BarcelonaThe explosion of padel in recent years is one of the strongest that has ever been seen in a popular sport. According to Idescat data, in 2009 there were just over 300 padel courts in Catalonia. And in 2021, just twelve years later, this figure has multiplied by 8.5. Growth seemed to have stagnated between 2017 and 2018, but in 2021, 620 new padel courts were counted in Catalonia, the most pronounced growth in the entire data series. Meanwhile, the number of tennis courts remains stagnant and is even slowly decreasing. The great racket sport has been dethroned, at least from the perspective of popular sport.
According to Idescat data, today there are still more tennis courts than paddle tennis courts in Catalonia, but it is easy to sense that the overtaking is imminent A simple search on the internet leads to news from this 2022 which explain, for example, that in Llers, in Alt Empordà, the construction of two padel courts is being completed, in Estartit the Nautical Club advertises that this year four new padel courts will be built and Club Natació Sabadell also announces that “the center of Can Llong will have eleven padel courts”. The boom seems unstoppable.
The padel courts are about to catch up with the tennis courts
Number of tennis and padel courts by year in Catalonia
Rafael Reig, who is a salesman for Reindesa, a company that has been building tennis courts for 50 years, confirms that this year he made a single budget for a private tennis court in a house on the Costa Brava. The work, he says, “is now all in the padel”. He explains that it all started with José María Aznar and that the phenomenon spread to the Costa del Sol and the Valencian Country, where in the late 90s and early 2000s real estate developments began to be accompanied by a padel court in addition to the pool.
Almost all the people consulted for this article agree that the rise of padel is mainly based on three legs: the first is the fact that the learning curve is steeper than that of tennis. In padel four people who don’t know how to play can enter the court and immediately have a good time, while in tennis just learning how to serve requires a significant effort. Padel also requires a much more modest physical condition than that of tennis.
A second leg is that it is a more social sport and is often accompanied by drinking a beer or staying at the bar to chat. Rafael Reig is clear: when a potential client asks him for a budget to build a paddle club, he is immediately on the alert that he must have a bar, as it is a considerable source of income. He assures that a customer of his in Igualada is told by the deliveryman of beer barrels that he brings more there than anywhere else in the area. A call to the Padel Cambrils club on Saturday afternoon catches its sports director, Albert Viñas, in the middle of the Mojito Cup, a tournament that they are currently holding at the club, the registration for which includes a couple of mojitos and a two per one in a restaurant in the area. When Viñas took over the club four years ago there were five padel courts and three tennis courts; now there are eight for padel and only one for tennis. Padel Cambrils calculate that at peak times they could easily fill twice as many padel courts as they have. You can also see the change in the classes: four years ago nine hours were filled with tennis courses for children and adults and now there are only four.
The third leg that agrees to be highlighted is the fact that there are many women who play paddle. 4 out of 10 padel federation cards are women and the perception of some of those consulted is that in the amateur field this figure could be even higher. In the case of tennis, one out of every three licenses is female.
A video clip recorded on an abandoned tennis court
There is a fourth economic aspect that falls on the padel side, linked in this case no longer to the players but to the clubs: making a padel court can cost around 35,000 euros and to make a clay tennis court you need to invest there are approximately twice as many. And beyond that, the maintenance of a tennis court is daily, while in paddle tennis the most important maintenance, according to Rafael Reig, is to loosen the artificial turf with a relatively affordable machine once a year.
The push of the pandemic
The pandemic has given the sport the definitive push it was missing. Albert Viñas says that he has noticed that people who played football or basketball tried padel outdoors because it was one of the first things they could play during the pandemic, and now they are hooked. According to Viñas, the level system makes people fight each other a lot to level up before their friends. Rafael Reig says they have also detected a notable increase in post-pandemic budget requests.
At Club Tenis Cabrils, tennis is much more sacred. They claim to have the best clay courts in the Maresme and the school here is powerful, the dwarfs who are part of it spend the day at the club, where they also study. The goal is that with the help of coaches like Jordi Burillo, who became number 43 in the ATP, they progress and can obtain a scholarship to go to the United States. None of the seven tennis courts here have been touched since the club was launched, but there are now also seven paddle tennis courts. A club worker, Juan Carlos Martínez, speaks to the ARA, who assures that CT Cabrils were among the first clubs in Maresme to have padel. He says that in the beginning there were people from Badalona and Barcelona who went to the club to play because there weren’t many other places to play, but that in recent years so many padel courts have been built between Barcelona and Cabrils that now that doesn’t happen anymore. In this club, on the other hand, they detect a generational gap: the tennis courts can be full in the morning, occupied by a more veteran audience, while the peak time for padel is in the afternoon, with younger users.
On May 13, 1996, a photo news from the newspaper The country teaches José María Aznar with a racket in hand. The holder is “The president plays paddle tennis”. Months later, the Selga family would open a store specializing in racket sports in Barcelona, which at that time meant tennis and something like squash and front tennis. Little did they think that 25 years later almost half of the turnover would revolve around the sport that Aznar popularized. Gemma Selga, former Spanish tennis champion in training categories, has noticed that buyers of paddle rackets look more for brands and assures that when it comes to choosing a paddle racket everything is also much simpler than in tennis . The popularity of big stars like Rafa Nadal and the epicness of singles battles of more than three hours that tennis players often fight remains a big attraction for many people, but there is no doubt that today paddle is clearly the amateur sport racket that dominates the panorama.
El rum-rum del ‘pickleball’
Perhaps one of the most curious aspects of padel is that it is a markedly Spanish boom. In many other countries there are either no facilities to play this sport or they are really sporadic. In the United States the cheaper and simpler alternative to tennis that is gaining followers in forced marches is the so-called pickleball, a mix of tennis, table tennis and badminton that is also looking for its place in Catalonia. At Padel Cambrils, a few months ago they turned one tennis court into four tennis courts pickleball, have tried their luck with a conversion that requires minimal investment if the tennis court was synthetic. It is not the only club in Catalonia where this has been done, it seeks to make the tennis courts profitable and place itself in the starting position of the possible new fashionable sport.
