Padel added almost 8,000 courts worldwide last year. The total now stands above 58,000, heading for a projected 91,000 by 2028. More than nineteen million people play. By the numbers, this is the fastest-growing sport in the world, and the numbers are not the interesting part.
The interesting part is what happened where the boom arrived first.
Sweden built more than 4,000 courts by 2022. Then more than a hundred facilities closed, around ninety padel companies filed for bankruptcy, and the country’s largest operator shut most of its clubs. Roughly half a billion euros of capital was destroyed. Chile ran a compressed version of the same film: bookings down 27 per cent, eighty clubs gone.
Here is the detail that matters. Swedes did not stop playing. Around 600,000 still do. Demand held. It was supply that collapsed, because supply was undifferentiated. A padel court is a 20 by 10 metre glass box built to a federation standard. Anyone with planning consent and a few hundred thousand pounds can add one, and in a boom, everyone does. When every court is the same, price is the only lever left, and the operator with the newest debt loses.
The Global Padel Report, produced by Playtomic with Strategy& at PwC, now grades markets by maturity rather than court count. Spain and Italy are what the report calls padel heartlands, mature and optimising. Sweden and Finland are post-boom. The United Kingdom sits in the bracket the report calls a hotspot: demand still outstripping supply, ecosystem still forming, strong willingness to pay for a premium experience.
The same report makes a quieter observation that we think is the whole game. Nine in ten top-performing clubs already sell something beyond the court: food, events, wellness, a reason to stay after the match. The report’s own term for what the best clubs become is a third space.
Put plainly: the court is the commodity. The club is the business.
This is not a new lesson. British sport learned it a century ago. The institutions that endure are not the ones with the best facilities. They are the ones you cannot easily get into. Queen’s closed full membership applications in 2019. Hurlingham closed its general waiting list in 2018. Scarcity and community, not concrete and glass, are what create pricing power and the thing operators want most and measure least: a reason to renew.
The implication for capital is straightforward. Underwriting court supply in a hotspot market is a bet that the boom stays orderly. Booms rarely do. Underwriting membership, community and hospitality, with courts as the anchor rather than the product, is a different asset with different economics, and it is the one Europe’s own data keeps pointing at.
That is where we are investing.
Sources: Playtomic and Strategy& (PwC), Global Padel Report 2026; World Padel Report; International Padel Federation, via European Business Magazine.