U.S. Padel Passes 1,000 Courts: The Tech Elite's Social Sport Becomes a Spectator Sport
From Uber's CEO to hedge fund founders, the courts are filling up—courts grew 45% in under a year, and with CNBC national broadcasts, infrastructure, capital, and media are converging
The U.S. padel market has crossed an infrastructure threshold. From fewer than 20 courts in 2019, the country passed the 1,000-court mark in early April 2026—up roughly 45% from 688 courts in Q2 2025, in less than a year.
The number of states with courts expanded from 31 to 37, and 39% of all courts are indoor facilities, anchoring a year-round business model. What is driving this growth is not the mass market but capital. As The Information reported on July 4, tech and finance elites—Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Coatue Management founder Philippe Laffont among them—have taken up the sport as both players and investors, turning padel into a networking hub and a trophy asset.
Layered on top are the Pro Padel League's (PPL) national broadcasts on CNBC and Premier Padel's Miami P1 tournament. U.S. padel has entered the early phase of its transition from a participation sport to a spectator sport.
Courts have multiplied this quickly because the supply structure changed. Unlike tennis facilities built from the ground up, padel courts are manufactured and assembled as kits—and with domestic kit manufacturers emerging where imports once dominated, and specialized installers multiplying, entry costs have fallen. Existing racket-sport infrastructure is acting as a distribution network as well: 30% of U.S. pickleball venues already offer padel courts.
What Is Padel?
Padel is a racket sport blending tennis and squash. Born in Mexico in the 1960s, it became a national pastime in Spain and Argentina with millions of players, and has since spread to more than 90 countries. Matches are doubles-only, played with a solid stringless racket and a slightly underpressurized tennis ball that travels slower than a standard one. The court is about 25% smaller than a tennis court, enclosed by glass walls and wire fencing. As in squash, the walls are part of the game: once a serve bounces on the opposite side, the ball can rebound off a wall and remain in play. Scoring is identical to tennis. Americans have not even settled on a pronunciation—some say it like 'paddle,' others opt for the Spanish-style 'pa-dell.'
Four players conversing on a compact court, in a game where strategy matters more than power, make padel unusually well suited to socializing and business networking. Laffont, who recently placed second in a tournament at Brisas, a self-described 'padel sanctuary' in New York, told The Information the sport is 'a mix between tennis and chess'—social, a good workout, and more strategy than physical force.
An Experiment That Began in an Airplane Hangar: The Tech Elite's 'Third Place'
Bay Padel captures Silicon Valley's padel boom. When Argentina-born Matias Gandulfo and Lucas Tepman set out in 2023 to build San Francisco's first dedicated padel club, landlords refused to deal with them, convinced the sport would never take off in America. The pair finally secured a former airplane hangar on Treasure Island.
Three years on, Bay Padel has expanded to Dogpatch and Sunnyvale and become a networking hub where OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Amazon regularly rent courts for employee events—about 30 events a month. Tepman told The Information that AI companies recently poached both of his club managers to serve as chiefs of staff. With demand surging for its $4,000-a-year unlimited membership—which includes co-working space, fitness studios, and cafes—Bay Padel recently raised $7.5 million and is preparing new clubs in Marina del Rey and San Jose.
East Coast clubs have pushed the luxury membership model further. Kith Ivy, a members-only wellness club in New York's West Village with rooftop padel courts, requires applicants to submit their job title and Instagram handle, then charges a $45,000 initiation fee and $10,000 in annual dues. Padel Haus, a chain founded by Mexico-born former banker Santiago Gomez, has expanded beyond New York into Colorado, Georgia, and Tennessee. Greater Miami—the U.S. capital of padel—now counts at least 25 clubs, including investor Wayne Boich's Reserve Padel. Ankur Nagpal, who sold his startup Carry for $80 million earlier this year, is a regular at Padel Haus in Williamsburg; he told The Information the crowd is wealthy people in their 20s and 30s who are highly successful at work yet lose their composure over the smallest things on the padel court.
The courts double as deal-sourcing venues. Warren Shaeffer, a partner at San Francisco's Pear VC, hosted roughly 25 founders and investors—including Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever and Linktree CEO Alex Zaccaria—for a tournament at Park Padel last October. In a separate match he met a founder whose competitiveness and composure on the court stood out, and he is now discussing joining that company's next funding round. He calls padel more forgiving than tennis, more glamorous than pickleball, more collaborative than squash, and far more fun than golf.
From a Padel-Only VC to $10 Million Franchises
Where the wealthy gathered, capital followed. EEP Capital, a New York venture firm founded in 2022 that invests exclusively in padel-related businesses, holds Bay Padel, Park Padel, and Padel Haus in its portfolio and is raising a fund of $30–40 million. The PPL closed a $15 million Series A in March led by Rick Schnall, Co-Chairman and Governor of the Charlotte Hornets.
The New York Atlantics reached a $10 million valuation with an investment from American tennis star Frances Tiafoe. Steven Levin of Chicago real estate firm Brijus Capital bought the Florida Goats, while the Eisen family—which sold its trucking conglomerate in 2023—acquired the Los Angeles Beat for around $5 million.
Both owners are leaning into a luxury image: Levin recruited Nacho Figueras, the Argentine polo star and Ralph Lauren model, as a minority investor, and Eisen signed Atlas Card, an invite-only credit card favored by tech executives, as the Beat's title sponsor.
