Padel in Europe: What’s Next For Tennis On A Padel Obsessed Continent?

THE VIEW FROM EUROPE by Philippe Azar

Padel’s growth is no longer a niche story confined to southern Europe and a few wealthy city clusters. According to the International Padel Federation (FIP), Europe now sits at roughly 18 million padel players and about 45,000 padel courts. That is a mass-participation footprint, not a fad.  And on the business side, Monitor Deloitte’s analysis with Playtomic has framed padel as an industry scaling fast—projecting global court counts roughly doubling over the coming years, alongside multi‑billion‑euro market potential. 

The lazy storyline is that padel is “stealing” tennis players but data suggests something more interesting: it’s changing how Europeans consume racket sports—often by creating multi-sport participants and by pulling people into clubs through a more social, lower-friction format.

Spain is the clearest lens because it’s the most mature padel ecosystem in Europe. Spain’s 2022 national sports-habits survey shows padel already ahead of tennis on annual participation indicators: 9.1% (padel) versus 4.6% (tennis).  

But the same survey also exposes the overlap that gets lost - but is a vital component of understanding what is really going on: around half of people who practiced tennis also practiced padel (49.3%), while about a quarter of padel participants also practiced tennis (25.1%).  That doesn’t read like a clean “switch.” It reads like a market where tennis is increasingly a co-practice rather than an exclusive identity.

Zoom out further and the panic narrative weakens again. Tennis Europe reported that tennis participation and club ecosystems have been growing again, with club membership rising to 5.7 million and more tennis clubs in Europe than at any time since 2009.  The ITF’s latest global participation snapshot puts tennis at 106 million players worldwide.  Even in Spain—ground zero for padel momentum—reported tennis licensing has surged since 2019.  Tennis isn’t disappearing. But it is being forced into a more competitive leisure market.

Where padel is already changing the sport is not the Grand Slam calendar but at the club spreadsheet.

Padel’s demand profile is brutally attractive to operators: it’s social by design (doubles as default), it’s easier for beginners to rally, and it creates repeatable “format” play—leagues, ladders, social nights—that can fill weekday evenings. In the UK, that growth curve is now visible in mainstream participation numbers. The LTA reported 860,000 adults and juniors playing padel at least once in 2025, with around 10 million people interested in trying, and roughly 1,600 courts in place.  That’s a recipe for scarcity: reliability of bookings becomes the product, not just the sport.

So, are tennis clubs going bust? The evidence doesn’t support a continent-wide collapse. What is happening is adaptation: clubs are adding padel where they can, and reallocating underused space when tennis demand is seasonal or skewed to weekends. UK planning specialists at Savills even frame conversion of under-utilized facilities as a major route to delivering new padel supply—while warning that noise and lighting are key constraints that can slow or block build-outs.  That’s an important nuance: not every club can “just add padel,” even if the business case looks obvious.

Coaches are adapting too—because clubs and players are asking them to. The LTA has created a formal padel instructor qualification and is building a multi-level padel coaching pathway (with a new “LTA Padel Coach” level set to launch in 2026).  France’s federation is professionalizing padel teaching through a dedicated credential (TFP Moniteur de Padel), explicitly aimed at building padel schools inside clubs and meeting rising teaching demand. And internationally, the FIP is pushing standardization through its own training platform, positioning padel coaching as a portable credential. 

The future of tennis in padel-mad Europe therefore isn’t about “winning” against padel. It’s about adaptation and designing coexistence.

Tennis’s best defensive strategy is also its best growth strategy: learn from padel and remove friction. Make tennis easier to start, easier to schedule, and more socially sticky at the club level—without stripping away the competitive ladder that makes tennis unique. Padel can be a gateway, a retention tool, and a revenue stabilizer, but only if clubs actively manage the mix: protect tennis court time, build programming that converts padel newcomers into occasional tennis players, and invest in coaches who can teach both.

There is one warning label, and Europe has already seen it: boom markets can overshoot. Sweden’s padel expansion turned into a cautionary tale, with Bloomberg reporting almost 90 padel-related companies filing for bankruptcy in 2023 (citing Creditsafe).  The lesson for tennis clubs isn’t “don’t build padel.” It’s “don’t build padel blindly.”

Padel isn’t the end of tennis. But it is the end of tennis as a default choice in European clubs. The winners will be the venues and coaches that treat the next decade as a multi-racket market—and make tennis the sport people keep coming back to once the novelty wears off.