A couple of years ago, Karl Robinson — then manager of English League One club Oxford United — was on holiday in Spain when he saw a group of lads playing a sport he did not recognise.
There was a court, a bat and a ball. It looked a lot like tennis, only it clearly wasn’t tennis. It also looked a lot like squash but it clearly wasn’t squash either.
For Robinson, the sighting was the beginning of an “obsession”. On his return to Britain, he introduced padel tennis to the staff at Oxford, and when he joined Leeds United as assistant to Sam Allardyce last season, one of the first things he did was hire a court for staff to use.
Yet this is not a parochial craze in the lower levels of the English football pyramid — it is a worldwide phenomenon, pulling in some of the biggest names in the sport.
Lionel Messi was bitten by the bug while he was living in Barcelona; Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar are also devotees, while Jurgen Klopp and Pep Ljinders are a regular pairing at Liverpool (the club posted a video of them playing Mohamed Salah and Thiago while on tour in Dubai).
Paris Saint-Germain owner Nasser Al Khelaifi, meanwhile, is such a fan that his Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) company took control of padel’s professional ranks last month.
Padel could even lay claim to being football’s second favourite sport, with Robinson predicting it will replace head tennis as a preferred method of fun around training sessions. He also thinks it has the potential to compete with golf as a favoured footballers’ hobby, because it manages to be relaxing and more inclusive.
Yet padel remains relatively unknown to those who don’t play it. Just what is the appeal?
Robinson describes padel as a “cool, European sport”.
Its roots are Hispanic, having been invented in 1969 by Enrique Corcuera, a Mexican businessman who did not have enough space at his holiday home in Acapulco to build a tennis court. Instead he fashioned a space that was 25 per cent smaller, with the walls becoming a significant part of the ebb and flow of the game, in the same way as squash.
The popularity of padel, which is always played in pairs and has the same scoring system as tennis, has boomed in southern Europe since the pandemic, when football and basketball were banned, and gyms and swimming pools shut down. In Spain, Italy and Portugal, padel was judged to be non-contact and therefore courts largely remained open.
In Italy alone, the number of padel courts in the country has increased 500 per cent since 2020, up to almost 5,000.
The one country that does not yet seem to have fallen for padel — which is widely described as the world’s fastest-growing sport — is the United States.
Outside of Miami, where the Hispanic community has ensured a strong local scene, padel is yet to take off, perhaps in part due to the growing popularity of another racquet sport, pickleball.
In Britain, by contrast, padel is booming. Underused tennis courts are being replaced with padel, and some five-a-side football pitches have also been repurposed. Five years from now, it is predicted that more than a million Britons could be playing padel.
Players at the British Padel Festival (Nathan Stirk/Getty Images for LTA)
At the centre in the village of Bicester, near his home, Robinson pays between £22-30 ($27-37) to rent a court depending on the time of day, which works out as cheap as a game of five-a-side football. He believes the sport has a huge potential. “It might challenge five-a-side in terms of participation,” he says.
Where there is potential, there is investment. Al Khelaifi, a former tennis professional, plays padel to relax. The European Club Association meeting in Budapest in March coincided with Ramadan and at 2am, he was sighted on a padel court with Hungarian locals.
Then, at the Youth Sports Games in Croatia last week, Al Khelaifi competed against a delegation from UEFA, including Zvonimir Boban, the former AC Milan midfielder. The one-time Manchester United defender Nemanja Vidic, an ambassador for the game, was also involved.
Former France footballers Florent Sinama Pongolle (left) and Robert Pires play at a tournament in Toulouse (Valentine Chapuis/AFP via Getty Images)
Qatar hosted the World Padel Championship in 2022 and it was during that competition that some professionals approached Al Khelaifi about their frustrations.
A source with an understanding of those conversations, who would prefer to remain anonymous to protect his working relationships, suggests Al Khelaifi was told that aside from performing at sub-standard venues since launching as a world professional tour in 2013, “players were underpaid – and often made losses” because of travel commitments and coaching expenses.
Qatar held the football World Cup and a month later, Al Khelaifi organised a ‘Legends’ meeting at the Waldorf Hotel in Lusail. Competitors included former professional footballers such as the Brazilians Ronaldo and Kaka, the Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas, and ex-England captain John Terry.
The tournament climaxed with French World Cup-winner Vincent Candela and partner Khaled Saldoon beating Italian World Cup-winner Marco Materazzi and Mohammed Abdulla.
Al Khelaifi sensed a big opportunity and in August it was announced that from next year QSI will run the professional circuit. He described the decision as “historic” for the “fastest-growing sport in the world”.
Further down the food chain, other high-profile investors have been attracted, with Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk joining former Wimbledon tennis champion Andy Murray in putting money into a company called Game4Padel.
Virgil van Dijk (left) and Andy Murray have invested in padel (Getty Images)
The attraction of big money, especially QSI, has pleased British men’s No 1 Christian Medina Murphy, who says that suddenly everything has become better for the players.
“It has made it easier to live as a professional,” he tells The Athletic. When he travels, he no longer has to think about booking hotels or paying for meals out of his own pocket.
With a surname like Medina Murphy, it should be no surprise to learn that Britain’s leading men’s player grew up in Spain. Having been born in London, he now lives in Murcia and trains in Alicante.
He only started playing padel when he was 14, and started training and competing at 16. By 18, he’d entered the professional tour. Seven years later, he’s ranked 208 in the world.
Medina Murphy believes footballers are helping massively with the promotion of the sport. A picture posted by Neymar on his Instagram feed in 2020, showing him playing a game, attracted 2.7million likes. (The Brazilian subsequently had two padel pitches installed at his home in Brazil.) Footage of Cristiano Ronaldo playing in Singapore three months ago added to the buzz.
When Liverpool’s new training ground was being built in Kirkby, Klopp — who describes himself as a padel “addict” — asked for it to include a court. Salah has used his Instagram page to post about padel and the photograph was tracked more than a million times around the world over the next four days.
“People who don’t know about padel take notice when they see footballers enjoying it,” Medina Murphy says.
The attraction for footballers, he adds, is at a very basic level: given that footballers tend to have to take on lots of information from coaches these days, the fact that padel is less tactical and more instinctive helps them relax.
“If you jump on a court with three other people of your level, you will enjoy it,” he says confidently. “It’s very sociable. I can see the comparisons with five-a-side football.”
Robinson, currently out of work and thinking about his next job in football, agrees.
“As soon as footballers play it, they want to play it again and again,” he says. “It’s a great way to do exercise and not get injured. While it helps burn off any excess energy and keeps your mind sharp, it doesn’t have an enormous physical impact. The ball is always in play but you barely have to run across the court.
“It also allows you to be creative and this brings unpredictability. Most of all, though, it’s really, really competitive — and footballers love competition.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)
