Pickleball is in a pickle. Attention saw it coming two years ago.
Pickleball stopped outgrowing other sports in November 2024. The industry spent 2025 building like it hadn’t. Here’s what the attention data said, and when.
In September, The Picklr, the biggest indoor pickleball franchise in the country, cut its corporate staff. Its co-founder admitted that “this year got hard.” A franchisee group that owns five of its clubs filed for Chapter 11. Clubs in Texas and Alabama closed. And nine pickleball facilities listed for sale cut their asking prices over the summer, by an average of 39%.
It looked like a sudden shakeout. It wasn’t. The attention data turned in November 2024, almost two years earlier.
What attention said, and when
We track how much attention every sport gets, every day. For pickleball, the number that matters is whether it’s gaining or losing share against the other major sports. Call it the adjusted attention score: how fast pickleball’s attention is growing compared with tennis, golf, basketball and football.
At the end of 2023, the score was +38%. Pickleball wasn’t just popular. It was pulling attention away from everything else, at a pace that made it look like the next big sport.
Then it slowed. By September 2024 the score was down to +15%. In November 2024 it dropped below zero. Pickleball had stopped outgrowing the rest of sports. It stayed flat through 2025, and in 2026 it fell for real: −9% by June, −17% by September.
The money went the other way
Here’s the part that matters. The stall in attention came first. The biggest wave of investment came after.
In 2025, while the score sat flat, The Picklr went from 22 franchised clubs to 56. Franchisors across the sport sold hundreds of territories, far more than they could ever open. Pro league teams that cost a few hundred thousand dollars in 2021 changed hands for $10 million to $16 million.
The participation surveys didn’t catch it until June 2026, when SFIA reported growth had slowed to 22.8% and NSGA put it at just 6.5%. By then the leases were signed.
Why a flat line breaks a club
Pickleball didn’t lose its players. SFIA still counts more Americans playing every year. What it lost was acceleration, and acceleration is what the clubs were built on.
An indoor club with ten courts typically signs a lease of $30,000 to $50,000 a month. Demand bunches up between 5 and 9 pm, so the rest of the day has to be sold to new players who haven’t found the sport yet. That works when the sport is pulling in new curiosity every month. It doesn’t work when curiosity has stopped growing. The median mature Picklr club does about $938,000 a year. Breakeven on a $50,000 lease is over $1 million.
Attention is a measure of curiosity at the top of the funnel. It doesn’t tell you how many people play on Tuesday night. It tells you whether the next wave of players is coming. In November 2024, it said the next wave was getting smaller.
Where the attention went
Some of it went to padel.
In 2023, padel drew about a quarter as much attention as pickleball. In 2026 it draws more than half as much. Padel is still a fraction of pickleball’s size in actual players. But the curiosity is moving, and curiosity is what fills the next round of courts.
If anyone had been listening
A franchisor, a landlord or a lender watching the score in late 2024 would have seen pickleball go from +38% to below zero in eleven months. That was the time to slow territory sales, shorten lease terms and underwrite new clubs on flat demand instead of on 2023’s curve. Most of the money now in trouble was committed after that signal.
This is one sport and one cycle, so it’s a case study, not a law. But it fits a pattern we keep seeing. Wherever a price is set by what people believe, whether it’s a waiver claim, a sponsorship or a ten-year lease, attention moves first. The surveys, the earnings and the bankruptcy filings come later.
The question now is which boom is next. Padel is the obvious one. We’re watching it.
How we measured it
Attention: our daily attention measure for pickleball, padel, tennis, golf, basketball and football. The adjusted score is pickleball’s attention over the trailing 12 months compared with the prior 12 months, divided by the same growth for a basket of tennis, golf, basketball and football. Padel share is padel’s average monthly attention divided by pickleball’s; padel figures before 2023 aren’t comparable because of a change in how the sport is indexed. Industry events come from public reporting: participation from SFIA and NSGA; The Picklr’s club counts and sales from its franchise disclosure documents as reported by IAPPF; staff cuts from Athletech News; the franchisee bankruptcy from court records reported by IAPPF; facility price cuts and lease economics from The Dink; pro team sale prices from Sportico.