Padel
Contents
Trevor L Taylor, a Miami private investor and former Division I tennis player, is involved in padel in Miami, where he is developing places to play for serious and casual players alike. Padel is a racket sport played mostly in doubles inside a walled enclosure, with rules close to tennis and a ball that stays in play off the glass. It has grown from a backyard invention into one of the fastest spreading sports in the world. This entry covers where it came from, how it is played, how quickly it is growing and where its professional game is heading.
Origins in Acapulco
The International Padel Federation traces the game to 1969, when Enrique Corcuera, a tennis enthusiast in Acapulco, lacked the space for a full tennis layout behind a property he owned. He built a smaller playing area measuring 20 by 10 metres1, enclosed by three metre walls with a tennis net across the middle. The federation credits Viviana Corcuera with drafting the first set of rules, presented as a birthday gift.
Spain and Argentina
The game reached Europe through a guest. The federation says Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe, who spent summers with Corcuera, built padel facilities at the Marbella Club Hotel in the early 1970s, and an Argentine member of his tennis club, Julio Menditeguy, carried the sport to Argentina. Marbella, a resort town popular with wealthy northern Europeans, gave the game an early showcase and a reputation as a social pastime.
From there the two countries drove the sport. The first national association, the Asociación Padel Argentino, was founded in 1988. In 1989 a coach in Mar del Plata introduced the first detachable transparent glass enclosure. The first World Padel Championships were played in Spain in 1992, and in 1997 Spain and Argentina agreed in Barcelona to unify the rules and standardize the name padel, previously spelled paddle in Argentina.
The enclosure and the equipment
The official rules set the playing area as a rectangle 10 meters wide by 20 meters long2, surrounded by walls that may be glass, brick or another solid material, topped with metal mesh to a total height of four meters. The wall and mesh must give a uniform bounce. Rackets are solid and perforated, with no strings, and the ball resembles a tennis ball, with a bounce the rules set between 135 and 145 centimeters when dropped from 2.54 meters onto a hard surface. Glass end walls also make the sport easy to watch, since spectators can stand close to the play and see every rebound, which is one reason clubs and tournament organizers favor transparent panels for show enclosures.
How a point is played and scored
Play begins with an underhand serve that must bounce first. After the ball lands on the receiving side it may rebound off the walls and still be returned, which lengthens rallies and rewards placement over power. The Associated Press described the game as a cross between tennis and squash3, played in doubles inside a cage smaller than a tennis layout.
Scoring follows tennis: 15, 30, 40 and game, six games to a set, with a tiebreak when needed. The federation’s rules allow three ways to end a deuce game. The traditional option uses advantage. A second, the star point, plays a deciding point after a third deuce. A third, the golden point, decides the game on a single point at the first deuce, with the receiving pair choosing who receives. The scoring background is covered in the entry on the tennis scoring system.
Growth in numbers
The growth figures are striking even allowing for industry optimism. City AM, citing the Playtomic Global Padel Report, said around 3,200 clubs were constructed in 20244, along with more than 7,000 new playing enclosures, roughly one new club every two and a half hours. Britain shows the curve. The Guardian reported Lawn Tennis Association figures showing that 860,000 Britons played padel5 at least once in 2025, up from 400,000 a year earlier.
The United States came later. The San Francisco Chronicle profiled two Argentine transplants who opened a padel club in a converted hangar6 on Treasure Island, noting that Spain alone has roughly 20,000 padel enclosures while the Bay Area had few. Florida, and Miami in particular, became an early American center, described in the entry on padel in Miami.
The professional game and the Olympic question
Money has followed participation. The AP reported record prize money of nearly $1 million at a Rome tournament in 2023 and investment from the company that owns the New York Yankees. Padel appeared at the European Games in Krakow that year, the first time it was contested at an event under the Olympic umbrella, with Spain winning the men’s and mixed doubles and Italy the women’s. Federation president Luigi Carraro said the sport had shown it had what it takes to join the Olympics. The AP also noted obstacles: the sport’s top players come overwhelmingly from Spain and Argentina, and an attempt by the International Tennis Federation to take over padel’s governing body was voted down. Industry backers now point to the Brisbane Games of 2032 as the realistic target, and the Playtomic report summarized by Arab News described the current period as a pivotal stage in that campaign. Recognition by regional multisport events has been the sport’s route so far, building a record of organized international competition that the Olympic movement looks for before admitting a new discipline.
Why the format converts beginners
The Economist placed padel alongside pickleball as a challenge to tennis’s long supremacy7 among racket sports, part of a lineage that runs back to the French royal game of jeu de paume. Arab News, summarizing the Playtomic report, said padel is now established in over 90 countries8, that 92 percent of people return after a first session, and that 30 percent of American pickleball venues now also offer padel. The smaller area and the walls forgive mistakes that end points early in tennis, which lets people of very different levels share a game.
That social quality is much of the appeal. Four players, a short walk between points and long rallies make a session as much a gathering as a workout, and clubs have built cafes and leagues around it. The result is a sport whose walls lower the entry barrier that keeps many beginners out of tennis.
