Fabrice Pastor, himself a former professional player, remains optimistic about the world’s third-largest pádel league, A1 Padel – known until this past January as the APT Tour. He is optimistic in the face of the recent unification of the world’s top two leagues, World Padel Tour (WPT) and Premier Padel. For one thing, as he told the Spanish paper Marca back in March, “pádel is going to sell twice what tennis is selling.” For another, he is looking abroad.
Pastor is both the founder of A1 and the owner of Montecarlo International Sports, and his objective for now with respect to pádel is, according to The Padel Paper, to expand the sport in the U.S. The vehicle for this is the entry into A1’s ownership, back in March (two months after the change of name), of Yankee Global Enterprises (YGE), owner of the New York Yankees and of stakes in the YES Network, New York City FC and AC Milan. As Pastor related to Marca at the time, the president of the Yankees baseball club, Randy Levine, had made a point of selecting A1 over Premier Padel, despite his acquaintance with Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the chairman of Premier Padel’s owner, Qatari Sports Investments.
Thanks to the deal, A1 is holding its first American tournament on Oct. 9 at the Wollman Rink in New York’s Central Park. Another event will follow in November, this time in Miami, along with another three in 2024.
Only with YGE’s help and influence could the A1 manage the outlay to cover the costs. “The key,” Pastor told Marca in another interview this month, “is the synergies. We are striking deals with very important brands in the country.”
According to A1’s internal studies, he went on to say, in two years, there will be 10,000 to 15,000 courts in the U.S., though there are only some 200 today. Pastor’s strategy for growth is to enter markets where the bleachers will remain half-empty and watch them fill over the years. “I don’t care that the stands are empty now. It seems to me more important that a figure like [Stan] Wawrinka be the promotor of the Switzerland Master.”
A1, by his admission, is not yet profitable, “but it will be. First, you have to lay the foundation. We have 20 promotors for the coming year, and that’s not easy.” Spain’s Santander Bank, for instance, has acquired the naming rights to the Sevilla Master.
“Everything possible has been done to drown,” A1, Pastor said, and the reason, he believes, lies in its better treatment of players. In both his interviews with Marca, he says that he encourages the thousand or so players on A1’s roster to sign annual sponsorship deals with the brands because “generational change” is coming to the brand hierarchy, but also because the terms are so unfavorable. According to Pastor, monthly compensation is in the hundreds of euros and the penalty clause for breach of contract is in the hundreds of thousands.
