It’s becoming increasingly commonplace isn’t it? The football idol, tennis player or basketball star investing their lot – or at least some of it – into an insurgent sport.
One week it’s Tom Brady investing in Major League Pickleball (MLP), then fast forward less than 12 months and he’s investing in one of England’s oldest football clubs. Four-time Grand Slam winner Kim Clijsters has invested in MLP, too. Then there’s Cristiano Ronaldo building a so-called ‘Cidade do Padel’ in his native Portugal (the older, slightly more rotund, Brazilian Ronaldo is known to be partial to a bit of padel, too) .
Fast forward to this month, and there’s news that the athlete-investor-driven UK largest operator Game4Padel has brought on English Premier League stars Jamie Vardy and Dominic Calvert-Lewin as the latest of its great former and present athlete-investors – Andy Murray, Annabel Croft, Andrew Castle and Virgil Van Dijk. A shrewd strategy from a shrewd padel business, if ever there was one.
And yet, what is the appeal – in this instance – of investing in ‘other sport’, or sport at all, for that matter?
Well, to take sport itself, put yourself in an athlete’s shoes – whether that be an athlete close to retiring or now retired, as is usually the case with the athlete investor. Athletes thrive on repetition. Wasn’t it former Commonwealth table tennis champion and now journalist and author Matthew Matthew Syed who stressed the point so well in his book Bounce about the importance of 10,000 hours of purposeful practice. From an athlete perspective, we’ve all heard the stories of David Beckham hitting free kick after free kick after free kick on the training ground. Or Jonny Wilkinson doing the same with drop goals on the rugby pitch. Day after day, week after week.
And it’s not just your Beckhams and Wilkinsons who have mastered the art of repetition to hone their craft over the years. There are countless athletes that have done the same who, come the end of their playing careers will face the bittersweet moment of knowing their prime time is up with the heartache at giving up what they’ve always known.
Yet there will be an element of the retiring athlete wanting to keep the zest for competitive sport alive yet try a completely different sport or discipline. To step into a new chapter. Something new, fast-paced, exhilarating, competitive, something fresh to put the mind to. Step in padel or pickleball.
So, why does padel appeal to the athlete investor?
Well, the game is widely talked about as positively addictive. And observers will mostly agree that – compared to a more technical tennis, golf or squash even – padel is quick to pick up yet hard to master. The perfect ingredients for the often obsessive, perfectionist athlete that wants to dedicate their all to something, whether that be playing padel as a hobby in their newfound free time or investing in it, as is the case here.
The game is quirky, no doubt about it, to those of us that grew up playing tennis or squash – or, in my case, both. The idea of a mini tennis court, with tennis scoring, yet the walls (a la squash) but then throw in the cage to give you the unpredictability akin to a rugby ball bouncing, and you have a wonderfully, eclectic sport that feels fresh. Feels different. Feels unconventional. Perfect for an athlete to get passionate about, and to avoid the inevitable emptiness that comes from hanging up the proverbial pair of boots in their former sport.
And then, purely from an economic perspective, why invest? Well, things usually come down to the numbers in life and here, a shrewd athlete investor will see the healthy direction of travel of a sport like padel.
25 million players across 90 countries worldwide, padel has achieved number two sport in Spain status. It’s estimated that there will be 85,000 padel courts worldwide by 2026 (there are currently 37,000) and remarkably 30,000 in the USA alone by 2030 (a sharp increase from the current couple of hundred). In Europe alone, 98 new courts have opened every week for the last two years, meaning there have been almost 3,000 clubs built in Europe in the last two years.
And the bottom line? The padel industry has a current value of $2bn, with positive testimonials aplenty from pretty much anyone who steps on the court for the first time.
It’s no wonder Vardy, Calvert-Lewin and other stars are investing in the sport that has everyone talking. The potential for padel growth here in the UK and across the New Padel World cannot be understated.
And you can’t say that about every sport.
