Who Is Padel Really For?

El Remate #49 | What's hot in 🇺🇸 & 🌎 padel | September 15-22, 2026

Bienvenidos a El Remate! I’m Aris, a padel-obsessed Missourian who spent two years living in Argentina and Spain to deeply understand the sport’s culture, strategy, and business. I’ve played and competed across 3 continents and 12 countries, and recently started documenting my journey on Instagram.

Each week, I curate what matters in padel: new US club openings, technique tips, my takes on international headlines and pro drama, plus insider knowledge from the global circuit. Subscribe for weekly updates! 📧

🔍 Topics we’ll cover this week

In another English-speaking market, not all padel is being built the same. Big money is chasing premium venues, while cheaper operators are proving the sport doesn’t need a luxury clubhouse to thrive.

Meanwhile, Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois’ investment platform is getting into padel, with the NBA and NFL on its longer-term wish list. Plus, and AI cameras are coming for America’s newest clubs.

Also in this issue:
— Your serve gets therapy
— The pros return to North America
— Women’s No. 1 gets a documentary
— The hilarious story of UK padel’s earliest days

…and plenty more. Dale vamos!

🇺🇸 Court Openings

Now Open

• Virginia-based Epic Padel, a club operator and investor focused on growing padel across North America, just opened its Milwaukee, WI location with eight indoor courts. The club features locker rooms & showers, a warm-up area, social lounge, co-working spaces, and grab-and-go food, with coaching, leagues, tournaments and junior programming rounding out the experience. Each court also features Clutch AI cameras to give players post-match stats and highlights via Epic’s app.

  

• Just outside NYC, Cross Court Pickle + Padel is bringing Westchester County its first publicly accessible padel courts. The location in Hawthorne, NY features four indoor padel courts alongside six pickleball courts, plus food & beverage, retail, spectator areas, clinics, leagues, and social events. The club will also feature PlaySight AI technology for recording, live streaming, and performance tracking.

  

📈 Up Your Game 

Rethink Your Serve

Think your serve is finished when you hit the ball? Nope. Rather, it’s finished when you’re in net position.

In this 12-minute video, Coach Mauri from Hello Padel critiques the serves of beginner, intermediate, and advanced players. A few takeaways:

1. Your serve should give you enough time to get forward and establish your net position before your opponents can attack.

2. Starting with the basics, bounce the ball around waist height, and drive from high to low rather than “spooning” the ball.

3. After the serve, don’t sprint blindly toward the net.

   1. Arrive in position before your opponent makes contact, then use a split step so you’re balanced and ready to react.

   2. Don’t obsess over reaching the perfect position. If you can’t comfortably reach that ideal position, move more diagonally and prioritize covering the dangerous area.

Remember, your first two steps after the serve can matter more than the serve itself. Suerte!

🌍 International Happenings  

Building Two Different Padels (🇬🇧)

As an American, it’s genuinely interesting watching padel accelerate this fast in the UK. It’s a more mature market than ours, culturally close, English-speaking, and the pace of headlines this summer alone (e.g., around the recent London P1 and insane pipeline of court builds) makes it worth paying attention to from across the Atlantic.

And as if there wasn’t enough already going on over there, The Padel Club, a Cheshire-based operator backed by high-profile British soccer and cricket legends, just raised over $4 million from PXN Ventures to open eight new sites, taking its network to 85 courts. It’s on track for ~100% revenue growth this year, and the money is chasing BIG demand: the LTA reported 860K people played padel in Britain last year (which makes me even more skeptical about the “1 million padel players in the US” narrative), more than double 2024.

Also worth noting, this isn’t investment flowing to a budget operator. The Padel Club’s model runs through clubhouse-anchored flagship venues inside major leisure destinations, its TraffordCity site sits alongside an indoor ski slope and an indoor skydiving center, with a similar approach now planned for Birmingham.

This really matters because the money is coming in before the sport has decided what it wants to be. A new UK Padel Report found 60% of English venues still sit in wealthier postcodes, with courts in London and parts of Manchester running $80 to $130 an hour. At the same time, a wave of operators in former industrial towns are proving the sport works just as well at a fraction of the price, in some of the country’s most economically overlooked postcodes, with players coming back more often than at the premium clubs. “Padel is a working-class sport,” says one of the operators behind that shift. The big question is which one the fresh capital ends up building more of, and this week’s raise went to the flagship-leisure-complex model rather than the community one.

