Padel is booming, and that's not really news anymore. What is news, or at least what should be, is the gap opening up between how fast people want to play and how fast anyone is building courts for them to play on. Ask around at any club on a Tuesday evening and you'll hear the same complaint. Booking slots vanish within seconds of release. The sport's growth is starting to strangle itself.
The numbers behind the squeeze
Estimates vary, but most industry figures put the number of padel courts in the UK somewhere around 3,000, up from a couple of hundred five years ago. That sounds like rapid expansion, and it is. But compare it with participation growth, which some governing bodies claim has run at over 200 percent annually in recent peak years, and the maths stops working. Supply is growing in a straight line. Demand is growing on a curve.
Take Altrincham, on the edge of Manchester, where a club opened three new courts last year and still can't keep peak-time slots available past nine in the morning when the booking window opens. The manager there told me members now set alarms for 7am on a Monday just to get a Saturday afternoon game. That's not an isolated case. It's becoming the norm.
Why building courts is harder than it looks
Padel courts need planning permission, and in built-up areas that's often where projects stall. Noise complaints from neighbours are common, because the pop of a padel ball off the glass carries further than most people expect. Land is expensive, especially anywhere near a city centre, and a padel court footprint doesn't fold neatly onto existing tennis courts without reworking fencing, lighting and drainage.
Planning applications typically take four to six months to clear, sometimes longer with objections
Glass and steel court structures cost between £70,000 and £100,000 installed, before any clubhouse or lighting work
Suitable flat land near population centres is scarce and getting scarcer
None of that stops demand from rising while supply crawls. In Bury St Edmunds, a converted squash club added two courts in a car park last spring and had a waiting list of over 300 names within a fortnight of opening. That's not a marketing story. That's a genuine bottleneck.
Who actually benefits from the squeeze
I'll say this plainly: the shortage is good news for existing club owners and bad news for everyone else. Membership fees are rising, off-peak restrictions are tightening, and some clubs have introduced tiered pricing that charges more for evening and weekend slots. A club in Kilkenny recently moved to a dynamic pricing model, charging almost double for a 7pm Friday court compared with a quiet Tuesday morning. Players grumble, but they still pay, because the alternative is not playing at all.
Should we be worried about padel pricing itself out of the mainstream? Yes, a little. The sport built its early reputation on being social and accessible, cheaper than golf and less regimented than tennis clubs with their waiting lists and blazers. If court scarcity turns padel into a members-only pursuit for people who can afford premium pricing, it loses the thing that made it spread so fast in the first place.
The regional picture isn't even
London and the major conurbations get most of the headlines, but the shortage is arguably worse in mid-sized towns where a single new facility becomes the only game in town, literally. Harrogate has one commercial padel venue serving a catchment of tens of thousands of people, and it runs at close to full capacity most of the week. Contrast that with somewhere like Ely, where a small three-court set-up attached to a leisure centre has become the unofficial social hub for players across a huge swathe of rural Cambridgeshire, because there's genuinely nowhere else nearby.
That uneven distribution matters because it shapes who gets to play padel at all. If you live within striking distance of a major city, you have options, even if they're expensive and hard to book. If you don't, you might have one club, one set of opening hours, and one price point, and that's it.
What happens next
My honest prediction is that things get worse before they get better. Investment is flowing into the sport, and new facilities are being announced most weeks, but planning and construction lead times mean court numbers won't catch up with demand for at least another two or three years, if they catch up at all. In the meantime, expect more dynamic pricing, more early-morning booking scrambles, and more players turning to app-based matchmaking to grab cancelled slots.
There's a decent argument that some of this pressure eases naturally, because interest in any fast-growing sport tends to plateau once the novelty wears off. I'm not convinced padel is there yet. Participation figures show no sign of slowing, and the social element, doubles play, mixed ability matches, a drink afterwards, keeps bringing people back in a way that solo sports don't.
For anyone thinking about getting into padel now, the practical advice is straightforward. Join a club's waiting list early, be flexible about which day and time you'll play, and don't expect prime evening slots without paying for the privilege. The sport hasn't stopped growing. It's just outgrown the courts built to hold it.
