History of Padel in Sweden
No country has lived through padel's commercial cycle as completely as Sweden. Courts went from a few hundred to more than four thousand in three years, then a hundred facilities closed and ninety companies failed. What did not collapse was the playing: participation held, and 46 Swedish players hold a world ranking.
Thirty years of almost nothing
Swedes met padel on holiday. Travel to Spain and the ownership of second homes in Andalusia introduced the game from the early 1980s, but it did not follow them home in any serious way for a long time. The first Swedish courts date to the late 1990s, and growth after that was slow enough to be measured in dozens: roughly forty courts by 2013 and around ninety by 2015. The Swedish Padel Association was founded in 2010 to govern a sport that barely existed.
The boom
Between 2019 and 2022 Sweden built more padel courts than any country outside Spain, going from a few hundred to more than 4,200 in about three years. Uppsala alone went from fourteen courts to nearly a hundred inside a single year. The build-out was overwhelmingly commercial and overwhelmingly indoor, which the climate requires, and it was financed on the assumption that a participation curve rising that steeply would keep rising. Private equity entered the sector. Facilities were built at a scale and cost that only continuous growth could service.
The correction
It did not keep rising, and the economics turned. By the end of 2024 more than a hundred facilities had closed and around ninety padel companies had filed for bankruptcy. We Are Padel, backed by the private equity house Triton, shut fifty of its sixty-three Swedish clubs. Industry estimates put the capital destroyed at close to €500 million. Rising interest rates did much of the damage, because indoor padel centres are property businesses as much as sports businesses, and the debt that funded them repriced sharply.
What the collapse was not
The crucial detail is that Swedes did not stop playing. More than 600,000 people were still playing padel in early 2024, a participation rate that remains higher per head than any European country except Spain. The failure was on the supply side, not the demand side: too much capacity, built too fast, financed too optimistically, in a market that had mistaken a genuine participation boom for an unlimited infrastructure opportunity.
The market that survived
What is left is smaller, cheaper to enter and better matched to the demand that actually exists. Facilities that failed were often bought out of bankruptcy and reopened under operators with lower cost bases. Court hire prices, which had been high enough during the boom to make padel an expensive habit, came down. The sport in Sweden today is less of an investment story and more of an ordinary participation sport, which is a healthier place for it to sit.
Sweden as a warning
Sweden's experience has become the reference case internationally, cited in analysis of the British, German and North American markets as the example of what a padel build-out can do when construction is financed against a projection rather than against play. That the country retains one of Europe's highest participation rates while having destroyed half a billion euros of capital is the point: both things were true at once.