Padel - A Brief History
The year is 2024, and padel is growing at an exponential rate all over the globe. Thousands of new players are stepping on court, every single day. For those of you who have already got the padel bug, living in echo chambers replete with padel aficionados, it is easy to forget that the majority of Brits still think padel is something that you do standing up, on the water.
Undoubtedly, padel has come a long way from its humble beginnings, but it still has much further to go. Maybe you’re picking up a racquet for the first time and wondering ‘where on earth did this sport come from?’. Maybe you’re already hitting bandejas like Paquito Navarro and just want to know more; either way, here is a brief history of how padel came about.
The Birth of Padel
1969 - Acapulco, Mexico
Whilst Neil Armstrong was taking one small step for man, Enrique Corcuera, a millionaire Mexican down in Acapulco, was making one giant leap for padel.
There are various theories as to why Enrique decided to create the game. Here are a couple:
Upon moving from a house with a tennis court, Enrique's wife Viviana, was desperate to keep up her favourite hobby, tennis. Due to insufficient space, Enrique had to come up with a solution (or potentially lose his wife!) - the end product was a miniature tennis court surrounded on all sides by concrete walls. The rules of padel evolved from that point onwards.
Enrique was a great lover of fronton (or basque pelota), a game played against a wall. Enrique’s court had significant issues, namely, that the ball would tend to end up in the neighbours garden. To avoid this, Enrique installed a second wall and placed a net in between the walls, thus padel was born.
The second of the theories seems to be the most prevalent on the internet. Some say it was a platform tennis court rather than a fronton court that laid the foundations for padel. What is clear is that Enrique had a small amount of space, 20 metres by 10 metres, that he was determined to play a ball game in. Through trial and error and the construction of various walls (to keep plants at bay more than anything else), padel was the game that eventually emerged.
The first ever padel court in Acapulco
The Corcueras posing for a photo
The First Padel Export
1974 - Marbella, Spain
Our second padel protagonist is Prince Alfonso De Hohenlohe, the playboy ‘father figure’ of Marbella. When visiting his friend Enrique in Acapulco, Alfonso became so enamoured with ‘Paddle Corcuera’ as it was called, that he noted down the court dimensions, flew back to his ‘Marbella Club’, and built the first ever padel courts in Spain.
Alfonso tinkered with the rules in order to make it a more dynamic and competitive game. Thanks to this tinkering, padel courts are now surrounded by mesh walls, not just solid ones. Initially, due to the exclusive nature of Marbella and the ‘Marbella Club’, padel was only played by the uppermost echelons of society; things have since moved on. Spain now has over
20,000 courts and padel is the country's second most played sport behind only football.
Prince Alfonso De Hohenlohe
Padel Arrives in Argentina
1975 - Mar del Plata, Argentina
One of the many opulent visitors to Alfonso’s Marbella club was Argentine millionaire Julio Menditenguia. Like Alfonso, Julio quickly became a padel convert and decided to import the sport to his home country. Initially played exclusively at private family residences and high end hotels, padel quickly captured the attention of a nation and spread like wildfire - Argentina now has over 10,000 courts.
Fifty five years on, the early uptake of padel in Spain and Argentina is still reflected at the sport’s highest level. Spaniards and Argentianians such as Fernando Belasteguín and Juan Martín Díaz have long dominated the professional circuit as well as the World Cup. Today the likes of Augustín Tapia and Juan Lebrón are ensuring that the trend continues.
A New Spectator Sport
1987 - Argentina
As aforementioned, padel picked up speed relatively quickly in Argentina and it was here, not Spain, that the first professional circuit was established. Horacio Alvarez Clemente, former world no.1 and coach to many more world no.1s, was a competitor in this pioneering Argentinian circuit. In an interview Horacio recounts that at the beginning they “played for prizes that were irrelevant”. The winnings may have been irrelevant but the developments to the game itself certainly weren't.
During these early years Coca-Cola took an interest in padel and became something of a patron of the sport. Somewhere down the line the notion of transparent walls started to take hold, and with the backing of Coca-Cola that notion became a reality. The first ‘palacio de cristal’ (or crystal palace) was born. This development marked a watershed moment for both court construction and the game as a spectator sport.
1992, Seville. The first ever ‘Palacio de Cristal’ in Europe was shipped from Argentina for the first Padel World Championship
The Standardisation of Padel
1991 - Madrid, Spain
Representatives from the Spanish, Argentinian and Uruguayan padel associations held a meeting in La Moraleja, Madrid and the International Federation (FIP) was formed. In anticipation of the first ever World Championship in 1992, representatives of each country put their heads together and agreed upon the rules that we now use today.
Two years later in 1993 the Sports Council of Spain recognised padel as a sport and changed the sports name from ‘paddle’ to ‘padel’ to better reflect the spanish pronunciation.
The Future of Padel
Cultivated almost exclusively in Spain and Argentina for 45 years, padel has only begun to reach wider, non hispanic audiences in the past 10. The sport is now gaining popularity at an unprecedented pace with over 25 million people currently playing padel in 110 countries, compared to 16 million just two years ago.
Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) recently acquired the leading professional padel circuit, World Padel Tour, with the aim of ‘growing the sport everywhere’. With the backing of QSI, a subsidiary of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund, the pace of growth won’t be slowing any time soon.
By 2026, the Deloitte estimates that the padel market will double from 2 billion euros to 4 billion. Here in the UK, home to a meagre 400 courts, we have a long and exciting journey ahead of us.
