 "India joins global Pickleball, Padel boom as sports surpass tennis' growth")
Even as the US Open tennis tournament witnessed a record one-million-plus fans come through the turnstiles this year, the game’s leaders and marketing departments are confronting a grave truth - the sport is not the country’s fastest-growing racket sport (or sport of any kind). That honour goes to pickleball which has seen participation boom 223% in the past three years.
Pickleball, an easy-to-play mix of tennis and table tennis using paddles and a wiffleball, has quickly soared from nearly nothing to 13.6 million US players in just a few years. In comparison, tennis, with its rich history and long-term legacy, has 23.8 million players.
India has seen massive growth as well with the coronavirus pandemic providing a boost. In 2016, there were three courts, handful of players and no prize money for tournaments. In 2024, the Monsoon Pickleball Championship in Mumbai offered a prize pool of $100,000 and had nearly 800 competitors. Then there was the India Open, also played in Mumbai, which had over 700 athletes from 12 countries.
Today, India has over 1,000 pickleball courts, with Mumbai and Ahmedabad emerging as the biggest hubs. Delhi-NCR and Chennai are quickly catching up. As per estimates, 10,000 players participate professionally and the amateurs take that tally to 70,000 in the country.
All of Mumbai’s prominent clubs such as Juhu Gymkhana, Khar Gymkhana, Cricket Club of India, Bombay Gymkhana, Willingdon Gym have pickleball courts now. In Delhi, there are pickleball courts at the Vasant Vihar Club and at the DDA-operated Siri Fort Sports Complex.
What is leading this growth for pickleball and padel?
Djokovic, Sinner, Krejcikova and Callie Smith doing pickleball dingles at Head event. pic.twitter.com/gzdZuYd3jR
— Jon Levey (@levey_jon) August 22, 2024
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“One is the convenience factor. As a sport, it’s (pickleball) extremely easy to pick up. Somebody hands me a pickleball racket, and I can go and play. It’s not very technical. So that removes the entry barrier for people to start playing. Think of golf, tennis or cricket. If you don’t know the right technique, if you haven’t had (the right) training, it is hard to enjoy,” says Suhail Narain of Hudle, a sports-tech platform which allows users to book private and public facilities for sports and recreation.
“The second factor is that it’s a decent workout but it has less stress on your body compared to football, cricket, badminton. Then football and cricket also need more players, so you need a bigger group, not always easily accessible.
“The other is the economic factor. It is among the cheapest sports infrastructure to set up. Badminton needs to be indoors. So the average single court has an initial investment of Rs. 15-20 lakhs to set up. So if you’re setting up a four court facility, you need to make it indoors. It’s anywhere between Rs 60-80 lakhs as a one-time investment. On the other hand, pickleball courts don’t necessarily have to be indoors. Depending on the surface, a single court costs anywhere between Rs. 2-4 lakhs, maximum Rs. 5 lakhs. So the court is the exact size of a badminton court but it takes about 20-25% of the investment. And it is conducive to multi-use surfaces. For example, a lot of schools have basketball courts already. All you need to do for pickleball is to paint lines in a different colour, and it becomes a multi-use surface.
“Additionally, the sport is age and gender-agnostic. There are 70-year-olds playing with 20-year-olds. Bulk of our audience for football is between 20-30 years old because as you grow old, you want to start playing less contact and physically strenuous sports. Cricket is a slightly wider age group, but it’s a more niche audience, because you need some hand-eye coordination. So people who’ve grown up playing cricket continue playing it, but if you haven’t played it till 25-30 years old, then it’s hard to pick up,” he added.
In comparison to pickleball’s maximum Rs. 5 lakh investment in setting up, padel is more expensive. “A good quality padel court will cost you, everything included, at least around Rs. 25 lakh rupees as a ballpark figure. But one tennis court can accomodate up to three padel courts. So as far as infrastructure use is concerned, it’s a very good investment because you have three times the potential of a tennis court in the same amount of space,” said Nikhil Sachdev, co-founder of PadelPark.
The most troubling aspect for tennis is that pickleball’s rise has often come at the expense of thousands of tennis courts encroached upon or even replaced by smaller pickleball courts.
Disgracefully, the beautiful clay on court five at Roland Garros has been replaced by pickleball courts. pic.twitter.com/8I1459fZCW
— Tumaini Carayol (@tumcarayol) June 6, 2024
Some tennis bodies and events have embraced the sport. France’s tennis federation (FFT) set up a few pickleball courts at this year’s French Open to give top players and fans a chance to try it out.
Novak Djokovic, 24-time Grand Slam champion, said tennis has a challenge at its disposal. “On a club level, tennis is endangered. If we don’t do something about it, globally or collectively, padel, pickleball in the States, they’re gonna convert all the tennis clubs into padel and pickleball,” said the fourth-ranked Serb.
The Goregaon Sports Club (in Mumbai), has converted some of their pre-existing tennis spaces into pickleball courts, others have set up completely new courts.
