The 92% who come back: the retention number that changes your unit economics

Many operators I meet can quote their acquisition figures pretty well. Ask what happens after the first booking and that is a different story. That gap is one area where venue margin leaks.

THE NUMBER EVERYONE QUOTES

The Playtomic Global Padel Report 2025 branded padel "the sticky sport" and put a number on it: a 92 per cent return rate after a single session. Nine in ten first-timers come back, unchased. Before that figure earns its citation it deserves the usual raised eyebrow, so here it is. A report built from a booking platform sees the booking, not the person, and it will see the sport at its most engaged: urban venues, players who already book everything on a phone. It is not a peer-reviewed study and does not claim to be. But everything else we can independently count points the same way: web searches climbing, courts multiplying, waitlists at the venues that got there early. When several dull, countable signals and one generous industry number all lean the same direction, the honest read is that padel keeps its first-timers at a rate most leisure businesses would pay hard cash to match.

A report built from a booking platform sees the booking. It doesn't see the person who never got one.

THE NUMBER NOBODY IS COUNTING

Here is what the 92 per cent cannot tell you: how many games inside your own club community died this week, quietly, with nobody marking it anywhere.

I visited a padel club in Spain in mid-September with an active (medium level) WhatsApp group of more than 600 members, the kind almost every serious club has and almost no club analyses (They had 3 separate whatsapp groups, and i was asked later how i got in there, as many club members have still not been able to get in, requiring a level test, before access)! It is often where real matchmaking happens, alongside Playtomic and Matchi rather than inside them: a scroll of "anyone free for a game Thursday?" that nobody at the front desk ever reads twice. We ran eight days of that chat, 14 to 22 September, through an early build of PADEXA's free Missed Games tool, which reads an exported group chat and hands back the pattern.

Two hundred and sixteen messages. Seventy-four people posting in a game thread. Forty-nine games asked for. Thirty-one went ahead, on the balance of what the chat shows, eighteen of those without an organiser ever confirming, but enough replies to make it the likeliest reading. Twelve died outright. A further six were still open when the export was taken, so nobody yet knows their fate, and they are excluded rather than guessed at. That gives a 72 per cent fill rate across the games we can call decided, inside a group most operators would simply describe as "busy".

The why matters more than the how many. Seven of the twelve dead games were short of players and nobody found a fourth in time. Three got no reply at all, which in a 600-member group is a visibility problem, not a demand one; somebody's ask simply drowned in the scroll. And six of the twelve, exactly half, sat inside the 5pm to 9pm band, the slots any operator would tell you they can least afford to lose. Priced at that club's own court rates, the twelve dead court-hours were worth £480 over the eight days. Read that as the size of the blind spot, not money anyone actually lost. Some of those games might have happened elsewhere; some players simply gave up for the week. But a blind spot that size across 8 days, multiplied across every WhatsApp-organised club in the country, is not a rounding error.

Twelve games died in eight days, and not one of them appeared on a single dashboard at the club.

WHY THIS IS A RETENTION STORY

A player whose game died quietly this week did not cancel their membership. They did not complain at the desk. They simply did not play, and if it happens twice more, the venue that swears it keeps 92 per cent of its first-timers will watch one of them fade out with no cancellation to explain why. Aggregate retention and week-to-week friction are two different measurements, and most clubs are only tracking the one that flatters them.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Start by finding out whether your club's real matchmaking happens somewhere you cannot see. Ask any long-standing member which WhatsApp group actually fills the courts. If one exists, export a fortnight of it and have someone count how many asks got no reply, how many died short of a fourth, and which time bands lost the most games; you do not need to read a single name to do this properly. Then look at what your own booking platform is missing: if a meaningful share of your peak-time court-hours is being arranged in a chat your software never sees, your official occupancy figures are quietly wrong. And build one small habit for group admins: note it when someone posts that they are free to play, because in our eight-day sample two people offered and twelve games died around them. That is not a shortage of players. That is a shortage of matching.

THE NUMBER TO REMEMBER

72. That is the verified fill rate inside one club's WhatsApp group over eight ordinary days. It is also roughly the share of real occupancy your booking platform was never built to see.

PADEXA's WhatsApp Missed Games tool, launching free at the Racket Sports Business Expo on 1 October, decodes exactly this kind of chat export, anonymised, in minutes. See it at padexa.ai/clubs.