What padel’s rapid rise teaches us about experience-led growth

Padel has moved quickly from niche to mainstream. What was once a sport discovered on business trips to Spain is now firmly embedded in the UK’s leisure and hospitality landscape. In July 2025, the UK passed a significant milestone: more than 1,000 padel courts across 325 venues nationwide, up from just 68 courts in 2019. Few sports can point to that rate of growth in such a short space of time.

The appeal is easy to understand. Padel is social by design, accessible to beginners, and built around shared experience rather than individual performance. It is as much about connection as competition, a theme that resonates strongly beyond sport.

From my own experience, sport has always been a powerful connector. Whether through rugby, golf, or increasingly padel, the common thread is that people value experiences that bring them together. That insight translates directly into business, particularly within hospitality and leisure-led sectors, where success increasingly depends on repeat engagement rather than one-off transactions.

What’s fascinating about padel’s rise is not just the participation numbers, with hundreds of thousands now playing at least once a year, but the way clubs are being designed. Modern padel venues are rarely just courts. They incorporate cafés, bars, events, corporate days and community initiatives. In effect, they combine sport with hospitality, creating destinations rather than facilities.

There is also a practical resilience to padel that suits the UK market particularly well. The courts are typically simple, enclosed structures, often covered or fully roofed, which limits the impact of seasonality that affects so many traditional sports. This makes padel a more consistent, year-round offering. Many venues have also embraced the repurposing of existing buildings, from warehouses to former retail spaces, helping to keep development costs under control while bringing new life to underused sites. It’s a model that feels well suited to long-term, sustainable growth.

What padel venues understand instinctively is that people don’t just come to play, they come to belong. The strongest clubs think carefully about how space is used throughout the day, how long people stay once they’ve finished playing, and what makes them want to return. Coffee turns into lunch, matches turn into social evenings, and casual visits become routines. Traditional hospitality businesses are grappling with similar questions: how to extend dwell time, how to blend day-time and evening trade, and how to create reasons for repeat visits beyond price or promotion.

In many ways, padel clubs are doing what the best hospitality operators have always done, curating atmosphere as deliberately as product. The court may be the anchor, but the experience is the differentiator.

This model mirrors what we see in the strongest leisure and hospitality businesses more broadly. Those that succeed understand footfall, utilisation, secondary spend and atmosphere as well as the core product. Padel clubs are becoming case studies in how to monetise experience sensibly and sustainably, a balance many sectors continue to wrestle with.

What’s particularly encouraging is that much of this growth is being approached with a degree of financial realism. The conversation within the sector is no longer purely about expansion, but about utilisation, yield and resilience. Adding more courts only works if demand is nurtured thoughtfully, programming is varied, and secondary spend is planned rather than assumed. It’s a reminder that experience-led growth still requires commercial discipline, something hospitality businesses know all too well.

Fast growth without structure rarely lasts. The padel operators that succeed long-term will be those who balance ambition with operational control, ensuring that community engagement and financial sustainability move forward together.

Community, in this context, is not just a social benefit, it’s a commercial one. Venues that invest in local leagues, junior programmes, corporate wellbeing days and inclusive entry points tend to build loyalty that outlasts trends. In hospitality, we see the same pattern. Businesses rooted in their communities often weather economic uncertainty better because they are supported by regulars, advocates and partners rather than relying solely on passing trade.

Padel’s social structure encourages this naturally, but the lesson is transferable. Experiences that make people feel welcome, recognised and included create far more durable value than those built purely on novelty.

Looking ahead to 2026, expectations remain high. Industry projections point towards continued court development, increased corporate involvement and deeper community integration, rather than unchecked expansion. The focus is shifting from ‘how many courts can we build?’ to ‘how well can we use them?’ - a much healthier question for long-term growth.

Globally, padel is following a similar path. With tens of millions of players worldwide and rapid international expansion, the UK remains behind mature markets such as Spain and Italy. But that gap represents opportunity, particularly for operators who understand experience, community and financial discipline. The benefit of arriving slightly later is the ability to learn from what has worked elsewhere, adapting models thoughtfully rather than simply replicating them at scale.

For hospitality businesses considering diversification, partnerships or experience-led extensions to their offer, padel provides a compelling reference point. It shows how global concepts can be embedded locally, how space can be activated creatively, and how community-first thinking can support commercial outcomes.

For me, padel’s rapid rise reinforces a broader lesson. People invest time and money in experiences that feel welcoming, social and well-run. Whether advising businesses at UHY or stepping onto a padel court, the principle is the same. When sport, hospitality and commercial thinking align, momentum follows.

Padel in the UK still feels like it’s in the first half of the match, and 2026 could be a very interesting set.