“It’s too early to say that in India. We have a lot of facilities where one tennis court gets converted into three pickleball courts, but you can play both. And then you can just let the market decide. If somebody books a tennis court for that time, those three pickleball courts are not available, or vice versa. Since it is a multi-use surface. We’re at the end of the day running a business. So we go where the demand is,” said Narain, based on their observation of user activity in 60 Indian cities, on whether pickleball or padel can replace tennis.
Where are pickleball and padel growing in India?
As far as regional growth in India is concerned, Mumbai, Gujarat, Delhi, Bengaluru are some of the biggest geographic to embrace pickleball. Driving the growth in these cities are schools that are converting already available courts into pickleball areas followed by commercial complexes, residential societies and companies’ recreational zones.
“Today, it is coming up in urban centers like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore [Bengaluru], Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad, but Vadodara is one of our biggest pickleball markets. Also, Indore has started picking it up. We’ve launched the first few courts in places like Jaipur, Kolkata. So it’s already started trickling into sort of the tier-two, tier-three markets, which is much faster than what we saw the others sports do. It will start from urban centers and then filter further. Even in a Mumbai, for example, it started with particular pockets of Mumbai, but now courts are opening in Thane, Dombivali, Navi Mumbai, it’s filtering within the city,” clarified Narain on the growth of the niche sports.
Sachdev, meanwhile, has observed that beyond the adoption by people of multiple age groups, which has resulted in packed facilities, another curious fact is that 35-40% of those who play padel are women, something not seen with other traditional racket sports.
Padel vs Pickleball
Tennis players and celebrities have been showcased competing in both pickleball and padel on a recreational basis. Ahead of the 2024 US Open, Carlos Alcaraz and Elena Rybakina played pickleball in New York.
The list of padel players includes Lionel Messi, David Beckham, Rafael Nadal, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Zinedine Zidane and Serena Williams.
In this quagmire of next-big-thing, which one will come out on top or can they co-exist and grow equally?
“Pickleball with its ease of setting up courts will grow faster. Having said that, while padel requires more investment, it still has a lot of advantages over traditional sports such as football, cricket, badminton, so there are going to be different growth stories for both sports. Padel will grow slightly slower, but has a unique edge attached to where a lot of people are, wherever there are courts, and there is an ecosystem,” believes Narain.
“A lot of people are hooked on padel, but it is going to grow slower. It’s almost going to be like the new golf where it’s likely sort of an elite corporate sport, so to say, in the first few years. Whereas pickleball has the potential to become a sport for the masses with all the things that it has going for it. So both are different. Markets will grow at their own pace, but both in their own right, will become as big as any other sport in India.”
Another aspect behind the growth of the niche sports is infrastructure development. PadelPark, a facility for the tennis-meets-squash sport., was established in 2023 and endeavours to grow the sport. After setting up their first court in Malabar Hill, Mumbai, they’ve grown into ten operational courts with plans to enter Chandigarh, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Kochi.
“The pickleball wave started long, long ago, which is why today we’re seeing the efforts of those years. As far as padel is concerned, it’s fairly new. The first couple of courts came up only six to eight months ago. While pickleball has been around for, I think, at least three to four years,” said Sachdev, one of the faces at PadelPark.
“Secondly, pickleball infrastructure is much easier to set up. So the growth of pickleball as a sport is a little different from how padel will grow. While it’s kind of in the same realm, they’re two different sports. We actually feel that padel will grow much faster because people are adopting to new kind of sports and kind of getting back into racket sports.
“I think India is in a unique place where pickleball and padel will both grow very big simultaneously. Because a lot of what’s happening in a lot of other countries is that it’s either pickleball or padel. Plus, India traditionally has had a bias towards racket sports to a certain extent. We all play it, whether it’s badminton, table tennis, squash etc.,” he added.
With padel drawing serious interest with courts going booked six months in advance and facilities having to turn down non-members, the challenge is in finding real estate.
“Of course it is profitable, there is huge demand but finding spaces is the biggest problem for the sport to grow,” said Sachdev. “We’re doing one-two courts but where do we find space in Mumbai to open a six court facility? If we get that, we can put in things like a high performance center, get serious coaching done,” he added.
There are already next steps being taken to take padel forward. JSW Sports and Inspire Institute of Sport (IIS) founder Parth Jindal, the group behind the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Delhi Capitals, has led a fresh round of funding in PadelPark.
The global pickleball market is expected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2022 to $3.85 billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 11.30% according to a Market Research report in the US.
While padel is expected to make giant strides of its own. Currently valued at over $2.2 billion, it is projected to grow at an annual rate of 22%, reaching $6.6 billion by 2026.
With both sports holding such lofty ambitions and being met with rising demand across the world, there is good reason for tennis and the players to be worried. But for the audience itself, there is something to look forward to - young and old, whatever the gender.
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