The guide

What is padel?

Doubles, on a glass-walled court smaller than a tennis court. The rackets have no strings, the serve is underarm, and the walls are in play. It is the easiest racket sport to start and one of the hardest to stop.

The one-paragraph answer. Padel is a racket sport played two against two on an enclosed court, 20 m by 10 m, surrounded by glass and mesh — a little smaller than a doubles tennis court. Players use solid, perforated rackets, serve underarm, and may play the ball off the walls on their own side after it has bounced. Scoring is identical to tennis. Nobody can serve past you, so beginners rally within minutes; the walls mean points keep going long after they would have ended, so experienced players never run out of things to learn.

Why it has taken over

Most racket sports make you earn the fun. Tennis asks you to hit a serve and a topspin forehand before you can have a rally; squash asks for a level of fitness most people do not walk in with. Padel asks for almost nothing on day one.

Three things do that work:

The result is a game where a complete beginner and someone two years in can play together and both have a good time — which is rare, and is most of why padel has spread the way it has.

How big it has got

In Britain, very quickly. The LTA counted one million adults and juniors playing padel in May 2026, across 1,825 courts at 551 venues. At the end of 2020 the country had sixty-nine courts.

Those are the LTA's own published figures, as of May 2026. Other counts circulate and most of them are higher; we have used the governing body's rather than the most flattering.

Globally it is older and deeper. Spain and Argentina have played it for half a century, and in both it sits alongside football as something people simply do. The professional tour fills arenas. Britain is five years into what those countries did over decades.

Where it came from

Acapulco, 1969. Enrique Corcuera had a small space at his home and not enough of it for a tennis court, so he walled it in and adapted the game to fit. A Spanish friend who played there, Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe, built two courts at the Marbella Club in the mid-1970s, which is how it reached Spain; from Spain it went to Argentina, and in both countries it stopped being a curiosity and became a national sport.

The constraint is the point of the story. Padel is what you get when someone takes the limits of a small walled space seriously instead of apologising for them — which is also why it fits a British city better than tennis does.

What a game feels like

Faster than it looks and less tiring than it sounds. The court is small, so you move in short bursts rather than sprinting corner to corner. Points are long. The ball is usually around waist height, and the glass gives you a second chance at nearly everything.

The shot that surprises everyone is the one off your own back wall: the ball goes past you, hits the glass, comes back, and you lift it over the net from behind where you were standing. It feels illegal the first time. It is not — see the rules.

The other surprise is how much of it is conversation. Doubles on a 20-metre court means your partner is a few feet away for an hour, and padel is unusually chatty for a competitive sport. Most clubs find the bar is as busy as the courts.

Will it suit me?

• Never played a racket sport. This is the one to start with. You will rally in your first session.
• Played tennis. Most of it transfers and a few habits actively hurt — which ones is its own page. Expect to lose to worse athletes for a month.
• Worried about fitness. It is short bursts, not sustained running, and the people who play it range from twenty to seventy. It is a sport you can take up at fifty without it being a project.
• Want something social. Four people, an hour, and somewhere to sit afterwards. That is the entire format.

What you need to start

Less than you would expect:

• A racket. Solid, perforated, no strings, with a wrist cord that the rules require you to actually wear. Almost every club lends them, and there is no reason to buy one until you know you are staying.
• Trainers. Court shoes with a herringbone sole grip better on artificial grass, but ordinary trainers will do for your first few sessions.
• Three other people. Or a club that will put you with three — most run sessions that do exactly that, which is how most people start.
• Balls. Padel balls, not tennis balls: slightly smaller, slightly softer. Any club sells them.

Padel in London

London has gone from almost no courts to a genuine scene in about four years, and demand is still ahead of supply — peak-hour courts in most of the city are gone days in advance. Most of what exists is outdoor, or indoor space borrowed from something else.

That is the gap El Padel is being built for: an indoor club where the weather is irrelevant, the booking window is long enough to plan around, and the room you walk into afterwards is as good as the court you just left.

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The rest of the guide

Common questions