To start with a strong fact, padel is a sport that 92% of people try once and never stop playing, and this is simply not happening in any other sport. It's also a sport where the courts are smaller than tennis, the rules take about ten minutes to learn and most of you can have a genuinely good rally on your very first day. It's a sport with a return rate most fitness businesses would kill for, and where the social element is baked in so deeply that people don't just come back for the game but they come back for the people and the small or big hangout post match.
That's padel. And while Europe spent the last decade figuring it out, and Spain is already playing for at least 3 and a half decades, Asia is now waking up to what it missed.
The global picture is staggering on its own. According to the FIP World Padel Report 2025, there are now over 35 million padel players worldwide, with 14.355 new courts built in 2025 alone, bringing the global total to 77.300, spread across 150 nations. With those figures at hand, we can clearly say that this is not just a simple a trend.
Before 2018, 85% of the world's padel courts were concentrated in Spain and Argentina, and at 46 I can clearly remind myself (as most of my friends), on the court in my teenage days. But today, those two countries account for just 35%, with the remaining 65% spread across approximately 150 nations on five continents.
The center of gravity of this sport has been shifting outward for years and Asia is increasingly where eyes are turning in this moment in time.
Asia-Pacific court construction grew by nearly 39% between 2023 and 2025 in a move that may sound like a statistic until you look at what's behind it. Indonesia alone has grown from zero to an expected 650 clubs by end 2026. Japan saw a 20% increase in court constructions in 2023, while China has begun incorporating padel into urban community centers. Australia's padel player registrations jumped by 25% year over year, with over 100 courts operational as of 2024. India announced plans for constructing 200 courts by 2025 under public private partnerships.
Generally, the sport is gaining its first institutional foothold on the continent, and in 2026, padel will feature in four IOC recognised and sanctioned events, including the Asian Beach Games in Sanya, China, and the Asian Games in the Aichi Prefecture, Japan. When a sport appears in the Asian Games, coaches, federations, governments and sponsors follow and that's when adoption curves go vertical.
What makes the Asian market genuinely interesting rather than just a repeat of what happened in Europe is maybe that the countries leading early adoption are urban, digitally native and intensely social. Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Tokyo, to put only some examples, are megacities where people are already accustomed to booking everything through an app, where premium fitness is a lifestyle signal and where group sports with a social dimension tend to spread fast.
In Asia, the sport is still in its early stages but gaining momentum in urban centers like Bangkok, Jakarta or Manila, places where the comparison to massively popular sports as badminton is worth sitting with for a moment. Badminton has over 300 million registered players in Asia alone. Padel shares its accessible doubles format, its indoor venue model, and its social rhythm, but it adds the wall dimension, the glass enclosures and a premium feel that commands higher court fees and attracts a slightly older, higher income demographic that most club operators would love to get in the door.
Padel is not trying to replace badminton but I would say it's more targeting the gap between badminton and tennis, and that gap, in Asia's booming middle class, is enormous.
And maybe one of the things nobody talks about loudly enough is that opening courts is the easy part but filling them consistently, building a community around them, retaining members past the initial curiosity phase and turning first time players into regulars who bring their friends, is where clubs either thrive or quietly die.
The Playtomic and PwC Global Padel Report 2025 put it bluntly. As supply catches up with demand, the market will ruthlessly separate serious operators from speculators. Operational excellence, genuine sport knowledge, qualified coaching staff, authentic community building and sustainable business models will determine winners from losers, because the sport is forgiving to early movers but is not forgiving to lazy ones.
This is not a theoretical fact. In Europe, the clubs that scaled fast and failed even faster almost always share the same story: they built courts, put up a website and assumed players would sort themselves out. They didn't.
This is where things get genuinely consequential for anyone opening or operating a padel club in Asia right now.
Clubs using digital platforms like Playtomic earn 3 to 5 times more revenue than those that don't. That multiplier should stop you for a second. It's not a marginal improvement. It's the difference between a club that breaks even and one that has a waitlist.
The logic is not complicated when we understand that high quality booking platforms basically remove friction at the exact moment when friction costs you a customer. Someone in Bangkok opens their phone at 9 PM, decides they want to play padel on Saturday morning, and either books in 30 seconds or doesn't book at all. There's no version of that story where calling a club the next morning and leaving a voicemail works out well for the operator.
But the platforms doing this well go far beyond booking slots. From the clubs perspective, real time analytics help clubs increase occupancy, reduce cancellations and maximize efficiency. Also, being part of a large racket sports community boosts player engagement and drives bookings that clubs would otherwise never reach.
The community dimension is especially important in Asia, where the social graph matters enormously in sports adoption. Platforms like Playtomic handle player matching, connecting people of similar skill levels who want a game but don't have four people ready, and that feature alone solves one of the biggest barriers to padel's growth in new markets: the "I want to play but I don't know enough people yet" problem. When a platform solves that, it doesn't just fill courts but it simply accelerates the social network that makes a club sticky.
And then there's the data. A club operating without booking analytics is running blind. Which courts are underbooked on Tuesday afternoons? What's the drop off rate between a player's first and second visit? Which membership tier is being renewed and which is quietly churning? The strongest apps combine court discovery, booking, player matching, memberships and coaching in a single interface, giving operators a complete picture of their business rather than a collection of spreadsheets and WhatsApp groups.
High growth markets now explicitly include Indonesia and India alongside the UAE, UK, and Mexico. These are markets where we see that a well run, digitally equipped club can establish category leadership before competition arrives. In Europe, that window closed years ago, but in Asia, it's still open and the clubs currently moving fast are the ones that will be hardest to displace two years from now.
The sport has a 92% first game return rate. It's targeting exactly the demographic, urban, professional, 25-45, fitness-conscious, socially motivated, that drives premium sports consumption across Asia's major cities. The infrastructure is now being built, the regulatory recognition is arriving, the federations are organizing...
What determines whether a club in Jakarta or Bangkok or Manila becomes the local institution or the cautionary tale isn't the courts or the rackets or even the coaching, but is whether the operator treats the digital experience as seriously as the physical one, because in the markets where padel is about to take off, the players they're trying to reach have never known any other way to book anything.
The serve has been hit. Asia just needs to return it well.
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Luis Carlos Yanguas Gomez de la Serna
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