What an awards night tells you about a sport

On Saturday 16 May 2026, around 600 people dressed in black tie walked into Victoria Warehouse in Manchester for an awards night – about padel.

There were coaches who run beginner sessions at leisure centres. Club managers who spent last year negotiating planning permission. Players who turned professional six months ago. Brands that didn’t exist three years ago. Content creators with a hundred thousand followers and none at all. And somewhere in the room: Ryan Giggs, Lily James, and Jason Manford collecting a trophy for a non-profit padel academy he runs for underprivileged young people.

The British Padel Awards is a new event. It has never happened before. And the fact that it happened at all – that 600 people turned up in evening wear, that headline sponsorship came from Cupra, that Anthony Daulphin spent years making it real from an idea he had as a padel-obsessed amateur in Liverpool – is worth sitting with for a moment.

What the room said

There is a version of this story that is pure padel boosterism. The sport is growing. A lot of people are excited. An awards night was held. This is fine.

The more interesting version is about infrastructure. When a sport develops the cultural infrastructure to hold an awards night – 21 categories, proper MC hosts in Sky Sports journalists Gail Davis and Jo Wilson, a room big enough that half the people in it have probably never met – it has crossed a threshold. It has stopped being a trend and started being a scene.

Daulphin put it plainly: “There were so many people from the UK industry in one room, and they weren’t wearing shorts and carrying a racket; they were there to celebrate.” That’s the signal. These are people who have built things inside British padel – clubs, coaching programmes, brands, communities – and they wanted a moment to acknowledge it.

His instinct for timing was sound. The LTA has since announced that the UK now has one million padel players across 1,825 courts at 551 venues. The infrastructure is there. The community is there. The awards gave the community somewhere to look at itself.

What 21 categories cover

The breadth of the category list is worth reading as an index of where British padel has arrived.

Player awards are obvious – Best Male, Best Female, Best Young Talent (Rosie Quirk, 16, took U18). But the list extends into Best Court Installation, Best Experience and Trip Provider, Best Equipment Innovation, Community Initiative of the Year, Partnership Award, and a dedicated Adaptive Player Award – won by Jack Binstead, whose recognition sat on equal footing with the player awards rather than as a separate track.

That last detail is the kind of signal that gets lost in a winners list. The Adaptive Player Award being a headlining category in the inaugural edition says something about the kind of sport British padel wants to be, before it has had decades to ossify into habits.

The Club Manager of the Year went to Oskar Wynne at Rocket Padel Ilford, the same organisation that took Best Padel Club Operator. Two awards to the same operation suggests the judges found an operator setting the standard – and that the category structure is specific enough to have a meaningful answer.

Community Initiative of the Year went to Empower Padel, whose work reaching underserved communities sits alongside Jason Manford’s JM Padel Academy non-profit in pointing at something: the awards were not purely a commercial celebration. Alongside the venue openings and investment rounds and Cupra sponsorships, there were people doing work that doesn’t show up in a balance sheet, and the night found room for them.

The sport it describes

UK padel started, in any meaningful public sense, at Huddersfield Lawn Tennis and Squash Club in April 2011. Fifteen years from those first outdoor courts to an awards gala at a Victorian warehouse in Manchester with a thousand-person player base grown to a million is a pace of development that surprised people who were there at the beginning.

The numbers behind it are worth stating: the LTA estimates 15,000 players in 2019, rising to 400,000 by 2024, and now past a million. Planning applications for padel courts surged 113% in 2025. Purpose-built venues are open in cities that had no padel infrastructure three years ago.

None of that on its own produces an awards night. You can have a million players and no community, no culture, no moment where the people building the sport gather to acknowledge each other. That takes someone deciding it matters – and enough people in the industry agreeing to show up.

The British Padel Awards coverage captures the full winners list and the mechanics of the evening. The cultural read is slightly different: this is the moment British padel decided it had earned a ritual.

From black tie to court shoes

Six weeks after the ceremony, the BPA CUPRA Cup moves the same community back onto a court. The tournament takes place on Saturday 27 June at Racketeer in London – the same venue that hosted Manu Martín’s London masterclass clinics last month, and one of Europe’s largest indoor racket sports facilities.

The format is Fast4Padel: first to four games wins the set, no-ad scoring, tiebreak at 3-3. Round-robin groups feed into knockouts, with enough matches in the day that you get court time regardless of how the bracket falls. The field is open to recreational players outside the LTA top rankings.

What the CUPRA Cup does, sitting six weeks after the ceremony, is convert the awards from a one-night moment into a calendar fixture. The people who were in that room in Manchester – and the people who couldn’t go but watched the coverage – have somewhere to take that energy. A community doesn’t form at a gala; it forms through recurring contact, through shared experiences across multiple occasions. The tournament is the second beat.

If you have been playing padel for a year or two and want to test yourself in something that feels like a proper occasion without requiring elite ranking, 27 June is worth considering. Register interest at britishpadelawards.co.uk – entry details follow through the BPA channels.

What comes next

The British Padel Awards returns in 2027. The BPA CUPRA Cup is on 27 June. Premier Padel London P1 runs at Olympia from 4 to 9 August. The calendar has cultural weight now alongside competitive weight.

Sports build identity through repetition – the same events in the same windows, year after year, until they become things people plan around. British padel is at the stage where those events are being invented. The awards is one of them. Whether it becomes the annual fixture that the sport deserves will depend on what the second edition looks like, who shows up, and whether the community that turned out in force in Manchester decides this is worth continuing.

The indicators from the first edition are strong. The room filled. The sponsors committed. Daulphin described it as “the biggest thing I’ve ever done.” And 600 people who build British padel for a living chose to spend a Saturday evening together in formal wear, celebrating the sport they play and work in.

That’s not nothing. In a sport that has grown from fifteen thousand players to a million in seven years, a moment like this is exactly what comes next.