[Image: Wikicommons]
Since its first game on South African shores in 2020, Padel has taken off like a rocket, and these days everyone knows someone who plays the bastard child of tennis and squash.
With more than 206 clubs, 600 courts and an estimated 100,000 players throughout the country, it seems as if padel is the biggest new sporting trend since touch-rugby.
While it was a bit late coming to our shores, the world has already been padel-ing it up since about 1975. The story goes that a Spanish prince visited Mexico in 1974, where he met the inventor of Padel, tried the game and decided to bring it home. Today, more than 5 million Padel players are smashing it up on 14,000 courts.
Although the sport seems simple enough to get into, it appears that the folks higher up on the middle-class ladder have been leading the charge. The very first courts were built at Val de Vie, an ultra-exclusive gated estate in the Paarl Winelands. Soon, country clubs in Cape Town and Johannesburg followed suit, repurposing underused bowling greens and tennis courts to cash in on the hype.
According to the latest BrandMapp survey, nearly half of South African padel players come from the country’s top 5% of households (those earning more than R40,000 per month). So, although Padel might be easy to pick up, in South Africa it’s still not that easy to access.
Between 2021 and 2024, the number of padel courts worldwide shot up by 240%, but here in South Africa, the trend is starting to show cracks for investors.
Building a single court runs anywhere from R600,000 to R1 million, and although the early investors were cashing in, paying off their courts within a year thanks to their 70% occupancy rates, things have shifted, and today, most South African Padel courts operate at just 30% to 50% occupancy.
It may have been a case of too much too soon as everyone jumped on the Padelwagon, but even though South Africa tends to smother trends to death, the global interest in the sport seems to have waned a bit. Even Sweden, which was once a padel pioneer, the market is now struggling with oversaturation. As a result, Swedish giant We Are Padel is applying for corporate restructuring and may have to close half of its 80 venues.
While Padel is showing signs of becoming another kennetjie, another ball-and-bat game has been on the rise – pickleball.
Played with a perforated plastic ball and paddles on a smaller court, the sport only caught on locally in 2021, long after the rest of the world had jumped on the trend. But now, South Africans are swapping racquets for paddles.
According to Daily Maverick, South Africa’s pickleball market “is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23.49% from 2024 to 2029, thanks to the sport’s affordability and accessibility”. Pickleball offers a unique advantage due to its small court size, making old, abandoned tennis courts ideal for play – especially in underserved communities.
Padel is going down and Pickleball is on the rise. Hopefully, over-eager investors will take a lesson from Padel. Everything these days seems to be a trend, so even Pickleball might be old hat in a few years.
[Source: Daily Maverick]
