Is padel the next pickleball?

Two years ago, pickleball looked unstoppable. Then, in November 2024, its attention score slipped below zero. Pickleball had stopped pulling attention away from other sports. Almost two years later, the biggest indoor franchise was cutting staff and clubs were closing.

Now the sport everyone calls “the next pickleball” is padel. U.S. courts grew 61% in a year. Investors are writing checks. One New York club charges $36,000 just to join.

So we ran the same test. In August, padel’s attention made the same turn.

Does that make padel the next pickleball? Partly. Here’s what the attention shows, and where the analogy breaks.

What the attention shows

The adjusted attention score measures how fast a sport’s attention is growing compared with tennis, golf, basketball and football. Above zero, it’s gaining on everything else. Below zero, it’s losing ground.

In mid-2025, padel’s attention was growing almost 60% faster than the big sports. By December it was +38%. By June, +9%. It crossed zero in August and sits at −4% today.

Line it up against pickleball and the two curves are almost the same shape. Padel actually came down faster. If the analogy held all the way, the padel equivalent of pickleball’s shakeout would land sometime in 2028.

But the analogy doesn’t hold all the way. That’s the interesting part.

Why padel looks like pickleball

The money is still coming in after the turn. Pickleball’s biggest wave of investment came after its score had already stalled. Padel’s is following the same order. A pro padel league raised $15 million in March, when the score was already falling fast. Courts keep opening.

Most players are still just trying it. Only 22% of American padel players played eight or more times last year. For pickleball, it was 31%. A sport made mostly of first-timers depends on new curiosity, and new curiosity just stopped growing.

It isn’t just America. Padel’s score has turned in almost every big market at once.

Spain, where padel is a mainstream sport, went negative in January. France in February. Only Germany is still gaining.

And padel has busted before. Sweden had the biggest padel boom in the world. It built about 4,200 courts for 10 million people. One city went from 14 courts to about 100 in a single year, roughly five times what it could support. Padel’s Swedish attention score turned negative in December 2021. The first clubs closed six months later. By the end of 2023, about 90 padel companies had gone bankrupt.

Why it isn’t

America hasn’t built enough padel to bust. This is the biggest difference, and it’s not close.

Pickleball got to about 25 courts for every 100,000 Americans. Sweden’s padel bust happened at about 40. American padel is at a third of one court per 100,000. When Italy’s padel score turned in 2022, it had built a lot of courts, but not Swedish numbers. Its growth slowed, and there was no Swedish-style wave of bankruptcies.

Padel is a different business.

Pickleball is a mass sport. You can paint lines on a tennis court and play for free, and 24 million Americans did. Its indoor clubs were bets on mass curiosity: a steady stream of new players to fill the hours outside 5 to 9 pm. When that stream stopped growing, the clubs broke.

Padel is built as a premium product. It needs a glass cage, a 23-foot ceiling and, at peak, about $100 an hour per court. A club like that doesn’t need millions of curious people. It needs a few hundred members who can afford it.

What the analysis says

Padel is the next pickleball in attention. It isn’t, yet, in the build-out.

The attention score tells you when the hype phase ends. It has done that for pickleball, for Swedish padel and now for American padel. What happens next depends on how much gets built on the assumption that the hype will keep going. Pickleball built a lot. Sweden built far too much. American padel has built very little so far.

That makes the risk narrower, not zero. The clubs to worry about are the ones priced for luxury but sized for the masses: big builds on expensive leases that need a steady flow of new members, in the handful of cities where courts have clustered. Padel courts are also hard to repurpose. A failed pickleball club is a floor with lines on it. A failed padel club is a set of glass cages under a high roof. (In Sweden, one club tore out four padel courts to make room for five pickleball courts.)

The clubs that look safe are the ones that look like Italy: tennis and country clubs adding a couple of padel courts for members they already have.

The thing to watch is simple. If American padel courts keep growing 60% a year while the score stays below zero, that’s pickleball in 2025 all over again. We know how that one ended.

How we measured it

Attention: our attention measure for padel, pickleball, tennis, golf, basketball and football, in English, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, French and German. The adjusted score is a sport’s attention over the trailing 12 months compared with the prior 12 months, divided by the average of the same growth for tennis, golf, basketball and football in the same language. English-language attention mixes the US, UK and other countries. US padel courts and prices from the US Padel Report 2026 (Misitrano); US players from SFIA via the USPA; pickleball courts from USA Pickleball. Sweden: court counts from the International Padel Federation and Bloomberg; closures and bankruptcies from Padel Alto, Dagens PS and Creditsafe via Bloomberg. Italy courts from its federation as reported by Open; Netherlands from EY; UK courts from Playskan; Spain from the 2026 Global Padel Report. Ceiling height from court-builder guides.