On Saturday 16 May 2026, around 700 people gathered at Victoria Warehouse in Manchester for a black-tie gala celebrating British padel. Players, coaches, club managers, brand founders, and content creators – dressed up, in one room, with 21 awards handed out.
The British Padel Awards is a new event. This is the first one. And the fact it exists at all says something about where the sport has arrived.
Why this moment matters for UK padel
Five years ago, a black-tie padel awards night in Britain would have been a joke – the sport didn’t have the infrastructure, the community, or the profile to fill a venue like Victoria Warehouse. It does now.
The UK padel scene has grown at a pace that has surprised even its most optimistic backers. Planning applications for padel courts surged 113% in 2025. Purpose-built venues have opened in cities that hadn’t heard of the sport three years ago. The LTA has been running padel categories in its own annual awards since 2023 – but dedicated recognition, specifically for padel, at scale, has been missing. The UK padel competitive calendar has expanded rapidly, yet the community lacked a moment to reflect on it.
That gap is what Anthony Daulphin set out to fill. The Birmingham-born entrepreneur based in Liverpool discovered padel on a family holiday, started playing at Liverpool Cricket Club, and began hosting local tournaments. He founded a padel apparel brand, Rêve Le, and then turned his attention to the bigger picture: a proper awards platform for the British padel community.
“These awards are about recognising excellence at every level and celebrating the incredible progress padel is making throughout Britain,” Daulphin has said. The event is backed by headline sponsor Cupra, with gold sponsorship from Este Medical Group, Led Projects, Lusotendas, and Slazenger Padel Clubs – a line-up that reflects the commercial seriousness now attached to the sport.
The 21 categories
The awards span five broad areas. Here is the full list of what was recognised on the night.
Players and performance
- Best Male Player
- Best Female Player
- Best Young Talent (U18)
- Best Coach
- Adaptive Player Award
Clubs and venues
- Padel Club of the Year
- Best Padel Club Operator
- Club Manager of the Year
- Best Padel Experience/Trip Provider
- Best Court Installation/Construction Company
- Best Padel Event/Tournament Coverage
Equipment and brands
- Best Racket Supplier/Brand
- Best Apparel and Footwear Brand
- Best Equipment Innovation
Community and partnerships
- Community Initiative of the Year
- Partnership Award
Media and influence
- Best Podcast
- Padel Influencer of the Year
- Best Social Media Content Creator
- Padel Ambassador Award
- Celebrity Padel Enthusiast of the Year
The breadth is deliberate. Player awards are the obvious headline, but the clubs category is arguably where most of the work in British padel has happened – the venue builders, operators, and managers who have taken the sport from leisure centre annexe to purpose-built destination. The community and partnership categories acknowledge the grassroots side: schools programmes, local council collaborations, initiatives that have brought padel to people who would never have found it through commercial routes alone.
Who is being recognised
Specific shortlists were announced across all 21 categories, with public voting open ahead of the ceremony. Among those nominated was Minter Dial, whose podcast The Joy of Padel received a nomination in the Best Podcast category, alongside nominations in Padel Ambassador, Influencer of the Year, and Innovation and Technology.
The Celebrity Padel Enthusiast of the Year category reflects padel’s increasingly high-profile following in British sport and entertainment. Play Padel Sheffield’s co-owner Joe Root – England’s cricket captain – is among those who have brought the sport into mainstream sporting culture.
The Adaptive Player Award is worth noting for its signal about where the sport wants to go. Giving players with disabilities their own award category within a dedicated ceremony – a listed category on equal footing with the rest – is a marker of maturity.
The venue: Victoria Warehouse, Manchester
Victoria Warehouse sits on Trafford Wharf Road – a converted Victorian storage facility that has become one of Manchester’s most well-regarded event spaces. It handles scale without losing atmosphere: around 700 guests in black tie, across an evening that included dinner, presentations, and the kind of networking that a sport with this much commercial activity has earned.
Manchester makes sense as the location. The city and its region have been one of the engines of British padel growth – venues have opened in Salford, Stockport, and Manchester itself, and the North West padel community is one of the most active in the country.
What the evening looked like
Masters of ceremony were Gail Davis and Jo Wilson, both Sky journalists with sports broadcasting experience. The combination of sports media credentials and padel familiarity kept the evening moving at the right pace for an audience that knows the sport and wanted it celebrated properly, never explained to them.