Court Infrastructure: Florida Holds 41%, Indoor Courts Open Four-Season Markets
Geographically, Florida holds roughly 41% of the nation's courts, followed by Texas, California, and New York. Expansion is spreading beyond Miami: between September 2025 and April 2026, the number of states with courts grew from 31 to 37, and with indoor courts at 39% of the total, a year-round model is taking shape in four-season markets beyond the Sun Belt.
New York alone counts around 15 facilities spanning the city and its affluent suburbs—Padel Haus's three Brooklyn locations, Reserve Padel at Hudson Yards, Brisas, CityView atop a converted factory, plus seasonal clubs in East Hampton and Southampton. Community operators are emerging too: Padelpalooza, a New York–based events platform, connects clubs through social tournaments—a structure in which courts (the hardware) and community (the software) grow together.
The amateur ecosystem is organizing as well. The U.S. Padel Association (USPA) closed 2025 with 2,915 individual members (up 53.5% year over year), 108 active clubs, and 104 sanctioned Open tournaments, and has announced more than 150 NOX USPA circuit tournaments supported by over 50 clubs for 2026. The USPA-backed National Padel League completed its first season with 1,956 players, 180 teams, 55 clubs, and 37 cities. A player picking up padel in the U.S. now enters a complete ecosystem running from lessons to rankings to tournaments.
50,000 Courts Globally, With U.S. 'Real Acceleration' Projected for 2027
The global growth rate sets the baseline for the U.S. market's trajectory. According to the Global Padel Report 2025, published by court-booking platform Playtomic with Strategy&, the strategy arm of PwC, 3,282 new clubs opened worldwide in 2024—nearly nine per day—bringing the total to 15,933, while 7,187 new courts pushed the global count to 50,436. The total is expected to exceed 81,000 courts by 2027; a new court opens somewhere in the world every two and a half hours. A 92% return rate after a first session points to accessibility and sociability as the retention engine. For the U.S., Playtomic projects faster expansion in 2026 and 'real acceleration' in 2027.
Market value estimates vary by research firm. The padel sports market (equipment and services) is projected to grow from $248 million in 2025 to $662 million by 2035 (a 10.3% CAGR), while the padel court construction market is separately forecast to expand from $500 million in 2026 to $1 billion by 2035. The U.S. is estimated to account for roughly 28% of the global padel sports market, and more than 45% of newly built urban racket facilities in the country now include padel courts.
The USPA projects that, on current trends, the U.S. will reach 30,000 courts and 10 million players by 2030. Today's U.S. player base ranges from 112,000 (registered and active) to an estimated one million (including anyone who has tried the sport), depending on the counting method—an early stage either way next to tennis's 27 million and pickleball's 24 million, leaving substantial room to grow.
CNBC Nationally, Premier Padel in Miami, and beIN
On the media front, three tracks are advancing at once. First, the domestic league. On July 2, the PPL announced a partnership with USA Sports, part of NBCUniversal, to air five 2026 championship matches on CNBC (three men's finals, two women's finals)—the first national TV network broadcasts for the league, which launched in 2023.
The schedule runs from New York's Hammerstein Ballroom (July 12) through Los Angeles (August 16), Playa del Carmen (September 27), and Guadalajara (November 22) to the City's Cup Finals in Miami (December 6). Diane Gotua, the PPL's Chief Commercial Officer, said the CNBC platform will let the league show the intensity of its competition, the talent of its players, and the strength of its team format to a national audience.
USA Sports—home to the WNBA, NASCAR, the Premier League, WWE, and the PGA TOUR—picked padel as its next property, and the CNBC placement reads as a deliberate play for the sport's high-spending audience. Much as golf did before it, padel is entering the broadcast market through the business audience.
The global tour is knocking on the U.S. market as well. Premier Padel, the sport's top professional circuit, made its U.S. debut in Miami in 2025 with four consecutive sold-out days and returned for a second Miami P1 in March 2026.
In the U.S., Red Bull TV carries matches from the quarterfinals onward, with early rounds on the official YouTube channel. beIN Media Group has secured rights to all 2026 Qatar Airways Premier Padel Tour events and the 2026 FIP World Cup across 39 territories including North America. Premier Padel is also introducing a broadcast-friendly 'Star Point' scoring system for the 2026 season.
The game itself favors television: glass-walled courts make camera angles easy to capture, and long doubles rallies keep the frame dense with action.
U.S. padel has entered a phase where three pillars are locking into place at once: infrastructure (past 1,000 courts), capital (a padel-only VC, a league Series A, and team investments), and media (national TV broadcasts and global tour events).
Where pickleball built a massive participation base yet struggled to convert it into viewership, padel is running the sequence in reverse—building the tech elite's premium club economy and broadcast assets first. The 2026 CNBC ratings and the infrastructure acceleration projected for 2027 will be the first test of that strategy.
Sources
· The Information, "Pickleball Is the Past. The Tech Elite Is Obsessed With Padel" (Jemima McEvoy, July 4, 2026)
· Sports Video Group, "Pro Padel League Announces Broadcast Partnership With USA Sports for 2026 Season" (July 2, 2026)
· Playtomic × PwC Strategy&, "Global Padel Report 2025"
· actu-padel, "1,000 padel courts in the USA: the boom changes scale" (April 2026), citing Misitrano Consulting data
· U.S. Padel Association (USPA), 2025 annual review
· beIN Media Group press release, 2026 Premier Padel Tour and FIP World Cup rights (February 8, 2026)
· Global Growth Insights; Business Research Insights, padel market forecasts (2026)
· Sports Destination Management, "The Next Big Thing, Padel Making Inroads into U.S. Sports Market" (August 2025)