Danske Padel KlipRecords & History
World padel, from one back garden in Acapulco to 77,000 courts
Padel exists because a Mexican businessman's garden was too small for a tennis court, and the walls he built to stop the ball reaching his neighbour became the point of the game. Fifty-seven years later it is played in 150 countries by more than 35 million people. This is the parent story the Danish and Swedish timelines hang off — where the game came from, and how it reached the Nordics at all.
1969Court zero, Acapulco
1991A world federation
77,300Courts worldwide
35MPlayers
1969–1974
An accident of garden dimensions
Every rule that makes padel padel — the enclosure, the small court, the playable walls — exists because of the size of one plot of land in Mexico. Nothing about it was designed as a spectator sport.
1969
Enrique Corcuera walls in a court in AcapulcoFirst
A Mexican businessman wants a tennis court at his holiday home and does not have room for one. He builds a 20 × 10 metre court instead, encloses it in three-metre walls with fencing above, and — the decision that creates a sport rather than a compromise version of another one — rules that playing the ball off the wall after it bounces is legal, not an error.
He keeps tennis scoring and net height. He calls it Paddle Corcuera. The first written rules are drafted by his wife Viviana, a former Miss Argentina, and given to him as a birthday present.
1969 is the date FIP and almost every secondary account give; a few place it in the early or mid 1960s. No primary document settles it, and the court's reported dimensions vary between accounts as well.
FIP · LTA Padel
1974
Marbella, and the version the world actually playsFirst
Alfonso de Hohenlohe plays at Corcuera's house, and builds the first two courts in Europe at the Marbella Club. In doing so he replaces solid masonry with glass and steel mesh.
That single substitution is why padel became watchable, and therefore broadcastable, and therefore commercial. Everything downstream on this page — the tours, the arenas, the Qatari money — rests on the fact that in 1974 someone decided you should be able to see through the walls.
FIP · Padel Magazine
1975–1990
Two heartlands, no governing body
For sixteen years padel grows enormously in exactly two countries and has no international federation, no world ranking and no championship. It is a national sport in Argentina before it is a sport anywhere else.
1975
Julio Menditeguy takes it to ArgentinaFirst
A member of the Marbella Club brings padel home. Argentina becomes the sport's second heartland and, in playing terms, its first great one — the country goes on to supply the dominant players of the professional era, and padel becomes its second most played sport after football.
Mr Padel Paddle · Padel Magazine
1980s
Spain and Argentina build, separately
Padel spreads through the Spanish costas as a resort and club sport, and through Argentina as a mass participation one. The two developments barely touch each other, which is why the sport arrives in the 1990s with two established playing cultures and no shared rulebook.
This is the era in which Danes and Swedes on holiday in Spain first meet the game — the mechanism by which it eventually reaches the Nordics, twenty years later, one returning holidaymaker at a time.
External sources
1991–1999
The sport gets an institution
Three federations create a fourth, and within a year padel has a world championship. The structure that governs the sport in 2026 is built in this decade.
12 Jul 1991
The International Padel Federation is founded, in MadridFirst
The Argentine, Spanish and Uruguayan associations create FIP. Twenty-two years after the first court and sixteen after the second country, padel finally has a body entitled to say what the rules are.
FIP is the organisation Denmark applies to in 2009 and is refused by — one court in the country, and that one unplayable — and joins as member 33 in 2017.
FIP · Wikipedia
1992
The first World Padel Championship, Madrid and SevilleTitle
Eight nations enter: Argentina, Spain, France, England, Italy, Mexico, Paraguay and Uruguay. Argentina win both the men's and the women's titles, beating Spain in the men's final.
The championship is set as a biennial event and remains the sport's senior national-team competition. Denmark first enters a qualifier for it in 2018, at Gent, and does not win a match.
FIP · Wikipedia
1990s
Argentina's boom, and what it leaves behind
Padel becomes a genuine mass sport in Argentina during the decade, on a scale nowhere else would match for another twenty-five years. The court stock built in this period is the base the country still plays on — and the coaching culture it created is why Argentine players remain over-represented at the top of the world game.
External sources
2000–2012
Spain turns it professional
The competitive centre of gravity moves decisively to Spain, and for the first time there is a circuit a player can earn a living on.
2005
Padel Pro Tour — the first professional circuitFirst
Spain gets a season-long professional tour with a ranking attached. It runs for eight years and establishes the format the sport still uses: a calendar of ranked events, mostly in Spain, with prize money concentrated at the top.
External sources
2000s
Padel becomes Spain's second sport
Over the decade padel settles in behind football in Spanish participation, on a court network that FIP's 2025 report puts at 17,300 — still, by a distance, the largest in the world. Spain is where the professional game, the coaching, the equipment industry and the audience all live at once.
Padel Creations · FIP
2007–2012
The northern edge of the map
While Spain professionalises, padel is arriving in northern Europe in a form barely recognisable as the same sport. Sweden's first court, in a shed outside Båstad, dates from 1998; Denmark's first, in Fredericia in 2007, was built without the mandatory fencing and appears never to have been played on. Denmark's first courts meeting official requirements arrive in 2012 — the same year Sweden opens its first indoor one.
Dansk Padel Forbund · Padeltennisguiden
2013–2019
World Padel Tour, and the sport leaves Iberia
One tour, backed by a brewery, becomes the global shop window — and the countries watching it start building.
