More evidence of pickleball’s rise outside the US

According to Almudena Lázaro, co-founder of Vila Pickleball, a club in the Catalonian city of Sabedell, pickleball is “making giant strides” in Spain as elsewhere in Europe. The spread is so fast, she tells CMDsport, that not only multinational racquet producers but also American pickleball specialists have taken note.

North America, all agree, remains the dominant region for the sport, but the fastest-growing one, at least according to according to the Indian consultancy Coherent Market Insights (CMI), appears to be Asia-Pacific, defined as including the Subcontinent and Central Asia. CMI puts the market’s worldwide value for 2024 at $612.2 million.

For Europe we at SGI Europe have seen projections of a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9 percent for pickleball from 2020 to 2030. Bonafide Research & Marketing is expecting the European market to add about $400 million in value from 2024 to 2029.

Among the American brands with an interest in the Continent are Gamma (distributed in Sweden by Pickleball Solutions), Franklin, Head, Joola (once a ping-pong specialist), Babolat, Paddletek and Engage. The American-founded brand Wilson has a pickleball line but is now owned by Finland’s Amer Sports.

Lázaro mentions an inverse motion as well. Some European pickleball brands, like Spain’s Zcebra, she says, are “opening space for themselves in the United States with very good results.” As we reported in July 2023, Zcebra was founded in 2020, during the lockdowns, as Europe’s first pickleball brand. It now claims to be Europe’s leading one, producing racquets, balls, apparel and accessories. Even a year and a half ago the brand was already looking across the pond.

Our own research suggests that Zcebra is one of two major home players in the European market, the other being Decathlon, which was in fact an earlier entrant, introducing a pickleball line through its Artengo brand in about 2017. Neither company has disclosed revenues specific to pickleball.

There is also the parallel phenomenon, Lázaro adds, of newer brands looking to “hop on the bandwagon” with inferior products, but names of these brands do not appear in CMD’s report.

In short, the pickleball market is immature. It is also murky. As our chart shows, it is unclear where several of the top brands keep their headquarters, if they exist, or when they were founded. Panel Sound, for instance, sells mostly through Amazon, while MTEN sells through both Amazon and its own website.