The ceremony followed a format familiar from other sports awards nights: drinks, dinner, the awards themselves, and an extended social. For many of the coaches, club managers, and smaller operators in the room, it was one of the few occasions where they shared a space with the people building the sport around them.
What it signals for the sport
The LTA has been the institutional home for padel recognition in Britain, folding padel into its wider tennis awards since 2023. That has worked as a transitional arrangement – it acknowledged padel’s arrival without fully separating it from its racket-sport cousins.
A standalone awards event is a different statement. It says the community is large enough, and distinctive enough, to merit its own occasion. It says the commercial ecosystem – the brands, the venues, the media outlets – has reached a point where gathering them under one roof produces a room worth filling. And it says the sport’s growth is no longer a niche story covered only by padel-specific outlets.
Whether the British Padel Awards becomes an annual fixture – and grows with the sport – will depend on what follows in the years ahead. But the decision to create it, and the response from sponsors and the community, suggests the timing was right.
For casual players, the awards offer something slightly different from a trophy night for professionals: a window into the infrastructure behind the sport they play. The coaches who run beginner sessions, the club managers who keep courts booked, the installers who built the courts themselves – these were the people on the shortlists. They are the ones who made the sport accessible.
The winners
All 21 categories were decided on the night of 16 May at Victoria Warehouse. Here is the full list.
| Category | Winner |
|---|---|
| Best Male Player | Louie Harris |
| Best Female Player | Aimee Gibson |
| Best Young Talent (U18) | Rosie Quirk |
| Best Coach | Sue Morrison |
| Adaptive Player Award | Jack Binstead |
| Padel Club of the Year | Padel Maidenhead |
| Best Padel Club Operator | Rocket Padel |
| Club Manager of the Year | Oskar Wynne (Rocket Padel Ilford) |
| Best Padel Experience/Trip Provider | Padel Travel X |
| Best Court Installation/Construction | Hexa Padel |
| Best Event/Tournament Coverage | UK Padel Convention/Padel Directory |
| Best Racket Supplier/Brand | Raquex |
| Best Apparel and Footwear Brand | Palair |
| Best Equipment Innovation | Name That Ball |
| Community Initiative of the Year | Empower Padel |
| Partnership Award | Access Padel x Rocket Padel Ilford |
| Best Podcast | Joy of Padel |
| Padel Influencer of the Year | Padel With Holly |
| Best Social Media Content Creator | Everything Padel |
| Padel Ambassador Award | Ben Nichols |
| Celebrity Padel Enthusiast of the Year | Jason Manford |
Notable winners
Jack Binstead – Adaptive Player Award
Binstead’s win carried weight beyond the individual category. The Adaptive Player Award sits in the same tier as Best Male and Female Player – not a separate track, not an afterthought, but a named category with equal standing in the programme. For a sport that has grown rapidly through commercial and recreational routes, building inclusion into the awards structure from the inaugural edition is a meaningful signal of intent.
Jason Manford – Celebrity Padel Enthusiast of the Year
Manford is more than a well-known face who picked up a racket. He runs JM Padel Academy, a non-profit dedicated to introducing underprivileged young people to the sport. His win sat alongside Empower Padel’s Community Initiative award – two different kinds of recognition pointing at the same theme: that the sport’s reach is widening beyond the demographic that arrived first.
Rocket Padel – Best Padel Club Operator and Club Manager of the Year
Both awards going to the same organisation tells a clear story about who is setting the operational standard in British padel. Oskar Wynne of Rocket Padel Ilford took Club Manager of the Year alongside the organisation’s operator award – a double recognition that reflects consistent performance across individual and company level, not a one-off result.
Empower Padel – Community Initiative of the Year
The Community Initiative category, alongside the Adaptive Player Award and Manford’s win, made one thing clear: the night was not purely a commercial celebration. Empower Padel’s recognition pointed at the grassroots work that sits alongside the venue openings and investment rounds – the initiatives reaching communities that the mainstream padel market has been slower to include.
What comes next
The CUPRA Cup tournament takes place on 27 June 2026 in Manchester – a title sponsorship that underlines how seriously the sport’s commercial partners are now treating British padel as a calendar fixture rather than an experiment. In August, Premier Padel London P1 runs at Olympia from 4 to 9 August, bringing the elite international circuit to British soil for the first time.
The British Padel Awards will return in 2027. The second edition starts from a stronger base – a confirmed format, a demonstrated appetite, and a community that turned out in force for the first.
The sport’s calendar now has cultural infrastructure to match its competitive one.