Will 2025 be the year when padel finally breaks out of its giant perspex box and joins the mainstream?
In Britain, most people have still probably never seen the sport – a racquets Frankenstein played with oversized ping-pong bats, a tennis net, and a squash-style wall around the court. But it already has dozens of celebrity enthusiasts – from rapper Stormzy to Formula One driver Lando Norris and professional gadabout David Beckham.
Now finance mogul Jonathan Rowland wants to recruit some of those names as team owners for a franchise league he plans to launch in November.
“We’re looking at selling four teams to famous people,” Rowland told Telegraph Sport during a festive event he staged at Padel Hub – the Slough venue which is fast becoming a de facto national training base – in mid-December.
“There’s a couple of footballers, couple of singers, TV personalities. So who your team is owned by will be interesting, and there will be an element of pro-am to it as well.”
Rowland does not pretend that his idea is original. The inaugural Hexagon Cup event, staged in Madrid last spring, benefited from a starry cast of team owners, including Barcelona striker Robert Lewandowski, Desperate Housewives actress Eva Longoria, and a pair of tennis icons in Rafael Nadal and Sir Andy Murray.
The question is whether Rowland’s home market is ready to sustain such a project. For the moment, Spain is unquestionably the epicentre of padel, having produced 52 of the world’s best 100 male players at the time of writing. Whereas Britain’s highest flier is 26-year-old Christian Medina Murphy, at No 125. Even this figure is a little misleading, because – as that double-barrelled surname might suggest – Medina Murphy also grew up in Spain.
During the aforementioned “Christmas Invitational” event in Slough, Medina Murphy served as the centrepiece of the home team, which played under the banner of “R3”. Over the past year, Rowland and his business partner – world No 426 Nikhil Mohindra – have struck deals with four of Britain’s five leading men. The R3 roster also includes towering tennis convert Chris Salisbury, whose brother Joe used to be a British Davis Cup regular.
‘We’re doing what the Lawn Tennis Association should be doing’
“Really, we’re doing what the Lawn Tennis Association should be doing,” says Rowland, 49, who built his fortune by launching Blackfish Capital Management and the Redwood Bank, among other ventures. “The minimum the LTA have to do is fund one or two good players, but Christian’s funding is peanuts. You look at France or Italy, and the Federation is pumping millions and millions into padel. Without private enterprise, these players have no chance.”
In response to these claims, an LTA spokesperson replied that they have invested more than £6 million in padel since they became the national governing body in 2020. Even so, the LTA’s stewardship of padel has come under scrutiny in recent days, after Sport England gave pickleball – another tennis offshoot played with small, string-free bats – the right to run itself.
Whatever the administrative ins and outs, it would help if Great Britain could rustle up a few more quality players to threaten the top of the game. Medina Murphy comes closest, and even he has yet to qualify for a Premier Padel event (the equivalent of tennis’s ATP Tour).
During the light-hearted Christmas event in Slough, Medina Murphy dominated his nearest rivals, regularly placing his smashes so precisely that they bounced over the perspex walls and out of the court. After one of his victories, he explained that Britain has not always been a padel backwater.
“When I was 17, I started to play with the GB team as a junior,” said Medina Murphy, whose mother teaches English in southern Spain, and whose grandmother lives in Manchester. “We came third in the junior World Championship, but then other countries were growing up so fast, because they have facilities to build courts. Whereas the UK is a really bureaucratic country. In London, for example, it’s really expensive to build indoor clubs. And with this weather, it’s really important to have indoor clubs. All these things, I think, was stopping [British] padel growing up. But now, I think, it’s coming.”
Medina Murphy exists in an intriguing world, made more complex by the fact that padel is played exclusively in doubles format. Teams enter events using their combined ranking, and certain veteran players are known for selling their services to up-and-coming stars.
“Sometimes there are people paying his partner,” Medina Murphy explained. “Maybe one guy has 35 years, and he gets a young kid playing good and he takes the kid’s money. Because if you are not in the top 64 teams, you are not going to be in the majors [which are played in Doha, Roma, Paris and Monterrey].
“At the moment, I don’t do that in my life,” Medina Murphy added. “But is not that unfair. You have to be on a certain level. Imagine if I told you, ‘Okay, you have to pay me £10,000 to play with me at the majors.’ But if you are not good enough, when we play the first round of qualies, they’re gonna put all the balls to you, and you lose your £10,000.”
For the moment, padel’s economics are closer to those of squash than tennis. In Spain, the world’s leading names now earn between £100,000 to £150,000 a year from prize money, plus a good deal more in sponsorship. Those sums are climbing each year, and will take a further hop forward if – as Rowland insists is likely – padel manages to earn an invite to the 2032 Olympic Games in Brisbane.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
