Is padel a fad?

The question is worth taking seriously, even if most people asking it are looking for reassurance.

UK padel has grown faster than almost any sport in recent memory. Player numbers went from roughly 15,000 in 2019 to more than 400,000 by 2024 and about 1,000,000 by May 2026, according to LTA data. The LTA now counts 1,825 courts across 551 venues, up from a handful of venues a decade ago. Trademark applications using the word “padel” surged 148% to 270 in the year to March 2025 – compared to just 23 for tennis.

That is either the beginning of something with deep roots, or the classic shape of a hype cycle before it peaks.

The honest answer is: we don’t know yet. Here is what the evidence shows.

The case for fad

Fast growth is not evidence of lasting sport. It is evidence of successful marketing. Padel’s early UK expansion was driven by the same forces that powered every social sport hype in the last decade: Instagram-friendly venues, celebrity association, high-end leisure positioning, and the particular appeal of a sport that looks impressive on video before you’ve even hit a ball.

The investment profile is also classically boom-like. Private equity has moved into padel at pace. Multi-site operators raised tens of millions in capital during 2023 and 2024 on growth projections that assumed the player base would keep expanding indefinitely. That kind of capital formation tends to create supply that runs well ahead of actual demand.

Sweden is the cautionary comparison everyone in the industry is discussing – and rightly so. That country added thousands of courts in under four years, most of them funded by borrowed capital. When participation growth slowed and energy costs spiked, roughly 90 padel businesses went bankrupt in a single year. We Are Padel, one of the biggest operators, entered restructuring and planned to close around half its venues.

The UK is at an earlier stage of the same curve. In parts of London – Wandsworth, Putney – multiple padel venues are competing for the same relatively small pool of local players. The LTA CEO has publicly flagged sustainability concerns. In June 2026, InsiderSport ran a piece with the headline question: is UK padel about to crash?

You can find a court near you. The question is whether that court will still be running in three years.

The case for staying power

Sweden built on sand. The UK is building on something more solid, even if it doesn’t always look like it from the outside.

Start with the governing-body position. The LTA formally adopted padel as part of its remit and has been active in funding court development through its Quick Access Loan scheme. Sweden had no equivalent governing body backing at the point of rapid expansion. That matters because LTA involvement means padel is structurally embedded in British racket-sport culture, with a player pipeline that tennis never fully abandoned.

The tournament infrastructure is also far beyond what you’d expect of a fad sport. There were over 670 LTA-sanctioned padel tournaments in 2025. Compare that with the early years of other sports that briefly caught on and then faded – those sports don’t generate 670 competitive events in a single year. Tournaments mean organised competition, which means people who care enough to travel, pay entry fees, and keep playing through the winter months. That’s a different kind of engagement from “I tried it once at a corporate away day.”

Then there’s the trademark data. 270 padel trademark applications in the year to March 2025 sounds like a bureaucratic statistic. It isn’t. Trademark applications cost money and require commercial intent. They represent businesses betting on padel’s future with real capital. When a legal team advises a company to protect a padel-related brand, they’re not doing it because the sport looks briefly trendy – they’re doing it because the client intends to be in this market for years.

Nick Baker, who works on padel development and spoke at the World Padel Summit, has pointed to the junior pipeline as the real metric. Children playing padel at 10 are padel players at 30. Spain – where padel has proven long-term resilience despite economic cycles – built its base through community clubs and school programmes. The UK is behind on juniors, but the infrastructure for junior development through the LTA is at least in place.

The comparison with Spain is worth holding. Padel in Spain has survived multiple economic crises and still has around 20 million players. That durability comes from community roots – padel in Spain is woven into ordinary social life, a sport you play at a local club with your neighbours on a Tuesday evening, as unremarkable as five-a-side football. The UK is not Spain. But clubs like Carbon Padel in Manchester – which has a formal community use agreement with MCRActive and runs sessions for over-50s, women, and wheelchair players – suggest that the community model is being built here too.

What the verdict requires

The question “is padel a fad?” is the wrong question, because it implies a binary outcome: the sport either becomes permanent or it disappears. The more useful question is: which version of UK padel survives?

The Instagram-driven, high-end, premium-venue version is the version at risk. The community-driven, LTA-backed, tournament-playing, junior-recruiting version has a reasonable case for durability. Both exist right now, often in the same city.

The LTA’s formal backing and the British Padel Awards – now in their second year, drawing 21 categories and hundreds of entrants – tell you something about the depth of the community that has formed around this sport. You don’t build award ceremonies for fads. You build them for sports that have constituencies who care.

But none of that is sufficient on its own. The industry needs to make specific calls that it hasn’t fully made yet.

What needs to happen

If padel is going to outlast the hype, three things need to happen that are currently not happening reliably.

Junior programmes. This is the most important one. Baker’s argument is right: if the sport doesn’t convert children now, it will face a participation gap in ten years when the original cohort ages out and there’s no one coming through. The LTA has the framework. Individual clubs need to run the sessions. Right now, junior padel in the UK is patchy and inconsistent outside the big urban centres.

Community club infrastructure. The high-end venue model is not a mass-participation model. A recreational player in a mid-sized town cannot sustain a sport at £30–£45 per hour, two sessions a week, for the rest of their life. The sports that last are the sports that embed themselves in the local club structure – the leisure centre court, the community club that charges £8–£10 per person and opens at 7am for working players. That model exists in places, but it is not the dominant model yet.

Operator discipline. Parts of the UK are already in local oversupply. If operators continue opening courts in areas that can’t support them – funded by capital that requires unrealistic occupancy to service – the correction that follows will damage the whole sector’s reputation, not just the operators who overextended. Sweden’s crash poisoned investor sentiment for years. The UK doesn’t need a repeat.

Padel is not a fad in the sense that pickleball is a fad, or that those inflatable axe-throwing venues were a fad. It is a sport with real merit, solid community infrastructure, and enough governing-body backing to survive the hype phase. The version that survives will be the version built on courts at leisure centres, junior sessions on Tuesday afternoons, and social ladders that are open to everyone who wants to play.

That’s the padel worth betting on.