History of Padel in Spain

A Mexican game with a Spanish address

Padel was not invented in Spain. It took shape in Acapulco in the late 1960s, where the Mexican Enrique Corcuera walled in a small court beside his house and wrote rules that made those walls part of the game. Spain's contribution was to give the idea a country. Alfonso de Hohenlohe, the aristocrat behind the Marbella Club, played on Corcuera's court while visiting Mexico and came home convinced. In 1974 he had two courts built at his hotel on the Costa del Sol, and every professional career in Spanish padel traces back to them.

Marbella was an unusually effective place to launch a sport. The Marbella Club's guest list ran to royalty, film actors and industrialists, and a game that is quick to learn, played in fours and forgiving of a weak serve travelled through that circle fast. Manolo Santana, the Wimbledon and Roland Garros champion, took it up and began organising tournaments along the coast, lending padel the credibility of a tennis name at the exact moment it needed one. In 1975 Julio Menditeguy, an Argentine friend of Hohenlohe, took the game home with him. Argentina embraced it faster than Spain did, and the two countries have shaped the sport between them ever since.

From the Costa del Sol to the rest of the country

Through the 1980s padel moved inland from Andalusia, first to Madrid and then to most provincial capitals. Its spread had less to do with fashion than with geometry and cost. A padel court occupies a fraction of the land a tennis court needs, can be dropped into a car park, a rooftop or an unused corner of an existing club, and pays for itself at a rate no other racket sport can match. For Spanish tennis clubs under financial pressure it was an obvious addition, and for municipalities it was a cheap way to fill a sports centre.

The game's other advantage was social. A beginner can hold a rally on a first afternoon, the enclosure keeps the ball alive, and every match is a doubles match, which makes padel something four friends of unequal ability can play together and enjoy. That is why it grew as a participation sport long before it was a spectator one. Two waves did most of the work: a first through the 1990s, when clubs, coaches, leagues and a domestic equipment industry took shape, and a second and much larger one from around 2010, which is when padel stopped being a regional habit of the south and became a national one.

Federation, licences and the domestic calendar

Spain's Consejo Superior de Deportes recognised padel as a sport in its own right in the early 1990s. That separated it from tennis administratively and opened a route to public funding, qualifications and a national competition structure. The Federación Española de Pádel governs the game nationally, but most of the week-to-week work sits with the autonomous regional federations, which issue licences, run club leagues and stage regional championships; the Andalusian, Madrid, Catalan and Valencian federations are the largest of them. The Campeonato de España runs from junior age groups through to veterans, and the federated club league is where almost every Spanish professional was first ranked against strangers.

Madrid and the world game

The International Padel Federation was founded in Madrid in 1991 by the Argentine, Spanish and Uruguayan federations, and it is still based there. Its first World Padel Championship followed in 1992, also in Madrid, and Spain has staged the event repeatedly since: Madrid again in 1996, Murcia in 2006, Palma de Mallorca in 2014. The European Championship, first played in 1995, has been dominated by Spain in both the men's and the women's competition. For a sport with a Mexican inventor and an Argentine heartland, the administrative centre has been Spanish almost from the beginning.

The professional circuit

Professional padel has been organised from Spain for most of its history. The Padel Pro Tour, which ran from 2005, was replaced in 2013 by the World Padel Tour, owned by the Barcelona brewer Damm; its calendar was overwhelmingly Spanish and so was its audience. In 2022 the International Padel Federation and Qatar Sports Investments launched Premier Padel as a rival structure, and once the two were brought under the same ownership the World Padel Tour stopped operating at the end of 2023. The unified tour is no longer Spanish-owned, but the map has barely moved: Spanish venues still carry more of the professional calendar than those of any other country, from Madrid and Barcelona to Málaga, Sevilla, Valladolid and Córdoba.

The players who made Spain a padel power

Spain's women got there first. Carolina Navarro, a tennis player from Málaga who switched codes in her late teens, spent the best part of a decade at the head of the world rankings and was a serial Spanish champion; the documentary made about her partnership with the Argentine Cecilia Reiter is the closest thing the women's game has to an origin story. Marta Marrero came the same way, from a professional tennis career on the WTA tour. Alejandra Salazar reached the top of the rankings with different partners in eras a decade apart, and Gemma Triay, from Menorca, has finished several seasons at number one, most of them alongside Salazar in a pairing the Spanish press called Triazar. Ariana Sánchez, Paula Josemaría, Beatriz González and Claudia Fernández have kept the supply going since.

The men's breakthrough came later, because for two decades the top of the men's game was Argentine and stayed that way. Paquito Navarro, from Seville, was the first Spaniard of the modern era to trouble that order. Juan Lebrón reached the top of the rankings alongside him in 2019, then held it with Alejandro Galán through three straight seasons at the start of the 2020s, ending the longest Argentine hold the sport had known. Arturo Coello and Miguel Yanguas belong to the wave behind them, and both came through the Spanish junior system rather than from tennis, which is a change in itself: Spain now produces padel players rather than converting them.

International results

The World Padel Championship has been an Argentina and Spain affair since 1992. Argentina has won the men's team title far more often, and Spain's men have taken it in 1998, 2008, 2010 and 2021. The women's championship reads the other way. Spain won the team title in 1998, 2000 and 2010, and has taken every edition from 2014 onwards, a run of consecutive victories without parallel anywhere in the sport. At European level Spain is the reference nation in both competitions, and the pattern is durable enough that a Spanish loss at a team championship is treated as the result of the tournament.

Where the sport stands

Padel is a normal part of Spanish sporting life rather than a novelty. It is the second most played participation sport in the country behind football, more people play it than play tennis, and Spain has more courts than anywhere else on earth. Around them sits a domestic industry of court builders, racket brands, academies and coaches that now exports across Europe, and that industry is as much a Spanish contribution to the sport as any trophy. 648 Spanish players hold a world ranking across the men's and women's professional games, a depth of field no other country has matched, and the reason Spanish names fill so much of the draw at tournaments far outside Spain.