Padel doesn’t have many agents yet. That’s not a criticism – it’s just a reflection of where the sport sits commercially. Most British players who compete on the FIP tour are self-funded, self-managed, and cobbling together sponsorship deals through personal connections and a lot of persistence. The infrastructure that exists around tennis, football, or golf – the agents, the endorsement pipelines, the PR machinery – hasn’t arrived for padel in any serious way. Not in this country.

Which is why this week’s announcement that Aimee Gibson has signed with CMG Sports is worth pausing on.

CMG is a London-based 360 management agency working across sport, music, and film. It’s not a padel-specific outfit. That’s precisely the point. When a general sports management agency looks at the padel landscape and decides there’s a career worth building around a British player, something has shifted. This is the first time a UK woman has signed with an agency of this kind for her padel career. That’s not marketing spin – it’s a data point about where the sport is heading.

Who is Aimee Gibson?

If you play club padel in Britain and you haven’t come across the name yet, here’s the short version.

Gibson is 34, from Harold Wood in Essex, and left-handed – an asset on the padel court, where a left-hander on the left side of the pair creates natural cross-court angles that right-handers can’t replicate. (The importance of court position and pairing angles is something doubles positioning explains – it’s why left-right pairing matters at every level.) Her favourite shot is the chiquita, which tells you something about her style: she’s a player who likes to keep opponents guessing rather than blast them off the court.

Before padel, she was a tennis player – LTA top-15 nationally – and she discovered the sport at the end of 2022 while coaching in Dubai. It’s a story that will be familiar to anyone who picked up padel by accident. You go somewhere, someone puts a racket in your hand, and something clicks. Within months, Gibson had committed. Within a year, she had turned professional.

She did this, it’s worth noting, as an adult woman in her early thirties with no padel background whatsoever. She wasn’t a junior prodigy coming through a development pathway. She was a competent professional tennis player who identified something she was good at, worked out how good she could become, and backed herself.

What she’s done since

The results suggest she judged it right.

In January 2025, Gibson became the first British padel player – man or woman – to break into the FIP world rankings top 100. She’d set herself a three-year target to do it. She got there in two. Her current ranking sits at world No. 89, with a career high of 81, and she’s been climbing steadily throughout a 2025 season that yielded nine FIP titles in total.

That hat-trick run at the end of last year was the moment many people outside the padel hardcore started paying attention. Three consecutive FIP titles across three successive weekends in November and December – Hong Kong, Crete, Bahrain – with Spanish partner Alba Perez Momha. The pair dropped barely a game across the whole run. In December, she also won the inaugural LTA Padel National Championship alongside Britain’s No. 2, Catherine Rose, making her the first champion of what will become an annual domestic showpiece.

She opened 2026 in the same vein. January brought a semifinal at the FIP Silver in Melbourne – defending champions, so no easy draw – and then in February, a FIP Bronze title in Doha, again with Perez Momha. It was their fourth consecutive title together. The pair intend to stay together for the full season.

The LTA named her Female Padel Player of the Year for 2024. For 2025, they’re probably going to need to renew the trophy cabinet.

What the CMG signing really means

Professional sport runs on commercial partnerships. Prize money helps – FIP tour events pay out, and with nine titles Gibson is collecting regularly – but the bigger picture for a professional athlete is sponsorship, endorsements, and the platform to build a profile that outlasts their playing career.

That infrastructure is almost entirely absent for British padel players right now. The sport is growing fast – courts, clubs, casual players – but the commercial ecosystem around the players themselves is still forming. Most British pros who compete internationally are doing it on very thin margins.

A management agency with CMG’s reach in sport, music, and entertainment changes that calculation. It brings contacts, commercial expertise, and – crucially – credibility with brands who might not yet have a padel player on their radar but can see that padel is worth backing. Gibson becomes the asset that makes padel legible to a broader market.

She’s also, for that purpose, a compelling story. A 34-year-old who switched sports in her early thirties, reached the FIP top 100 faster than she planned, and is now competing against full-time professionals who’ve been playing since their teens. The narrative writes itself.

Whether she reaches her stated goal of world No. 75 and Premier Padel qualifying – the top tier, where the biggest prize money and the largest audiences live – is the competitive question. She’s in range. The FIP Silver events she’s been winning are one step below Premier Padel qualifying level. The gap is closeable.

Why club players should pay attention

Here’s the thing about professional padel in Britain: it exists in a strange position relative to the amateur game. The sport is exploding at club level. Courts are opening across the country, from Govan to Guernsey. The people booking them are people like you – recreational players who’ve found something they love and want more of it.

But the professional side of the sport, the elite circuit, the FIP rankings, the Premier Padel tour – most club players have only a hazy awareness of it. It feels like it belongs to another world. Spanish. Expensive. A bit inaccessible.

Gibson matters for exactly that reason. She is, incontrovertibly, one of us. Not in a patronising sense – she’s an elite professional athlete, and what she does on a padel court most of us can only aspire to. But she picked up a racket for the first time as an adult. She learned the game from scratch. She did it in this country. She trains at Stratford Padel Club.

When someone with that biography reaches the FIP top 100 and signs with a sports management agency, it makes the professional game feel connected to the recreational game. It gives casual players something to follow that doesn’t require knowing the FIP world rankings in depth or caring about a sport you didn’t grow up with.

Britain doesn’t have many padel role models yet. It has one who currently holds a world ranking, wins titles against international opposition, and is now being managed alongside people in sport, music, and film. For the bigger picture on where professional padel in Britain is heading, the R3 Bullpadel Cup piece covers the domestic prize money story – £50,000 and the first serious professional circuit on home soil. That’s a profile the sport in this country has been waiting for.

What happens next

The 2026 season is already well under way for Gibson. She and Perez Momha have Bahrain and Egypt on the schedule following Doha, working through the FIP calendar that will build towards Premier Padel qualifying. Back in Britain, the LTA’s performance competition calendar includes five FIP events, seven Grade 1 domestics, and – in August – the first ever Premier Padel event on British soil.

If things go to plan, she’ll be in or around that field. If they go very well, she’ll be competing at Queen’s or the O2 in front of a home crowd.

That’s the version of events worth wanting. And for the first time in British padel’s short history, it’s not entirely implausible.

Aimee Gibson competes on the FIP Tour as Britain’s women’s No. 1. Follow her at @aimeegibson.x on Instagram.