History of Padel in Paraguay
Paraguay's padel federation was founded in the early 1990s, one of the first in South America to join the sport's international body, and the country has since hosted a Premier Padel event, a senior World Championship and a Juniors World Championship. Its growth has been steady rather than explosive, built around a small number of generational talents rather than a broad amateur boom.
Arrival and the founding of FEPARPA
Padel arrived in Paraguay early by South American standards. The Federación Paraguaya de Pádel (FEPARPA) joined the International Padel Federation in 1992, a year after that governing body was itself founded by the federations of Spain, Argentina and Uruguay. That makes Paraguay one of the first national federations to affiliate outside the three founding nations, well ahead of the sport's later growth elsewhere in Europe and the Americas.
FEPARPA has competed at every FIP World Padel Championships since, appearing at the event on more than a dozen occasions, and has sent teams to nine FIP Juniors World Championships going back to the first junior edition, held in La Plata, Argentina, in 2000. That junior pipeline would later matter: several of the players who built Paraguay's current professional scene came up through junior national teams before turning professional.
Clubs, courts and a question of scale
Estimates of the size of Paraguay's amateur base vary sharply depending on who is counting and when. The International Padel Federation's own research, published in 2024, put the country at more than 500 clubs and 2,000 courts, with roughly 500,000 amateur players and around 2,800 holding a FEPARPA professional licence. An earlier estimate from FEPARPA's own president put the national court count at a little over 250, with 30 more under construction at the time, after what he described as exponential growth over the preceding five years. The gap between the two figures is large enough that it most likely reflects different survey dates and different definitions of what counts as a court, rather than a single consistent trend; it is one of several reminders that courts-and-players figures for a market this size should be read as estimates rather than counts.
Hosting the world
Paraguay has hosted international padel on several occasions. The country staged the FIP World Padel Championships in 2018, an event that drew some criticism over court conditions at the time. It returned to host duties more smoothly in 2023, running the FIP Juniors World Padel Championships in Asunción; the host nation's men's team beat Mexico in the quarter-finals before losing the bronze-medal match to Argentina, with Spain winning both the men's and women's titles overall.
The professional tour itself arrived in May 2024, when Asunción hosted a Premier Padel P2 event at the Secretaría Nacional de Deportes complex, the first stop of a three-event South American swing that continued in Argentina and Chile. The tournament drew leading international pairs, including the top seeds in both draws and a returning Fernando Belasteguin, and followed three earlier CUPRA FIP Tour events Paraguay had already staged on the second-tier circuit.
Padel America and the continental picture
Paraguay is one of the national federations behind Padel America, a continental body set up to coordinate the sport's development across the Americas; FEPARPA's leadership sits on its board as one of the members designated by the International Padel Federation. That continental role has coincided with Paraguay's own rise through the South American pack, even as its base remains modest next to the region's two dominant nations, Argentina and Brazil.
The players who built the modern scene
Three names account for most of Paraguay's recent international attention. Martin Abud, born in Encarnación in 2003, won the men's world junior team championship in 2021 before turning professional; in 2025 he won the A1 Padel Cordoba Open alongside Spaniard Jose Solano, beating the top seeds in a deciding set and taking the tournament's MVP award.
Facundo Dehnike, from Hohenau in the Itapúa department, received a wildcard into the main draw of the 2024 Asunción Premier Padel event at fifteen. Later that year, partnering Spaniard Manuel Aragón, he reached a Premier Padel semi-final at sixteen, the youngest player to do so in the tour's history. He also recorded Paraguay's first match win at a FIP World Padel Championships, partnering Samuel Rodríguez against Mexico in Doha.
Mariano Gonzalez, also from Encarnación, built the men's most significant individual result of the current era: partnering Curro Cabeza, he became the first Paraguayan to reach the quarter-finals of a Premier Padel P1 event, beating two seeded pairs along the way before facing the tour's top-ranked duo.
Gold at the South American Games
Padel made its debut at the South American Games in Rafaela, Argentina, in September 2026, and Paraguay won the men's gold medal in the sport's first appearance at the event. Abud and Dehnike beat the Argentine home pair in a final played to a sold-out crowd, giving the country its first continental multi-sport medal in padel and a result that, for a federation of FEPARPA's size, sits well above what its amateur base alone would predict.
Where the sport stands now
14 Paraguayans hold a position in the world rankings across the men's and women's professional game, the great majority of them men. The women's side of Paraguayan padel has not yet produced a player near the top of the world game, a gap that has persisted even as the men's results have improved, and closing it looks like the more open question facing the federation than maintaining the men's recent momentum.