Pádel players now number 30 million worldwide

The International Padel Federation (FIP) has released the 2024 edition of its World Padel Report, which has pegged the number of pádel players worldwide at 30 million and the proportion of women among them at 40 percent.

More than half of the players are in Europe, with another quarter or so in South America.

Europe is the region best endowed with clubs.

But not all the countries with the most clubs are in Europe.

According to the report, pádel is now played in 130 countries and 12 dependent territories. This is up from 90 in 2021. The number of courts out there has risen to 63,000, many of them at the 19,800 clubs and “accommodation facilities” now in operation.

National federations, meanwhile, have grown in number to 71, of which 30 date back no more than three years. Europe has the most (39). Yes, San Marino and even Vatican City have pádel federations, though we’re not sure about Lichtenstein.

In any case, in federation totals Europe is followed by Asia (15), America (12), Africa (3) and Oceania (2). Five national federations have a million or more members: Spain (5.5m), Italy (1.5m), Argentina (1.4m), Mexico (1m) and Chile (1m). There are now 600,000 federated players worldwide.

The professional players now number 4,874 (3,512 of them male, 1,362 female) and hail from 72 countries. There are in addition 1,209 juniors (847 male, 362 female) from 15 countries. Last year FIP held 163 tournaments in 30 countries.

A little extrapolation

The last several pages of the report detail the 71 federations and include the number of amateur players per federated country. By combining this with some national populations, we have arrived at country penetration rates – percentage of amateur players in the population – for the sport of pádel.

It seems probable that the countries that have bothered to establish federations are also the countries with the highest rates, so the charts below probably present a faithful picture of pádel’s state worldwide.

As shown above, 24 countries have a penetration rate of 1 percent or more. The country with the highest rate is, naturally, Spain (11.29%), but the next country comes as a small surprise.

Malta (9.09%) is just 2.2 percentage points behind Spain. Of course, Malta has a small population, in the hundred thousands (550,000), so the first thousand Maltese to play pádel will bring the penetration rate into the ballpark of a percentage point. This goes to show what an outlier Spain is. It has achieved its high penetration rate with a population in the tens of millions (48.7m).

The next countries in this tens-of-millions ballpark are Sweden (10.6m, 6.60%), Chile (20.1m, 4.98%), Portugal (10.6m, 4.25%) and Belgium (11.9m, 3.78%). The closest in population are Argentina (47.2m, 2.97%) and Italy (58.6m, 2.56%).

Another thing worth noting is that pádel is approaching 1 percent penetration in only one country with a population above 100 million: Mexico (132.5m, 0.75%). There are more pádel players as a share of the population in Canada (42.1m, 0.12%) than in the US (342m, 0.03%). China has its federation, but pádel’s penetration there is below a hundredth of a percentage point.

Final points

Luigi Carraro, FIP’s president, observes in his note that over the course of 2023 padel found its way into the European Games, and thus came a step closer to the Olympics, and established both a unified professional tour, Premier Padel (under FIP’s aegis), and a unified ranking (the FIP Ranking).

FIP is Premier Padel’s governing body, while its promotors are the Professional Padel Association (PPA), the International Padel Players Association (IPPA) and Qatar Sports Investments (QSI). The plan has been for Premier Padel to hold high-level tournaments in its first two years, 2022–23, and then become the world’s single major international circuit, after taking over the World Padel Tour.

There were eight tournaments in 2022 (all for men) and six in 2023 (mixed). This season there will be 25 – in 18 countries.

The Cupra FIP Tour dates to 2019. From then to the present year the tournament totals have risen as follows: 6, 24, 73, 98, 108, 160.