For the past 15 years, I’ve had an entirely healthy compulsion – my wife, I suspect, would disagree – to play tennis at least twice a week. I assumed this habit was so ingrained that nothing short of a calamitous injury could ever keep me from my fix.
Spain is where the craze took hold. Now it’s the country’s second most popular sport, after football
I think I may have been mistaken. Recently, I’ve discovered a new sport which is proving, if anything, more addictive. Time will tell if this is a fleeting crush, or the start of something more enduring – but I am beginning to wonder whether my new-found love of padel will lead me to abandon tennis.
I hear you ask: what exactly is padel? It is often described as the fastest-growing sport in the world, yet remains utterly unknown to many – and Britain has been especially slow on the uptake.
That, however, is bound to change, for padel is becoming impossible to ignore. Go to any tennis club these days, and much of the chat will be about the merits of getting rid of the croquet lawn or communal seating area and putting a padel court in its place. Stratford Padel Club in east London, which I recently joined, has five courts and is adding another four this autumn. This month, Padium – described as the UK’s ‘premium’ indoor padel venue – opens in Canary Wharf. Sporting celebrities, meanwhile, are busy trumpeting the game’s merits: Lionel Messi, Andy Murray and Jürgen Klopp are all big fans. What is it about this upstart sport that is making even confirmed tennis nuts like me strangely unenthused by Wimbledon?
Padel was invented in 1969 by a Mexican businessman named Enrique Corcuera. Lacking the space for a tennis court in his garden, he built a smaller court, enclosed with metal fencing. A Spanish friend of Corcuera’s was so impressed that he imported the game to Spain a few years later, building two courts in Marbella.
Padel matches have an intensity that makes tennis seem ponderous by comparison
Spain is where the padel craze took hold. Today, the country has at least 14,000 courts, and more than six million players – making it Spain’s second most popular sport, after football. Walk around any Spanish town of an evening, and you are certain to hear the echoey thwack of padel matches in progress.
It’s big in other countries too: Sweden and Italy have both experienced padel booms in the past few years, and the game is growing rapidly outside Europe, particularly in South America and the Middle East.
Padel is best thought of as a mix of tennis and squash, with a dash of real tennis (the racquet sport from which tennis as we know it evolved). It is played on a court that’s smaller than the one used in tennis (20m by 10m as opposed to 23.77m by 10.97m) with a net in the middle. Unlike a tennis court, with its ample space beyond the baseline and sidelines, a padel court is enclosed on all four sides with four-metre high walls, made – these days – of toughened glass. There are also two metal mesh sections on the side walls adjacent to the net, which are referred to as the ‘cage’.
You cannot hit the ball directly against the walls; it must bounce on the ground first. Yet the walls have a crucial effect on play, as they mean that, unlike in tennis, a shot which is beyond a player’s reach isn’t automatically a winner. Padel, you might say, is like tennis with inbuilt insurance: there’s often a second chance to hit the ball as it rebounds from the walls.
Padel is invariably played as doubles; a singles game does exist, but it requires a narrower court. A point begins, as in tennis, with a serve into the opposing service box, though this is hit underarm and on the bounce. The scoring system is identical to tennis, with players taking it in turns to serve in games, progressing towards a set.
Such tennis-like features give padel a feel of familiarity, but the dynamics of the two sports are very different. Again, those walls are crucial to this, as are the satisfyingly underpowered bat-like racquets, with their chunky perforated heads of foam or rubber. The result is a game that – as several more experienced players have told me – is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
And what makes it so ridiculously enjoyable? Pace is one factor. Because of the simplicity of serving in padel, and because of the court’s relative smallness, there is much less downtime than in tennis: in the same amount of playing time, you end up hitting a lot more shots. Padel matches have a distinctive intensity– the action feels virtually nonstop – that makes tennis seem ponderous by comparison. Equally important is the way that court craft and subtlety are integral to success. You can’t win a padel game, as you can a tennis match, with a booming serve and heavy topspin drives; in fact, neither of those things is even possible. The court’s dimensions – and the stringless racquets – mean that topspin barely features. Winning depends on the deft manipulation of space and angles, and imparting a range of under-spins and sidespins.
The sport is speedy, but also delicate. While it is sometimes desirable to hit the ball hard, it’s more often by deploying a well-calibrated gentleness that you can access those areas of the court, particularly the ‘cage’ and the opposite corners, that make life trickiest for your opponents. Padel rallies feature a lot of lobs – a shot characterised by its slow precision – and, as a result, the game also encourages an array of differently paced smashes with their own specific motions and spins.
These have striking names, reflecting the sport’s Mexican-Spanish origins: there’s the bandeja (a slow defensive smash struck low and with underpin), the vibora (a more aggressive side-spun smash) and the gancho (a smash struck over your left shoulder). Another distinctive feature of more advanced padel are the lightning-fast twisting motions that players deploy to retrieve angled balls off the back and side walls. I am by no means a master of such strokes yet – but it’s exciting to think that I might one day learn them.
Padel is also refreshing in its non-playing aspects. As a veteran of tennis clubs (and of the toxic politics that often characterises them), it feels liberating to be part of a sport actively engaged in creating its own culture. I fix up my matches on the club’s app, and have always played, so far, with strangers. But since everyone is doing the same, it all feels perfectly natural. A padel game – at least where I currently play – is like a microcosm of a certain kind of urban encounter: four people who don’t necessarily have anything in common, collaboratively engaged in a fun activity. Padel seems more open and egalitarian than tennis, a sport that can feel weighed down by its traditions.
Not everyone, of course, has a padel court near them. Some of those who don’t have built their own. Charles Wilson, an old schoolfriend who works in finance, built a court at his home in Hampshire in 2020, after encountering the sport while playing golf in Spain. This ‘lockdown project’ arrived flat-packed from Spain, and cost around £50,000 in total. He tells me that the one problem is the noise: the sound of a padel game travels much further than tennis – so unless your garden is truly enormous, neighbours end up being disturbed. His solution has been to make his court available to his neighbours, who are free to use it even when he’s on holiday.
Padel may be addictive to play, but what are its prospects as a spectator sport? Here, I’m less certain that it can take over from tennis, which has a uniquely gladiatorial glamour that is hard to replicate in a sport dedicated to doubles. There are now professional padel players, and it is being talked of as an Olympic sport – so it’s likely to be an increasing presence on our screens. But I don’t think Wimbledon’s place in the sporting calendar is under imminent threat.
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