Danske Padel Klip
Sweden's first padel court was built in 1998 in a shed outside Båstad, out of timber and fencing. Twenty-two years later the country was booking 5.8 million court hours a year, and three years after that it was converting padel halls into warehouses. This is the whole arc — the one country that ran the experiment first, and hardest.
Padel arrives in Sweden two decades before anyone builds a business on it. For most of that time the sport exists in Sweden as a curiosity brought home from Spain.
Thommy Andersson and his son Johan build a court inside a 12 × 25 metre building in the village of Grevie, outside Båstad — timber and fencing rather than glass, and undersized against the official dimensions. Andersson had found the sport on a trip to Marbella, and is generally credited with bringing padel to Sweden.
Denmark's first court would follow nine years later, in Fredericia, and go unplayed. Sweden's got used.
Padeltennisguiden · PadelfeberSweden gets an SM eight years before Denmark gets one — then loses it for two years to an argument between the new clubs and the federation.
A national federation exists a full year before Sweden has anything resembling a court network. It would take until 2021 to get into Riksidrottsförbundet.
PadeltennisguidenA handful of enthusiasts gather around a single outdoor court by the harbour to play the first Swedish championship. Men: Robert Andersson & Simon Vasquez.
Vasquez was 17 years old. He is still Sweden's most recognisable padel player sixteen years later, and he appears four more times in this timeline.
Padelfeber2011: Fredrik Lindh & Mathias Lundmark. 2012: Ola Brodén & Pieter Sjösten. There is no women's class in any of the first three championships.
PadelfeberPeter Ohlsson of Kristianstad opens Sweden's first indoor padel court, in Ramlösa. Indoor play is what makes padel a year-round sport at this latitude — everything that follows depends on this.
PadeltennisguidenSM is not held for two years, over disputes in which newly founded clubs could not work with the federation. Sweden's governance problems start this early, and they recur — the same fault line reopens in 2021.
PadelfeberThe championship comes back indoors and, for the first time, with women. Then the bookings curve turns vertical.
Men: Husein Mehmedovic & Roger Fridolf. Women: Biljana Gajic & Antonette Andersson — the first Swedish women's champions.
This is the edition usually treated as the first "modern" SM: a real indoor hall, and both classes.
PadelfeberMen: Ola Brodén & Anton Andersson — Brodén's second, four years after the first. Women: Biljana Gajic & Antonette Andersson retain.
PadelfeberThe single most violent number in Swedish padel. Not court construction — actual bookings. Demand arrives years before the halls do, which is exactly the signal that triggers the build-out.
PadeltennisguidenMen: Daniel Windahl & Simon Vasquez. Women: Sofia Arvidsson & Anna Svedenhov.
Windahl and Vasquez are the two names that dominate the next decade of Swedish padel — together, apart, and eventually on opposite sides of the Rocafort story.
PadelfeberSweden becomes the first Nordic country to host top-level professional padel — the same summer Denmark's national team plays its first match ever, across the bridge.
The world tour stages an event on Swedish soil, in the tennis town of Båstad, twenty minutes from where the first court was built. It runs in Båstad for two years, the second exceeding expectations on both attendance and quality, before moving to Stockholm.
Context for what this meant regionally: in June of this same summer, Denmark's national team drove over Øresundsbroen to play Sweden at Staffanstorp — their first match against anyone — because there weren't enough players to compete against at home.
PlayPadel · Swedish Padel Open · DPFMen: Bobby Seger & Andreas Pålsson. Women: Sofia Arvidsson & Anna Svedenhov retain.
PadelfeberMen: Pierre Bonfré & Viktor Stjern. Women: Baharak Soleymani & Antonette Andersson.
Sweden ends the year with 388 facilities and 169,594 unique people having booked a court. Both numbers are about to more than double.
