The head of pickleball for the Catalunya Tennis Club’s Meeting Cup, Lluis Riba, wore a prognosticator’s cap for his recent chat with CMDsport, saying that 2027 will be the year of pickleball in Spain.
Like pádel before it, he said, pickleball is in a position to save struggling tennis clubs, if only through mathematics. Four pickleball courts fit within a single tennis court, yielding more paying customers and, thus, higher revenues per unit of area. Moreover, pickleball requires lower investments than tennis – for clubs as well as for players.
The clubs will “crunch the numbers and realize that it’s a sport that pays,” Riba said. It’s also an “inclusive, sustainable and easy” sport. There are some 50 million players in the US (population: 336m), with an average age of 55. By comparison, there were, according to the United States Tennis Association (USTA), 23.6 million tennis players in the US in 2022, up by 1 million from the previous year and by 5.9 million since 2020. The average age for tennis in the US is 20 to 30, according to Zippia.com’s demographic breakdown.
Spain, according to Statista, had about 83,500 licensed tennis players in 2020, down from the approximately 100,000 it had for a few years a decade earlier.
According to the 2024 report put out by TennisRacketball.com, there are about 87 million tennis players worldwide. The US (26.1%) and China (24.1%) by themselves account for more than half. India (107%) ranks third. In Europe, Spain (3.6%) comes in behind Germany (5.5%), France (4.8%) and the UK (4.8%).
Pickleball’s “handicap” in Spain, as Riba pointed out, was that it was not “federated” – that is, there was no license for matters of insurance, but this was remedied in September of last year when Spain’s Royal Tennis Federation (RFET) came to terms with the Spanish Pickleball Association, as we have reported.
Pickleball will now “grow rapidly,” said Riba, “and already, in 2024, will see its players multiply.” “In 2027,” he continued, “it will be a more than recognized sport,” but “I don’t know whether it will cast a shadow over pádel.” Unlike pádel, he said, it has plenty of room to grow in Spain.
The 2024 edition of the Meeting Cup, scheduled for March 28–31, will include pickleball.
