Sport England says ‘23,000 padel players in the country’

Padel has been included in Sport England’s Active Lives survey for the first time – and its newly-published 2022-23 report says there is a core base of 23,000 players in the country.

Sport England – the non-departmental public body under the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – produces two separate reports every few years (one for adults and another for children and young people) to measure the nation’s activity levels.

The report conducted by Ipsos is split into many different demographics, with participation figures included for many different sports and physical activities.

Each individual within each sport’s figure is defined as being over the age of 16 and who says they have participated ‘at least twice in the sport in the past month when they were surveyed.’ These two playing sessions need to have reached a minimum threshold of 60 minutes.

Padel’s figure of 23,000, then, does not include anyone who has played just once within the past month, for whatever reason. Also to be borne in mind is that there were fewer padel facilities within the survey period (November 2022 to November 2023) and many players who were casual ‘once a month’ players then may have been bitten by the bug and playing more often now!

Padel’s 23,000 figure compares to 20,000 for pickleball, which is also included in the survey for the first time. Tennis shows a 0.5% drop to 861,000 since the last pre-pandemic Active Lives survey in 2016, with badminton down 3% at 763,000, table tennis down 3% to 350,000 and squash once again dropping heavily to 250,000, down by 7%.

Incidentally, the survey also included pickleball for the first time. Sport England’s 20,000 figure for pickleball during the November 2022 to November 2023 period is in line with recent estimates issued by the sport’s de facto governing body Pickleball England. At the February AGM they recorded a membership at the end of 2023 of 6,008 (which is now over 8,000). They estimated 15,000 players and the membership advised they thought this was under-reported. They are now estimating 25,000 and think that the Sport England figure validates this.

Overall, the new Actives Lives Adult Survey, which was published on 25 April, show that 63.4% of the adult population met the Chief Medical Officers’ guidelines of doing 150 minutes, or more, of moderate intensity physical activity a week. That’s equivalent to 29.5 million adults in England playing sport or taking part in physical activity every week.

This figure is largely unchanged from 12 months ago when 63.1% were active but means that, compared to when Sport England first ran the survey between November 2015 and November 2016, there are two million more active adults – an increase of 1.3%.

Read the Sport England 2022-23 Actives Lives Adult Survey here.