One million players. 1,825 courts.

In 2019, fifteen thousand people in Britain played padel. The LTA’s latest count puts it at one million. Participation more than doubled last year alone.

The court base has not kept up. Britain has 1,825 padel courts across roughly 550 venues, up from 69 courts in 2020. Savills puts the compound growth rate in supply at 43 per cent a year between 2016 and 2024. It still trails demand by a distance. The LTA reports that 57 per cent of British adults are now aware of the sport, and more than ten million say they want to try it. FMG Consulting relays industry forecasts of seven to eight thousand courts nationally within a decade, which is to say the build-out has barely started.

Then there is London, which is its own market.

Playskan counts around 324 courts across 86 clubs within twenty miles of central London, and about 30 per cent of all British courts sit in London and the South East. Peak-hour pricing tells you what the spreadsheet cannot. Padium in Canary Wharf charges £80 to £100 an hour. Rocks Lane Chiswick runs roughly £52 to £70 an hour depending on time. The Greater London average sits in the mid-forties, at prices most European markets would consider aspirational.

Two more numbers complete the picture. Tennis has not been cannibalised; it recorded 5.8 million adult players in summer 2025, an all-time record, and 86 per cent of padel players have prior experience in another racquet sport. The two sports share a member. And around 30 per cent of padel players are women, a share the LTA has made it a stated priority to raise, which changes what a venue needs to be: less warehouse, more club.

The honest caveat is that supply gaps close. Sweden’s did, violently, and the operators who suffered were the ones whose only asset was court time. The UK will add thousands of courts this decade and most of them will compete on price from the day they open.

Which is why we think the window that matters in London is not the window to build courts. It is the window to secure the sites and build the institutions: places with hospitality, programming and a membership that renews. Land in the right postcodes is finite, planning is slow, and the premium end of this market is still, for a short while longer, unclaimed.

The demand is no longer a forecast. It has already happened. The question is who builds something worth belonging to.

Sources: LTA Padel, March and May 2026; LTA annual report, May 2026; Savills, The UK padel market, March 2026; FMG Consulting; Playskan London data, September 2026; published venue rates, checked September 2026.