Padelfeber · Svenskpadel statistikA Spanish professional from Málaga relocates and starts playing the domestic circuit. He goes on to win a run of Swedish Padel Tour titles with Simon Vasquez, and Swedish Wikipedia records him as Sweden's top-ranked player from October 2021. Foreign professionals settling in Sweden is a symptom of how much money entered the sport here — and it becomes the subject of the sport's biggest political fight.
Swedish Wikipedia · PadelDirektTwo years in which Swedish padel gets everything it asked for — a public, a court network, recognition as a real sport — and then has a civil war about who is allowed to be Swedish.
410,000 unique people book a padel court, against 169,594 the year before. Sweden ends 2020 with just over 500 facilities and around 1,500 courts. Covid, an outdoor-capable racket sport and a nation indoors combine into the steepest year the sport has had anywhere.
Svenskpadel statistik · PadelZpelMen: Daniel Windahl & Carl Knutsson. Women: Amanda Girdo & Anna Åkerberg — the match record enters her as Anna Jonzon, which is the same player under a different surname.
PadelfeberSvenska Padelförbundet is admitted to the national sports confederation with 97 affiliated clubs and 23,000 members, comfortably past the threshold of 25 clubs and 1,500 members. Admission to RF is the formal moment padel stops being a leisure business and becomes part of organised Swedish sport.
Denmark's federation was still outside Danmarks Idrætsforbund at this point, standing, in its own words, on its own legs.
Riksidrottsförbundet · DPFThe federation opens SM to players without Swedish citizenship, provided they have been resident twelve months and belong to a Swedish club. 34 men's players, including the entire top tier, sign a letter threatening to boycott the championship unless the rule is withdrawn. Signatories include Daniel Windahl (#3), Carl Knutsson (#4), Pablo Figueroa (#5) and Johan Brunström (#10).
Their argument was comparative: badminton required 24 months of residency, table tennis 36, squash 60. Twelve was an outlier. Their other complaint was timing — the rule landed four days before entries closed and two weeks before the championship. The letter was dated 19 August and revised on the 22nd after meeting federation representatives.
PadelDirektSM and the SPT playoffs are moved by several months, and an extraordinary federation meeting is called for 13 September to settle the eligibility rules. The federation says it takes full responsibility. A players' survey that October finds confidence in the federation at rock bottom — one response is quoted simply as "noll förtroende".
PadelDirektMen: Cayetano Rocafort & Simon Vasquez. Women: Amanda Girdo & Anna Åkerberg retain.
The championship that half the men's field threatened to boycott over foreign eligibility was won by the Málaga-born player the rule was effectively about, partnering the teenager who had won the very first SM eleven years earlier. Swedish padel rarely offers an ending that tidy.
PadelfeberSweden's third World Padel Tour event draws more than 25,000 spectators and is voted the best on the tour by WPT and the trade press. Two years after Båstad, Sweden is not just hosting top-level padel — it is setting the standard for how it is staged.
Swedish Padel Open · PadelDirektRoughly 3,500 courts across just over 600 halls. 540,000 unique people booked a court during the year, and 5.8 million hours were played. Sweden is second in the world by court count. Everything after this is decline, then flat.
Svenskpadel statistik · ElitepadelSweden built for a demand curve that had already turned. The correction is the part of this history other countries were watching.
Men: Daniel Windahl & Simon Vasquez, five years after their first title together. Women: Sofia Arvidsson & Baharak Soleymani.
PadelfeberSwedish Padel Open leaves Båstad for the Avicii Arena in Stockholm — padel in a landmark national venue, the peak of the sport's cultural reach in Sweden. It arrives in the same year the underlying numbers turn.
Avicii Arena · PadelDirektUnique bookers fall to 421,000 from 540,000. Hours booked fall to 5.29 million from 5.8 million. Court construction, meanwhile, is still running — the stock peaks above 4,200 courts. Supply passes demand going in opposite directions, which is the whole story in one line.
Three padel halls close in the first six months. It reads as noise at the time.
