A “courtside” look at the pádel market

Sales have been flat so far this year at Padel Courts Deluxe, CEO Fernando Cánovas tells CMDsport. Now that mid-year is behind us, moreover, he believes it safe to say that 2023 will be a year of transition in the pádel-court business, with growth picking up once more in the second quarter of 2024.

His company merged late last year with GreenSet to form Rakit Group, the private-equity firm bd-capital taking a share in the joint entity. The two companies are consolidating their structures and strategy right now so as to “attack the market jointly.” Their objective for 2023 is to generate €30 million in revenues, or 30 percent more than their combined figures for last year. Padel Courts Deluxe brought in the larger share of this, with €15 million.

Pádel, Cánovas says, tends to enter and expand the same way in every country. First come the small clubs, then the “need to play” develops, and an explosion in the demand for courts follows. At least for the moment, the most fertile ground for courts, he predicts, will be found in European countries where pádel remains emergent.

The new Sweden?

Chief among these is Germany, which Cánovas says appears to be following Sweden’s path and has close to eight times the population (84.3 million vs. 10.5 million). Sweden is by total players the world’s third-largest market, behind Spain, but by total courts, it is second.

According to Elitepadel.com, some 540,000 unique pádel players booked a court in Sweden in 2021, and the number of such players had grown by an average of 133 percent annually over the previous eight years. The biggest percentage increase occurred from 2019 to 2020. According to the same source, Sweden had amassed about 3,500 courts and 600 pádel halls (clubs) by 2021.

Padel69.com – “an independent research and growth company in padel” with operations in the sport’s birthplace, Mexico – seems to share Cánovas’ opinion, writing earlier this year that “the German market looks like the Swedish market was in 2010.” The same source observes that tennis is “huge” in Germany, with five million “active players” and membership in the national tennis federation of about 1.4 million. By contrast, there are about 153 pádel courts at 78 locations, most of them operated “as a hobby by tennis clubs or padel enthusiasts.” But obstacles to growth exist.

Germany’s curious pádel lag behind other European countries, Padel69 believes, is due to the German mentality. Holger Van Dahle, president of the German Padel Federation, sees a preliminary problem – what Americans call name recognition – but otherwise agrees.

In an interview with Padelalto.com last year, Van Dahle said, “When you go to the public authorities in Germany to ask for permission to build a padel court, they say ‘Padel? And where will you get the water from?’”

“From then on,” he continued, “the German mentality comes into play; as there is no basis laid down on how to build a padel court, they will tell you: ‘You will hit the ball against the wall, that will make noise, you must hire a noise pollution expert’; ‘You will play at night? Ok, you must hire a light pollution expert’; ‘you will build walls at a 90-degree angle? That’s a building; you must hire an expert in static and electrical discharges.’ Anywhere else in the world, a padel court would be similar to building a tennis court, but in Germany, it is considered a building. That means you have to pay at least €25,000 before you start building the padel court, and this has to be repeated for every court you build. This makes it very expensive and is one of the reasons that, together with the country’s own bureaucracy, make it difficult to get investors to build padel courts in Germany.”

The rest of the scene

Cánovas sees Italy (population: 58.9 million) as a mature market with steady growth and France as remaining in the initial stages of pádel penetration. But France (65.3 million) is further along than Germany and is the country where Padel Courts Deluxe has enjoyed the most growth over the past month or so. The Netherlands (17.8 million) Cánovas describes as a “difficult country to enter, small, but with solid and harmonious growth.”

And so Europe will be the immediate focus for Padel Courts Deluxe, but Cánovas and company will also be betting on the U.S. (335 million) as a “winning horse” – predicting considerable growth in, once again, 2024.

In the U.S., Cánovas’ company has been operating in the east, with plans to set up eight courts at a club in Detroit. Motown, as he points out, is near the border with Canada, another country with pádel potential.

Other promoters have been following the great American tradition, as it were, and going west.

Padel Courts Deluxe operates in Central but not South America, for which transport costs are prohibitive. As Cánovas explains, Chile, for instance, is seeing growth in the sport but also has competent court manufacturers that import their materials from China, which lies closer than Europe and, if only for that reason, offers unbeatable prices.

Africa and Australia are the company’s third and fourth areas of operation, after Europe and North America. Padel Courts Deluxe has recently secured contracts in Ghana and Nairobi. The top African country for pádel in general is South Africa, and the sport will be growing on the rest of the continent, Cánovas believes, in 2025.

Battle of the racquet sports

In the U.S., pádel is up against the similar sport of pickleball, but in the rest of the world, pádel’s main antagonist is tennis. According to Padel.fyi, pádel players outnumber tennis players in Spain, Argentina, Sweden and Portugal, although not in Belgium or Italy, where tennis appears to have, respectively, a two-to-one and a four-to-one advantage.

In the U.S., the number of pádel players is an order of magnitude smaller and the pádel-to-tennis ratio is more unbalanced – having stood at about 10,000 to 21.6 million in 2021, according to Serveandsmash.com.

Europe in four figures

Last year, along with Monitor Deloitte, Playtomic – which operates “Europe’s largest tennis and padel booking app” – put out its Global Padel Report. The document makes country comparisons across Europe and includes a good measure of market penetration: the ratio of pádel courts to population.

Sweden, having the lowest such ratio, is arguably the most developed pádel market in the world.

Photo: Tomasz Krawczyk, Unsplash