Padel news: Why padel’s biggest returns now hinge on the district, not the country
Sports News Blitz have teamed up with Saidja Drentje, partner at CAA Portas, to keep us updated on all the latest news from the world of padel.
When I opened one of the first padel clubs in Al Quoz, Dubai, the warning from investors was always the same: too many clubs opening nearby would split the market and destroy demand.
The opposite happened. Al Quoz is now the world’s leading padel supercluster – roughly 40 clubs and more than 200 courts packed into a single industrial district.
The clubs that were supposed to cannibalise each other instead manufactured demand together.
That counterintuitive lesson is the starting point for CAA Portas’ new report, Padel Superclusters, and the Global Hotspot Index it introduces.
Global growth, local value
Padel’s headline numbers are spectacular.
The sport has grown from around 10,000 courts in 2016 to more than 77,000 today, expanding at roughly 21% a year, with around 35 million players across 150-plus countries.
On current trajectory, it should pass 90,000 courts by 2027–28.
But aggregate growth hides the more important truth: padel’s economics are not spreading evenly – they are concentrating.
Around 70% of the world’s courts sit in just 15 countries, and even within those countries, value pools in specific districts rather than across whole cities.
Stockholm, Bali, and Buenos Aires are all padel-rich, yet their courts are scattered across the metropolitan area, never reaching the density that creates true cluster economics.
Only two superclusters
To separate genuine clusters from dispersed growth, we screened around 30 candidate districts worldwide and scored each on the Hotspot Index – a composite measure built on scale (total courts) and density (courts per square kilometre).
Only two districts clearly crossed the supercluster threshold:
Al Quoz, Dubai – index score 94
Alcobendas, Madrid – index score 87
The third-placed district scored 75, a material drop.
Beyond the top two, cluster strength falls away sharply.
The flywheel
What sets superclusters apart is not infrastructure; it’s economics.
Once court density crosses a critical threshold, the district enters a self-reinforcing flywheel.
Density creates player liquidity – the near-certainty of finding a game at the right level and time.
Liquidity drives utilisation; high utilisation supports stable pricing; pricing power attracts capital; and fresh capital deepens the ecosystem with leagues, coaching, and events that pull in still more players.
Playtomic’s data underlines why this works: around 90% of padel players use more than one club, and roughly 88% are willing to travel to play.
Crucially, clustering rewards competition rather than punishing it.
When strong clubs sit close together, operators are forced to raise their game – operationally, commercially, and in the experience they offer.
Two roads to the same place
The two superclusters got there in completely different ways.
Al Quoz was capital-led: concentrated investment into a central industrial corridor with cheap, large warehouse space and a ready expat player base, reaching critical density in under a decade.
Alcobendas was ecosystem-led: built over more than 50 years on Madrid’s deep sports culture and an affluent corporate catchment, with supply added in successive layers.
Al Quoz’s clubs sit a median of 247 metres apart; Alcobendas’ sit 511 metres apart.
Different histories, different structures – the same self-reinforcing economics.
The mega-club myth
One assumption the data did not support: that giant flagship venues create clusters.
Of the world’s 15 largest padel clubs, only two sit inside a supercluster – both in Alcobendas.
Mega-clubs turn out to be a lagging indicator of a mature ecosystem, not the mechanism that builds one.
Density is assembled one mid-sized venue at a time.
What it means – including for the UK
For investors and operators, the strategic implication is significant: city selection is becoming secondary, and district selection increasingly drives returns.
Underwriting national growth rates is the wrong lens; the right one is district-level density, liquidity, and catchment quality.
For the UK, that framing is timely.
Britain is one of padel’s fastest-growing but least mature markets, with court supply still well below European norms.
London’s Stratford is on our shortlist of districts to watch – rapid expansion and institutional operators are arriving, but operator density is not yet deep enough to sustain a true cluster.
We expect that to take three to five years.
The same pattern holds for a handful of districts globally; we forecast fewer than 10 new true clusters worldwide over the next five years.
Padel’s first decade was about expansion.
Its next will be about concentration – and the winners will be decided street by street, not country by country.
The full Padel Superclusters report, including the complete Hotspot Index and district-by-district analysis, is available from CAA Portas. Saidja Drentje is a partner at CAA Portas, where she leads the global racket sports practice. She is a former Netherlands national tennis player and founded one of the first padel clubs in Dubai.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Betting analysis: 10bet review - Markets, odds and best free bets
