Why is everyone suddenly playing padel?

Here is a question every club operator can answer without checking the booking system. Which courts in your venue are hardest to book on a Sunday? For most clubs it is no longer tennis. Padel has gone from a curiosity with a Spanish accent to the sheet that pays the bills, and the trade has noticed. What almost nobody can tell you is how big the thing actually is. So here is the decade in real numbers, with an honest note about which ones deserve your trust.

The governing body says Britain went from roughly 15,000 padel players in 2019 to a million in 2026, playing on 1,825 courts across 551 venues. That is the official story, and it deserves a raised eyebrow before it earns its citation, so let us give it one. "A million players" in participation research usually means a million people who played padel at least once in the past year. Sixty-six-fold growth in seven years is what a very low base meeting a generous definition produces. None of this makes the number useless. Curiosity still pays: everyone who tries the sport once is a person a venue can reach again in January. But treat the headline figure as a measure of curiosity, not commitment.

Now the countable ones. 1,825 courts on 551 sites is a number you can drive past and count. It is the physical footprint of the boom and no marketing department rounds it up. It also averages three courts a venue, which is the real constraint: a sport played in fours, on a stock that small, turns full books into waitlists long before demand says stop. This is the figure to build a business case on.

Search tells the same story from the demand side. In 2021, people in Britain searched "padel" about 4,400 times a month. For the year to April 2026 the figure was 90,500 times a month, up 121 per cent year on year. Nobody types a query to flatter a press release, and search engines are hard to lobby. Note when it peaks: January, every year, with the resolve-to-move crowd. If your acquisition campaign starts in May, you are four months late for the cheapest demand in the sport.

Then the number that should worry an operator more than any of the above. Britain has 427 coaches who have completed the LTA’s Padel Instructor core training. Set that against a million people who tried the sport and you get roughly one accredited coach for every 2,300 players, charging £45 to £120 an hour where they exist at all. Coaching capacity, not court capacity, is the first thing this boom will run out of. For the facilities that solve it early, it is also the first thing it will pay for.

The global numbers deserve their own paragraph, because they disagree with each other. The FIP’s official count says 35 million players across 150 nations, on 24,600 clubs and 77,300 courts, with 14,355 courts built in 2025 alone. The commercial estimates, from Playtomic with Strategy&, reckon 19.4 million players and 91,000 courts by 2028. Keep those two separate in anything you publish. They disagree about the present by nearly half, which tells you to trust neither to a decimal place and both about the direction of travel.

What to do with this on Monday? Build the case on the countable numbers, courts, venues and searches, and quote the participation estimates with their caveat attached. If it is a board paper, lead with courts and searches and footnote the survey. Put your January plan in writing now, because the search peak is the cheapest acquisition moment your venue will get all year. And if you can host an LTA Padel Instructor course, book one. The coach shortage is the market gap with the shortest queue.

The number to remember: one court for roughly every 550 people who played last year. Whatever the counting quibbles, that ratio explains every waitlist you are currently failing to explain to a tennis member.

The Little Book of Padel by Ross Thornley (£7.99, Amazon) is a one-hour guide for the new players filling those courts.