Svenskpadel statistik · SVTOver a hundred padel companies go under, 76 of the hall closures falling in 2023 alone, and 113 padel businesses shut in total across the correction. Occupancy at many halls sits around 25%. Padel halls are converted into warehouses, logistics space and retail.
The two largest operators both fail at scale: PDL United files for restructuring in May and loses roughly twenty sites through subsidiary bankruptcies over the summer; We Are Padel has been running heavy losses since autumn 2022 and pushes dozens of companies into bankruptcy. The diagnosis everyone agrees on is överetablering — too many halls, in too many towns, too fast.
SVT Nyheter · PadelDirekt · FastighetstidningenWhile the commercial halls collapse, member associations affiliated to the federation rise from 106 at the previous year-end to 220 by the first quarter of 2023. The business model failed; the sport did not. That distinction is the single most useful thing in this timeline for anyone reading it from another country.
Svenska PadelförbundetMen: Adam Axelsson & Christoffer Persson. Women: Sofia Arvidsson & Ida Jarlskog — Arvidsson's fifth title across three different partnerships.
PadelfeberThe court count stabilises, and Swedish players post the best international results the country has had.
Daniel Windahl is the highest-ranked Swede at 52; Simon Vasquez is 110. For a country with the second-largest court stock on earth, that gap between participation and elite results is the honest measure of how young the competitive base still is.
PadelDirektSweden finishes 6th of 16 in the men's championship and 5th of 16 in the women's, both decided against the Netherlands in the 5–6 play-off. Spain win both titles, Italy take both silvers. Denmark, for scale, finishes 10th and 8th.
Swedish reports of "first European medals" in this period are a different competition: a women's silver and a men's bronze in deaf padel, a four-nation event in Spain. The two are easy to conflate.
Padel Magazine · FIP · SVT NyhetsteckenMen: Daniel Appelgren & Douglas Rutgersson. Women: Linnea Björk & Amanda Girdo.
PadelDirektAdam Axelsson & Simon Vasquez become the first Swedish pair ever to reach the semifinal of Premier Padel, the sport's top world tour — a circuit almost entirely owned by Spanish and Argentine players, where European pairs from outside Spain rarely get this far.
The federation's verdict was unambiguous: the biggest success Swedish padel has ever had. Fifteen years after he won the first SM as a 17-year-old on an outdoor court in Båstad harbour, Vasquez is still the player it happens through.
Svenska Padelförbundet via TTMen: Daniel Appelgren & Douglas Rutgersson. Women: Linnea Björk & Amanda Girdo. Both pairs repeat their 2024 titles — the first time since Arvidsson and Svedenhov in 2017–18 that a pair has defended in either class, and the first year both classes were retained at once.
Mixed went to Sofia Arvidsson & John Larsson. In the club team championships that May, Spritans Padelklubb Ödåkra took the men's title — their third in a row — and GLTK the women's.
Svenska Padelförbundet, SM-vinnareFIP's compilation puts Sweden at about 4,220 courts across some 1,200 facilities — still among the top handful of countries in the world, and broadly back at the 2022 peak after the shake-out. The framing in the 2025 FIP report is "from boom to base": halls shifting away from selling random hours toward leagues, level-matched play and recurring events.
Which is, more or less, the model Sweden skipped on the way up.
Mixed-SM was played in Malmö on 10–11 July and won by Rickard Kjellberg & Filippa Vial, who lost the 2025 final to Sofia Arvidsson and John Larsson — the pair they beat this time were Juni Sjöland and Larsson.
The 2026 senior championship still has no champion as of September 2026. The federation's results page lists the year's club team and junior titles — Spritans Padelklubb Ödåkra and Halmstad Padel Club in the club draws — and the mixed title above, but no senior men's or women's winner.
FIP-rapporten 2025 · Court22The boom and the turn, in the one metric that measures players rather than buildings
Court construction peaked after this curve turned — the stock passed 4,200 courts in 2022, the first year player numbers fell. That lag is what the 2023 bankruptcies were made of.