Babolat, the French leader in racquet sports, has just announced the launch of a “Babolat Rafa Celebration Box” in connection with the 12th victory of its main sponsored tennis player, Rafael Nadal, at the Roland-Garros tennis tournament a few days ago. Available in only 220 numbered units and accompanied by a card signed by Rafa, it consists of the mini-replicas of seven Babolat racquets that have been used by the Spanish tennis champion for his victories since 2005.
Babolat remains the tennis leader in Europe, the U.S. and other parts of the world, but with the global tennis market estimated to have declined by 2 percent in the past year, it continues to look for new “territories.” Besides softgoods and badminton, one of them is the game of pádel tennis, also known simply as pádel.
Invented in Mexico in 1962, pádel borrows from other racquet sports but is played with distinctive equipment – notably a large and solid, stringless racquet. The court is about one-third the size of a tennis court and is enclosed like a squash court, so that balls can be played off the walls. The game uses the tennis scoring system and is typically played in doubles. It is not quite the same in format as the North American sports of paddle tennis and platform tennis.
The game is relatively inexpensive to play. Hence, perhaps, its mass appeal in Spain, home to some four million pádel players, compared with less than 80,000 licensed tennis players – very curious for the country of Rafael Nadal, although he is said to be playing pádel as well. Neighboring France, by contrast, has about 900,000 licensed tennis players, down from one million a few years ago, and only about 50,000 pádel players, yet their number is on the rise and the market seems primed for growth. The country already has about 200 pádel clubs and 300 to 500 pádel courts.
Babolat has just signed a four-year partnership with 4Padel, a French chain of pádel clubs, to help expand participation in the sport in its home market, partly in reaction to an ongoing decline in regular tennis. 4Padel hopes to be operating 100 courts be the end of 2020, reaching a leadership position in Europe. The chain currently operates 17 complexes with 50 courts.
Pádel is very big in Argentina, with about 50,000 installations as compared to a little more than 35,000 in Spain. Besides France, other geographic areas with potential to grow the sport are Italy, the U.K., Portugal, Japan and Mexico. The Spanish-based licensee of Adidas Padel, All for Padel, has a plan to establish 259 pádel centers all over Europe, after the opening of 80 centers in 2017 and 155 in 2018, according to CMD Sport. The company sold 53,000 pádel racquets last year, 56 percent more than the year before.
Last month, the All for Padel Group (AFP) inaugurated a new European office, called Redsport Padel Belgium, in Zele, a town in the province of East Flanders. AFP not only has been working to internationalize the sport of pádel, with operations in 35 countries, but has taken an all-inclusive approach to the sport. In addition to supplying racquets and balls under the Adidas brand, it has establish AFP Courts, for court supplies, and the AFP Academy, to provide training in the technical, tactical, biomechanical and physical aspects of pádel.
In France, Italy and other new territories for pádel, the new playing courts are often created by transforming tennis courts or futsal pitches that are no longer attracting a sufficient number of players.
The first full-fledged pádel center in the U.S., called Padelphia, will be opened later this month by a company called All Racquet Sports in Venice Island at Manayunk, Pennsylvania. It will be led by the company's marketing and sales manager, Marcos del Pilar, a master trainer sponsored by Adidas Padel, in collaboration with the U.S. Professional Tennis Association (USPTA). The company had a stand for the first time at the PGA show in Orlando, Florida, in January.
Like Head and Wilson, Babolat has already been involved for some time in the game of pádel as part of its diversification strategy. It created a dedicated innovation center for pádel last year in Madrid. Wilson, which gets its pádel racquets made by StarVie in Spain, is the sponsor of the French Padel Tour organized by the French Tennis Federation, which is actively promoting the game. For its part, StarVie has added two French pádel players to its sponsorship roster.
