Padel has grown sevenfold in four years, and it still takes four people to play

The French Tennis Federation passed 100,000 padel licences in June 2025, against 70,491 a year earlier and around 18,000 in 2021. Over the same stretch, the country went from 2,917 courts in June 2025 to 4,066 by the end of that same year. No other sport in France is growing at this speed. And no other sport forbids you quite so absolutely from playing when one person is missing.

How much has padel grown in France in four years?

The series is unambiguous: around 18,000 padel licences in 2021, 37,512 in 2023, 70,491 in 2024, more than 100,000 in June 2025. That is a rise of 42.7 per cent in the last year alone, and roughly seven times the figure of four years ago. To measure the distance travelled, it is worth remembering that in 2014 France had about ten padel clubs in total.

The infrastructure has kept pace. In June 2025 the federation counted 2,917 courts across 959 clubs, some forty per cent more courts and twenty-five per cent more clubs than a year before. By the end of the year the count had risen to 4,066 courts and close to 1,027 clubs. The global report published in 2026 by Playtomic credits France with 1,142 new courts built in 2025 alone, more than any other country.

That same report places France in what it calls the market sweet spot, with occupancy of nine to ten hours a day per court. That is enough for clubs to be profitable, and not so much that booking becomes a nightmare. In the United Kingdom, where occupancy reaches eighty-five per cent at peak hours, half the players surveyed say they struggle to get a slot.

How many padel players are there really in France?

Precision matters here, because the numbers circulate in disorder. Three counts coexist, and all three are correct within their own perimeter.

First there are the 100,000 padel licences issued by the French Tennis Federation, announced on 17 June 2025. Then there are the 272,000 members of that same federation who say they play padel, a figure published by its observatory on 19 November 2025: those are largely tennis licence holders who also play padel, not additional padel licences. And finally there are the 850,000 players estimated by the Observatoire du Padel 2025, conducted by the Union Sport et Cycle with the federation among 5,520 players, which takes in everyone who plays without holding a licence anywhere.

The same disorder exists globally. The International Padel Federation puts the world total at around thirty-five million players and 77,300 courts, while the Playtomic 2026 report counts 19.4 million and 58,334. Both figures are published, neither is false, they simply do not measure the same thing. When you read a number about padel, look at who produced it before you keep it.

Why does a padel court always need four players?

The International Padel Federation regulations that came into force on 1 January 2026 describe a court twenty metres by ten, with a tolerance of half a per cent, a minimum clear height of six metres with eight metres recommended, back walls four metres high made up of three metres of solid wall topped by one metre of mesh, and a net ten metres long strung at eighty-eight centimetres in the middle and ninety-two at the posts.

The detail that matters is not in the dimensions, it is in the drafting. Those regulations are written from beginning to end in terms of pairs. Singles is not covered. Padel is not a sport that is usually played by four people, it is a sport whose official rules provide only for doubles.

Do the arithmetic and it speaks for itself, even though it is only arithmetic: two hundred square metres shared by four players comes to fifty square metres each, against roughly a hundred and ninety-five square metres for a tennis player in singles. Four times less ground to cover, walls that send the ball back instead of ending the point, and rallies that last. That density is what explains padel’s immediate appeal, and it is also what makes the fourth player non-negotiable.

What really motivates padel players?

The Observatoire du Padel 2025 asked 5,520 players what brings them to the court. Enjoyment comes first at sixty-nine per cent, followed by sharing good moments with friends at sixty-one, the playful character of the game at fifty, passion at forty-four, unwinding at forty-one, fitness at thirty-eight, letting off steam at thirty-five and health at twenty-four. Competition brings up the rear at six per cent.

Two of those figures deserve a pause, because they run against the prevailing talk. Meeting new people motivates only twenty-two per cent of players. And ease of learning, the standard argument of every article ever written about padel, is cited by just sixteen per cent of them.

The rest of the picture is consistent: eighty-five per cent play with friends, seventy-seven per cent have a drink afterwards, eighty-two per cent say they are satisfied with the conviviality, and eighty per cent book by the session rather than by subscription. Fifty-four per cent are between twenty-five and forty-four, forty-six per cent play at least once a week, padel is the main sport of half of them, and thirty-eight per cent had never played tennis before. Women make up sixteen per cent of French players, twenty-two per cent among newcomers.

What that tells you is that padel is not how people meet. It is how they play with the people they already know. And that is precisely why a missing fourth blocks everything.

Is padel really a social sport?

A systematic review published in 2025 in Frontiers in Psychology by Lauxtermann and Stubbs, covering fourteen studies and 1,403 participants, reaches an instructive verdict: scientific research on padel deals overwhelmingly with performance, physiology and biomechanics, very little with wellbeing and almost not at all with social integration.

In other words, the sentence “padel is a social sport”, which you will read everywhere, is a market claim. It is probably true, it is consistent with what players report, but it has not been established scientifically. The same goes for the idea that padel is quicker to learn than tennis: no serious study compares the two learning curves. Nobody can honestly tell you how many sessions it takes before you can play.

How much does an hour of padel really cost?

There is no official price list in France. The available orders of magnitude put court hire at around thirty-two euros an hour according to a Playtomic estimate quoted by Deloitte in 2023, and between thirty and forty-two euros an hour according to a specialist press survey in 2026.

Divide by four and you get eight to ten and a half euros per player for an hour. That is arithmetic rather than measurement, but it is enough to understand the economics of padel: it is a cheap sport as long as there are four of you. With three, the same court costs ten to fourteen euros a head. With two, it is simply not playable under the rules.

How do you find the other three players?

Everything else about padel has been sorted out. The courts exist, they are close by, they are available nine to ten hours a day, booking takes three clicks and eighty per cent of players take their slot by the session with no commitment. What is missing is never the court. It is the fourth player.

Elsewhere, answers are starting to appear: Playtomic reports that more than twenty per cent of bookings in the United Kingdom now go through open matches, where you sign up alone and the game fills itself, and claims more than ten thousand open matches in the United States in 2025 alone. No equivalent data has been published for France.

That is exactly the gap Smatchy fills: putting you in touch with players at your level and in your area for Thursday evening’s game, with no club to join and no subscription to sign. Because in padel, finding a court was never the problem.