Somewhere between "fun new racket sport" and "asset class," padel quietly crossed a line most sports never reach: institutional investors now think about it the same way they think about a hotel lobby or a parking garage — as square footage that needs to earn its keep.

The Numbers Behind the Shift

The 2026 Playtomic Global Padel Report — produced with Strategy&, PwC's business strategy consulting arm, and reportedly nicknamed "the Bible of Padel" inside the industry — puts real weight behind this. Nearly 5,000 new padel clubs and almost 8,000 new courts were added globally in 2025 alone, pushing the worldwide total past 20,900 clubs, 58,300 courts, and 19.4 million players. The global padel equipment market hit €598 million in 2025, growing at a 34% compound annual rate since 2019.

But the headline isn't the growth rate. It's the new chapter this year's report dedicates entirely to padel as a real estate asset — something that didn't exist in prior editions. Global real estate advisory giants JLL and CBRE have both stood up dedicated sports-and-entertainment real estate practices. Padel courts are increasingly treated as standard amenities in residential developments, hospitality properties, and mixed-use projects, the same way a gym or a rooftop pool gets baked into a building's pitch to tenants and buyers.

Why Padel Specifically, and Why Now

PwC's Miren Tellería frames the appeal in blunt financial terms: padel courts activate underutilized space efficiently, generate consistent foot traffic for adjacent retail and food-and-beverage tenants, and offer a non-correlated lifestyle hedge that boosts brand equity and tenant retention. Translated out of investor-speak: a padel court is cheap to build relative to other amenities, keeps people coming back regularly, and makes a development feel like a destination instead of just a building.

The report specifically flags the United States as a "Diamond in the Rough" — early-stage relative to Europe, but positioned for outsized long-term growth. Growth here is concentrated in Florida, Texas, California, and select East Coast markets, and it's developing along a different path than Europe did. Rather than spreading through traditional standalone clubs the way it did in Spain, US padel is expanding through premium private clubs, wellness destinations, and luxury residential and hospitality projects — a slower, more curated rollout than the traditional-club boom that built the sport in Europe.

One more detail worth sitting with: the report explicitly describes pickleball not as padel's competitor, but as its gateway. The theory is that pickleball's mass-market recreational boom is softening up American consumers for racket sports broadly, which makes them more receptive to padel once they're exposed to it — meaning every backyard pickleball court arguably makes the next padel court's business case a little easier.

Why This Should Change How You Think About Padel's US Trajectory

Sports don't usually attract this kind of institutional capital interest unless something in the underlying economics genuinely works, not just because a sport looks trendy. When JLL and CBRE build entire practices around a category, that's a signal about durable demand, not hype. If you've been watching padel's US growth and wondering whether it's a fad following pickleball's shadow or something building its own separate momentum, this is a real answer: professional real estate capital is treating it as the latter.

• If you're watching for where padel shows up next in the US, look at premium mixed-use and hospitality developments before you look at dedicated standalone clubs — that's where the growth is actually concentrated right now
• The "early innings" framing from Playtomic's own leadership isn't just optimism — the US added roughly 250 new clubs and 330 new courts in 2025 alone, a fraction of what the report expects over the next several years