Gareth Southgate has said this himself: since stepping down as England manager after Euro 2024, he has been playing “golf and a bit of padel, tennis as well – what’s not to like?” That quote surfaced in interviews last autumn, and most people filed it away as the kind of thing retired football managers say when asked what they’re doing with themselves.
Last Saturday, the padel part stopped being an offhand remark.
Southgate was on court at Surge Padel in Harrogate for Martin House’s first-ever Padel Open – a charity tournament raising money for a children’s hospice that provides palliative care across West, North, and East Yorkshire. About sixty players competed across two leagues: competitive and social. Southgate entered the social league. The former England manager, who turned 54 in September, is a padel amateur. Just like your partner who keeps lobbying you into the back glass.
The tournament was organised by Padel 4 The People, sponsored by Apollo Capital Group, and fortified throughout by Yorkshire Tea. Martin House’s Pamela Newby called it a great success. Around £6,500 was raised. The competitive winners were Richard Watts and Alexis Twigg; the social league was won by Matt Welsh and Dan Ross. Southgate, for the record, did not take home a trophy.
Southgate plays padel regularly
He wasn’t there as a figurehead. Southgate is a Martin House ambassador – a long-standing relationship, not a one-day PR arrangement – and padel is something he has returned to repeatedly since leaving the England job. In post-management interviews, he listed it alongside golf and tennis as what he does now, in the same breath, with the same casualness. The coding of that tells you something: padel has arrived at the point where a 54-year-old former football manager mentions it as a default leisure activity.
He also changed his official profession to “company director” after leaving the FA. His current portfolio includes working as a UEFA technical observer, delivering a course at Harvard on leadership, writing a book, and continuing his charitable commitments – including Martin House. Somewhere in there, there are padel sessions.
No direct quotes from Southgate appear in any coverage of the event. He was simply there, competing in a social league on a Saturday morning in Yorkshire for a children’s hospice. Which is, when you set it out plainly, a very padel story.
Why football does padel on its days off
Five regional outlets covered the Harrogate Padel Open. All of them reported the same facts in roughly the same order: Southgate was there, it was for Martin House, a good time was had. None asked the more interesting question, which is: why is this happening at all?
The celebrity-and-padel overlap in Britain is now a proper pattern. Andy Murray invested in Game4Padel and plays regularly. Peter Crouch has courts near his Cheshire home and has had a one-on-one session with Murray. Bradley Walsh was filmed on a padel holiday alongside Peter Jones and John Terry. Theo Walcott, Izzy Christiansen, and Laura Robson have all played the Pro-Am Padel Tour. Dion Dublin, Joleon Lescott, and Phil Jones competed at the Battersea Power Station Pro-Am. Jason Manford runs a padel academy for schoolchildren. Pippa Middleton plays.
Across Europe, the link between football and padel runs even deeper. Didier Deschamps and Zinedine Zidane are both regular players – because in France and Spain, padel is simply what footballers do when they retire, the same way British ones used to take up golf. That shift is now showing up here, and Southgate is one of its clearest signals.
Golf was the sport of the football manager. Slow, solitary, status-coded. Padel is social, fast, and accessible – you can book a court for four people at a time that suits everyone, play for ninety minutes, and get a proper workout without needing to be good. For someone who has spent thirty years in elite sport and is now winding down into something that still feels competitive without the pressure, that is an obvious appeal. Football clubs across the UK are already building padel courts – the culture that created those venues and the culture that put Southgate on court in Harrogate are part of the same movement.
It is also worth noting where Saturday happened. UK padel is growing fastest outside London, and Harrogate – home to Surge Padel at Hornbeam Park – is a good example of the regional venues that have been building serious facilities without much fanfare. Yorkshire has been one of the stronger growth areas for the sport over the past two years. The Four Nations Padel Championship, taking place later this month in Leeds, is another marker of the same trend.
Sixty people in Yorkshire on a Saturday
The social vs competitive split in the Harrogate Padel Open is worth dwelling on for a moment. Southgate did not enter the competitive league. He played in the social – the accessible one, designed for players who want a proper game in a low-pressure format. That is exactly the format padel’s growth has been built on. The Americano and social ladder formats are what fills courts at clubs across the UK on weekday evenings and weekend mornings. They are how 60 people in a mid-sized Yorkshire town end up spending a March Saturday on a padel court for a children’s hospice.
Martin House – which cares for children and young people with life-shortening conditions, and provides respite support for their families – raised roughly £6,500 from the day. That is a meaningful number for a specialist hospice. It is also a meaningful number for padel’s standing in the community: the sport is now mature enough to anchor a charity fundraiser of this kind, in a region where four years ago you would have struggled to find a court.
The Padel Open will presumably happen again. There will be more events like it, across more venues, for more causes. Southgate will play golf on other days. On this one, he played padel in Yorkshire for a children’s hospice, and did not win the social league. That’s what a mainstream sport looks like.