When Mark Hewlett opened Soul Padel’s first club in Stockport in June 2024, there were four other padel clubs in Greater Manchester. There are now 58.
That is roughly the shape of the last three years in UK padel. More than a million people now play, up from around 15,000 in 2019, and the number of courts has grown from 69 to almost 1,800 over the same period. Gross booking value across the sector is estimated at close to £290 million a year, growing by more than half again year on year. Numbers like that invite a simple explanation: padel arrived, and Britain fell for it.
More than a million people now play, up from around 15,000 in 2019, and the number of courts has grown from 69 to almost 1,800 over the same period.
These kinds of numbers get repeated a lot in padel, and it is genuinely remarkable. But it also risks becoming the whole story, when the more interesting shift is happening one level up, in who is now building these businesses and what they are borrowing from to do it.
Take Padel Social Club, the clearest example of the sector’s professionalisation to date. “Backed by Active Partners and Stormzy, the business recently brought in Jen Zweibel, who spent more than eleven years running clubs at Equinox, as managing director to run the day-to-day operation, working alongside founder and CEO Kristian Hunter, who continues to lead the business and its new site development.”
“The court is the reason that people show up, but the experience is why they stay.” – Lauren van der Westhuizen
Jen is explicit that she is importing a fitness-industry playbook rather than inventing a padel one. “Getting service standards written down and trained, and not left to instinct,” is how she describes it, adding that “managers own their numbers and get measured on a weekly basis,” with decisions being made on data, and not “gut feel”.
Interestingly for a sports proposition, the focus on hospitality is turning out to be where these different philosophies show up most sharply. Lauren van der Westhuizen, founder of House of Racquet, which is backed by angel investors including Fitness First founder, Mike Balfour O.B.E., treats hospitality as core rather than incidental. “The court is the reason that people show up, but the experience is why they stay,” she told us. “For us, how you’re welcomed and looked after – and your experience off-court, is just as important as the quality of the courts and coaching. In an age of disconnection and changing behaviours around how we work and socialise, we’re building third-spaces that deliver meaningful social connection.”
Soul Padel has taken this in a different direction, by going further down the health and wellness route – it never serves alcohol and instead leans on healthy food, coffee-led dwell space and a loyalty scheme called Soulmates, built on status rather than spend. “It’s amazing how much a free T-shirt makes you feel good,” Mark explains, “because you’re wearing it, it gives you status.” Padel Social Club has a different proposition, launching “Nashville Nights”, which includes a live band, Southern food and themed cocktails alongside tournament play, designed to make the club a destination on nights nobody is even booking a court.
Even within one operator, the approach can shift site by site: Rocket Padel’s Battersea Power Station club runs on corporate drinks after a match, its Bristol site on “Padel, Pizza & Pints” nights for a younger crowd, and one of its busiest clubs serves no alcohol at all because its landlord is a religious charity, and still runs at 95 per cent occupancy. Brands outside the sector have noticed the same opportunity from a different angle. Oakberry, the açaí chain, has opened inside a premium padel club in Leicester, describing it as “brand alignment with that healthy lifestyle community,” a small sign that padel’s food and drink offer is starting to attract partners who have nothing to do with the sport itself.
Investment in the sport is also rising. Game4Padel, which is targeting 100 courts by the end of the year, has raised from more than a hundred investors including Andy Murray, Virgil van Dijk, Jamie Vardy, Aitch and Ollie Croft. The Padel Club secured £3 million from the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund this month and promptly hired a chief financial officer from The Climbing Hangar and Casual Dining Group.
That capital does not seem to be spreading the sport into new places so much as consolidating it where it already exists. London accounts for roughly a quarter of the UK’s padel courts, with almost all of the rest concentrated in Southern England, so Court de Padel’s move into Dundee, its first Scottish site and fourth overall, is notable precisely because it is the exception.
Oakberry, the açaí chain, has opened inside a premium padel club in Leicester, describing it as “brand alignment with that healthy lifestyle community,” a small sign that padel’s food and drink offer is starting to attract partners who have nothing to do with the sport itself.
Mark, whose clubs are located at St Helens, Braehead, Loughborough University and Stockport rather than the capital, has built his growth around a different kind of site altogether. “A lot of the deals we’ve done, our landlord is the council,” he says. “ We’re taking a problem off their hands, which is usually a redundant or underused sports facility, regenerating it into a padel club and paying the council rent.” Most of the money currently flowing into padel though, is still chasing the same urban, affluent corridor that was already saturated, which raises the question of whether ‘growth’ in this market currently demands new demand, or just better-funded competition for demand that already exists.
Although there is some feeling that many padel businesses will consolidate with larger organisations, Jen and Lauren both push back against the idea that this is inevitable, reaching for the same comparison: boutique gyms survived the arrival of the big chains. From their perspective, scaled operators will keep winning through capital and standardised delivery, but independents survive because they build something, as Jen puts it, that “money struggles to buy”, a real community rather than a franchised one. It’s also true that some founders have no interest in scaling at all. “There will be founder clubs that survive because they built something a spreadsheet maybe can’t replicate,” Lauren says, pointing to operators happy running several exceptional sites rather than mass-scale adequate ones.
Carl-Henrich Heimdal, co-founder of Rocket Padel, makes the same point from the ground up rather than the boardroom down: his four English sites all succeed on completely different models, which is his evidence that there is no universal template for consolidation to standardise around in the first place.
Scaled operators will keep winning through capital and standardised delivery, but independents survive because they build something, as Jen puts it, that “money struggles to buy”, a real community rather than a franchised one.
What happens next is the more interesting question. Carl-Henrich frames it best when he says, “If we are 95 per cent full, one day, where do you go from there?” His answer is not about slowing down but about deepening the offer: coaching, leagues, community events, reasons for people to return that go beyond simply booking a court. That shift is already happening. Mark is building academy pathways and has just signed Britain’s number one wheelchair player Louis Telford as a brand ambassador to advise on making his clubs more accessible.
Lauren, who also manages professional padel athletes, including GB No.1 Aimee Gibson, points to broadcasters negotiating rights and sponsors like Rolex circling the sport, alongside a generation of juniors coming through who have only ever played padel. Jen is building member events that give people a reason to turn up even when they are not playing. The participation numbers are the foundation. What is being built on top of them, whether it is professional pathways, hospitality programming, or council regeneration partnerships, is where the growth will come – and for now it seems like UK padel is simply growing and growing.
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