions.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and those competitions need their own identities and stars, but from a commercial perspective there surely remains room for experimentation.

A high-profile mixed pairs competition involving the world's leading male and female players could provide a very different product for broadcasters, promoters and sponsors without undermining the existing tours.

Padel is almost uniquely suited to it because doubles is already the default format.

No significant behavioural change is required. The sport simply changes one member of each pair.

But the biggest commercial opportunity may actually be inside clubs

It is easy to concentrate on television audiences because those numbers are visible.

For most of the racket sports industry, however, the more important economics happen considerably further down the pyramid.

A tennis, padel or pickleball facility does not primarily make money because somebody plays the sport. It makes money because somebody plays regularly.

That distinction should make mixed doubles extremely interesting to operators.

The USTA reported that 27.3 million Americans played tennis in 2025, an increase of 54% since 2019, but perhaps the more important figure for operators is that 14.5 million were classified as core players who played ten or more times during the year. Those players generated part of more than 616 million tennis play occasions.

Court utilisation is ultimately built on those occasions.

If mixed doubles gives somebody another reason to visit on a Wednesday evening, enter a Friday social, stay after coaching or bring their partner into the club, it has economic value.

The USTA's own guidance for social tennis programmes makes precisely this business connection. It recommends co-ed, inclusive formats and identifies the benefits to operators as attracting new players, improving retention, generating participation fees and filling otherwise unused court time.

That is effectively the facility business model in four lines.

Acquire players. Retain players. Fill courts. Generate revenue.

Mixed doubles can contribute to all four.

It increases the addressable market for every session

Consider two clubs.

Club A runs men's doubles on Tuesday and women's doubles on Wednesday.

Club B runs those sessions but also offers mixed doubles on Friday.

Club B has created another product without needing another court, another sport or another major piece of infrastructure.

More importantly, it has created a product that potentially connects previously separate sections of its membership.

That has consequences beyond court fees.

• Players stay for drinks.

• Partners join the club.

• Friendship groups form.

• Mixed leagues create fixtures.

• Social tournaments create entry fees.

• Coaching groups emerge around them.

• Members introduce other couples and friends.

• Food and beverage spend increases.

• Equipment gets purchased.

The commercial impact of mixed doubles should therefore not be measured simply through the revenue generated by a mixed doubles competition itself. Its greater value may be its ability to increase the density of relationships within a club.

And relationships are one of the strongest retention mechanisms available to a sports facility.

Pickleball's demographics demonstrate the opportunity

Pickleball offers particularly useful evidence.

SFIA says 24.3 million Americans played pickleball in 2025, compared with just 4.2 million in 2020. More importantly, the participant base is becoming increasingly balanced: women now represent 42.9% of US pickleball players, compared with 38.6% five years earlier.

SFIA research also identifies social interaction alongside exercise, fun and competition as a major motivation for participation.

That combination matters.

A sport with large numbers of men and women, played predominantly in doubles and where social interaction is a significant motivation has the ingredients for a particularly powerful participation model.

Mixed doubles does not simply accommodate that model. It reinforces it.

Mixed play also reduces one of sport's biggest participation barriers

Most sports ask new participants to find their group.

The right football team. The right cycling group. The right cricket club. The right gender, age, ability level or competitive category.

Racket sports can be much more fluid.

• A husband and wife can play with another couple.

• A father can play with his daughter.

• Two male and two female friends can organise a game.

• A club can create a social session containing players who would rarely meet through traditional league structures.

• A corporate padel evening can put colleagues together irrespective of gender.

That dramatically increases the number of possible playing relationships available to every participant.

For operators, that is enormously important because one of the hardest parts of customer acquisition isn't persuading someone to try a sport once. It is helping them find people they want to play with repeatedly.

Mixed formats increase that network.

There is also a sponsorship argument

Mixed doubles can provide something increasingly valuable to brands: one sporting property capable of reaching male and female audiences simultaneously.

A sponsor doesn't necessarily need separate men's and women's activations.

• The athletes appear together.

• The branding appears together.

• The social content appears together.

• The story is shared.

For brands in categories such as travel, financial services, automotive, technology, fashion, wellness and consumer goods, that can create a broader proposition than a competition targeted predominantly towards one demographic.

There is another benefit.

Mixed doubles naturally generates personality.

Players communicate more. Partnerships become part of the story. Different playing styles have to complement one another. Celebrations are shared. Strategy becomes visible.

That makes the format particularly suitable for short-form content and social media, where personality and relationships can be every bit as important as the result.

The extraordinary digital numbers surrounding the US Open's mixed doubles experiment – including that 12.8 million-view YouTube day – offer an indication of what happens when those ingredients are combined with recognisable stars.

Racket sports should recognise the advantage they have

There is a tendency within sport to look constantly for the next format, technology or marketing innovation capable of unlocking growth.

Sometimes the opportunity already exists.

Tennis has been playing mixed doubles for well over a century. Pickleball has made it central to both recreational and professional competition. Padel has almost perfect structural conditions to exploit it further.

The important point for the industry is that mixed doubles should perhaps no longer be considered simply another competition category.

It is a commercial asset.

At professional level it can combine star power, audiences, sponsorship inventory and storytelling in ways that conventional men's and women's competitions cannot.

At recreational level it expands the number of people somebody can play with, strengthens social connections, creates additional programming opportunities and potentially improves both court utilisation and retention.

And across the entire participation pyramid it communicates something very powerful about racket sports.

Men and women don't simply have equal opportunities to participate.

They can participate together.

In an increasingly competitive sports and leisure market, where every federation, club, facility operator and equipment brand is fighting for people's time, attention and disposable income, that may prove to be one of the industry's most valuable advantages.