History of Padel in Chile

Arrival through tennis and golf circles

Padel came to Chile in the mid-1990s, carried in by Spanish players who had come to the country for tennis and golf and brought the sport with them. It stayed a private-club curiosity for years, played on a handful of courts that were largely closed to the public, before wider adoption began in the early 2000s as more clubs opened their doors and local tournaments started to appear. Chile's national federation affiliated to the International Padel Federation (FIP) in 1994, only a few years after FIP itself was founded — an early formal step that predates the sport's mass popularity in the country by the better part of a decade.

The federation that runs the sport today, FEPACHI (Federación Nacional de Padel de Chile), took its current shape under Fabián Parolin, who has served as its president since 2010 and has also held the vice-presidency of the FIP. Under his leadership the federation built out the administrative scaffolding a national sport needs: ranked categories for men and women from beginner through elite level, age-group divisions running from junior categories up through seniors brackets, coaching certification, and a domestic calendar anchored by the Copa Chile de Clubes.

The pandemic boom and its correction

Padel's growth in Chile was not steady. Demand for court time had already been rising through the late 2010s, but the years around the COVID-19 pandemic turned that rise into a rush: an outdoor, low-contact sport that four friends could pick up quickly was exactly what Chileans were looking for after the social unrest of 2019 and the restrictions that followed in 2020 and 2021. Clubs opened rapidly across the country, concentrated heavily in Santiago's wealthier eastern communes, and for a period getting a court at a popular venue meant booking weeks in advance.

That growth did not continue indefinitely. By 2024, industry figures and the federation itself were describing a market correction: booking volumes fell noticeably through the year, waiting lists that had once stretched for weeks shortened to same-day availability, and a significant number of clubs closed as the supply of courts built during the boom outpaced demand. Parolin himself has been candid that the country now has markedly fewer operating clubs than it did at the peak. Framed plainly, this was a young market moving from a pandemic-driven fad to a more sustainable size — overbuilding followed by consolidation is a familiar arc in a sport that expanded this quickly across so many countries, and Chile's version of it is well documented rather than exceptional.

Players who carried Chile onto the international stage

For most of the 2010s and into the 2020s, one player did more than anyone to put Chile on padel's professional map. Javier Valdés grew up around the sport — his father, Juan Carlos, had been the country's leading player — and was pursuing tennis himself until a back injury as a teenager redirected him. A trip to watch a World Championship with his father convinced him to switch codes, and by 2016 he had relocated to Spain to chase a professional career. For a long period afterward he was, by his own account, the only Chilean treating padel as a full-time profession anywhere on the world tour. That isolation gradually ended as he built a career good enough to reach the main draw of every Premier Padel Major on the calendar.

The women's game found its own high-profile crossover in Andrea Koch Benvenuto, a former professional tennis player who represented Chile in Fed Cup competition before switching to padel. In March 2023 she became the first Chilean woman to compete in a World Padel Tour tournament, and she has continued to combine playing and coaching padel with a role in Chilean tennis administration. Behind these two, a younger group of players — among them Catalina Arancibia and Kimberley Ahumada Carrasco, selected to represent Chile at the 2026 South American Games — represents the federation's attempt to widen a pipeline that has so far produced only a handful of players able to sustain a full-time professional career.

International results and the national team

Chile's clearest team achievement came in 2019, when the men's side won the South American Championship for the first time in the federation's history, beating Brazil in the final in Encarnación, Paraguay. The Chilean women's team reached the final of the same event and finished as runners-up, a result that marked genuine progress for the women's programme. In the years since, national teams have added further continental medals, including runner-up and third-place finishes at Pan American and ODESUR competitions through the early 2020s.

At the sport's highest level, the men's national team finished eighth at the World Championship in Dubai in 2022 and repeated that finish at the following edition in Qatar in 2024 — a result that places Chile among the strongest padel nations in South America outside the sport's two dominant powers, Argentina and Brazil.

A permanent place on the professional tour

Chile's standing shifted again when Premier Padel, the sport's top-tier tour, arrived in Santiago for the first time in 2024, staged at the Movistar Arena. The tournament came about after the Chilean promotion company Acción Total began courting Qatar Sports Investments directly in 2022, eventually persuading the tour's owners to add Santiago to the calendar. The event returned in 2025 at Estadio San Carlos de Apoquindo as the tour's opening South American stop of the season, giving Chile a recurring fixture rather than a one-off booking. The FIP has also brought its Promises circuit for junior players to Santiago, running age-group draws that give Chile's next generation competitive experience against players from across the continent.

Taken together, the picture is of a sport whose domestic business went through a sharp boom-and-correction cycle typical of a young market, while its competitive structure — federation, national teams, a fixed tour date and a junior pathway — has kept building steadily underneath it.