2013
World Padel Tour replaces the Padel Pro Tour
Organised by Setpoint Events, a subsidiary of the Catalan brewer Damm, WPT becomes the sport's premier circuit and holds that position for a decade. It is privately owned, which becomes the central fact of the next chapter.
FIP · Sportico
2018
The tour reaches the NordicsFirst
WPT stages the Swedish Padel Open in Båstad, the first top-level professional padel in northern Europe. It runs there two years before moving to Stockholm, and in 2021 the Malmö event draws more than 25,000 spectators and is voted the best on the tour.
In the same summer of 2018, Denmark's national team drives over Øresundsbroen to play its first match against anyone.
Swedish Padel Open · DPF
2017–2019
Federations start queueing up
Denmark is admitted to FIP as member number 33 in November 2017. Britain has 68 padel courts in 2019. The United States has almost none. The map that looks obvious in 2026 — padel everywhere — does not exist at the end of this decade; outside Spain, Argentina and a handful of others, the sport is a rumour.
DPF · LTA Padel
2020–2023
The boom, and the war over who owns it
A pandemic hands padel the best four years any racket sport has ever had, and the sport immediately spends them fighting itself.
2020–2021
Covid is the best thing that ever happened to padel
An outdoor-capable, four-player, low-skill-floor racket sport is close to the ideal pandemic activity, and the numbers everywhere go vertical at once. Sweden runs the most extreme version — bookings up 186% in 2020, 540,000 unique players and 5.8 million hours in 2021 — and construction follows demand across Europe.
Svenskpadel · FIP
2022
Qatar launches Premier Padel, and the sport splitsFirst
Qatar Sports Investments — owner of Paris Saint-Germain — launches Premier Padel, organised under FIP and backed by the players' association PPA, as a direct rival to the privately owned World Padel Tour. Major events carry 2,000 ranking points and €525,000 in prize money.
WPT sues FIP, QSI and the PPA, and pursues its own contracted players for playing the rival circuit — claims reported in the millions of euros. For roughly eighteen months the best players in the world are being sued for competing.
Padel Alto · The Padel Paper · Wikipedia
24 Aug 2023
QSI buys World Padel Tour and ends the splitTitle
QSI and Damm agree the acquisition of WPT. Both tours finish the 2023 season separately, then unify from 2024 as a single global circuit — Premier Padel — under FIP governance.
Padel comes out of it with something tennis has never had: one professional tour, owned by one investor, governed by the international federation. Whether that is a happy ending depends entirely on who you ask.
FIP · QSI · Sportico
2022–2023
Sweden runs the correction first
While the rest of the world is still building, the country that built earliest and fastest goes into reverse: 113 padel businesses fail, 76 hall closures fall in 2023 alone, and halls are converted to warehouses. Member clubs, meanwhile, roughly double.
The distinction Sweden established — the business model failed, the sport did not — is the single most cited data point in every other country's padel investment case since.
SVT Nyheter · Svenska Padelförbundet
2024–2026
One tour, 150 countries, and an Olympic question
The growth curve does not break. What is unresolved is whether padel converts scale into the one thing it does not yet have.
2024
Premier Padel runs as the single world tour
The unified circuit's first season. One ranking, one calendar, one owner, and no litigation between the players and the people who organise their sport.
FIP
Jul 2025
Britain hits 1,000 courts — from 68 in 2019First
The LTA records 1,000 padel courts across 325 venues, and participation at 400,000 players, up from 15,000 in 2019. Padel's British growth is a fifteen-fold participation increase in six years, driven by the tennis federation rather than against it.
LTA Padel · The Padel Paper
2025
The United States opens its thousandth courtFirst
Fewer than 100,000 American padel players in 2023; roughly 500,000 by the end of 2025. Florida holds around 41% of the country's courts, ahead of Texas, California and New York. The largest sports market on earth starts from nearly nothing — which is why the growth rates read as absurd and the absolute numbers still trail Britain.
The Padel Paper
Dec 2025
The FIP World Padel Report: 77,300 courts, 35 million playersTitle
Courts across 150 nations and 20 dependent territories, up 15.2% in a year with 14,355 built in 2025 alone. Clubs up 16.1%, registered federation members up 42%, FIP past 100 member federations. FIP-organised tournaments rise from 182 to 290 in a year.
Two numbers are worth holding onto. Women are 40% of participants, which makes padel one of the most gender-balanced sports in the world and is the strongest single argument in its Olympic case. And 61% of amateur players are still in Europe — the sport is global on the map and regional in the data.
FIP World Padel Report 2025
2026–2032
The Olympic question, answered slowly
FIP holds IOC recognition through ARISF, which makes padel a legitimate international sport but not an Olympic one. Los Angeles 2028 is out — the IOC's seven-year rule closed that door before padel was ready. Both of the credentials that matter most for a bid are now confirmed: padel is a medal sport at the 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, 19 September to 4 October, and at the 2027 European Games in Istanbul, 16–27 June. It had already been played at the 2023 European Games in Kraków, which is the precedent both decisions rest on.
The target is Brisbane 2032, whose programme is not finalised until 2027. The binding constraint is the participation threshold — 75 countries across four continents for men, 40 across three for women — which is precisely why that 61%-of-players-in-Europe figure is a strategic problem and not just a statistic.
Inside the Games · The Padel Paper
Where the world's courts are
Out of roughly 77,300 across 150 nations, as counted by FIP's 2025 world report — the concentration is the story