🏆 Pro Padel Roundup 

The Calm Before the Storm (🇲🇽🇦🇷🇳🇱)

The Premier Padel tour is taking a breather after Roland Garros, but the pro scene is still far from quiet.

First, US/Canada/Mexico-based Pro Padel League is back in action this week, with its third event of the season landing in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Going into this week’s tournament, the DC Matrix sits atop the league table, with the Florida Goats and Toronto Polar Bears closely behind. The tournament will stream on YouTube, with the Finals airing on CNBC.

Meanwhile, Delfi Brea is getting the documentary treatment. Adventures Delfi, the latest episode of Red Bull TV’s Padel Life, follows the 26-year-old Argentine from leaving Buenos Aires at 17 to becoming the women’s world No. 1 alongside Gemma Triay. The 43-minute episode gets into the less glamorous side of going pro: homesickness, partner changes, injuries, losing, and trying to find a home between Argentina and Spain.

And then there’s Miguel Lamperti. The 47-year-old, white-haired Argentine legend will step away from Premier Padel at the end of 2026, though “[his] body doesn’t want to retire yet.” He plans to keep playing FIP events, exhibitions, and clinics before spending 2027 learning the coaching trade.

Finally, the post-Paris shuffle is underway. Paquito Navarro / Martín Di Nenno have climbed to No. 4 in the rankings, while Sanyo Gutiérrez is reuniting with Maxi Sánchez Blasco for the final stretch of the season. The new pairings begin rolling out at the Rotterdam P2 (Sept. 28-Oct. 4).

🎯 Quick Hits 

• Real Madrid’s Belgian goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois’ investment platform, NXTPLAY Capital, will add a padel project to its portfolio before year’s end, with plans to enter the NBA and NFL down the road. (🇧🇪)

• Closing out the Senior World Cup in Buenos Aires, Argentina defended its men’s title with a 3-2 comeback over Spain, while Spain took the women’s crown for a fourth straight year, beating a Team USA side that reached the final for the first time. (🇦🇷🇪🇸🇺🇸)

• Spain released its preliminary World Cup squad ahead of November’s championship in Doha, with Ale Galán, Arturo Coello, and Gemma Triay among the closest to locks. (🇪🇸)

• South Africa is having its first-ever national padel championship, set for Cape Town this October. (🇿🇦)

• Bogotá inaugurated the country’s first padel court built into public space, part of a push to reclaim land beneath the city’s bridges. (🇨🇴)

• Padel has entered the University of Pristina in Kosovo, where the amateur player base has tripled every year since 2024, now sitting at 9,000. (🇽🇰)

• The Argentina Padel Tour just headed to a Buenos Aires shopping mall, setting up courts on the first floor next to the retail traffic. (🇦🇷)

• Tennis Wales appointed its first-ever National Development Manager for Padel and is launching dedicated padel channels. (🇬🇧)

• Police forces from ten European countries came together in Monaco for the inaugural European Police Padel Championship, with Monaco ultimately taking the title over Sweden. (🇲🇨🇸🇪)

• Community musings:

  • Before the UK padel boom, there were five courts. One of the UK’s first padel pioneers tells the wonderfully chaotic story of building the country’s national teams in 2008 with four months, zero budget, and barely any players at home.

🤩 Cool Court of the Week

📍 Tripoli, 🇱🇾
More info here!

Missed a recent issue? Todo tranca che ;) we got you covered:

• “We Are Not a Serious Sport”

• (Don’t) Believe the Hype?

• 📌 Hot take editorials:

  • I Said US Padel Is Ass-Backward. Here’s What Ensued

  • POV: The Only 🇺🇸 at the World’s Largest-Ever Padel Tournament

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Thanks for reading! My promise: I’ll keep the newsletters coming, you share with a friend if you’re enjoying. Está bien? Forward to a friend.

For more on-the-ground 🌎 padel content from a 🇺🇸 POV, follow @padelyanqui on Instagram! And if you have any feedback, news to share, or are interested in becoming a preferred partner of El Remate, just respond to this email :)

See you next week & keep smashing those volleys 🎾