The history of padel

Key takeaways

• Padel began in 1969 in a single backyard in Acapulco, Mexico — not Spain, as many assume.
• The enclosing walls were a fix for a practical problem: the ball kept escaping the yard.
• Spain and Argentina, not Mexico, turned padel into a mainstream sport during the 1970s-80s.
• The sport got its first international governing body in 1991.
• The current boom — the U.S., the Gulf, the UK — is a distinctly 2020s phenomenon.

1969: A backyard in Acapulco

Padel's origin story is oddly specific for a sport now played by tens of millions of people. In 1969, Mexican businessman Enrique Corcuera wanted to build a tennis court at his home in Acapulco, Las Brisas, but did not have the space for a regulation one. His solution was to build a smaller court — roughly 20 by 10 meters — and enclose it with walls so the ball would not constantly leave the property and interrupt play. That single practical compromise, solving a neighbor-annoyance problem rather than designing a new sport from scratch, is what makes padel padel: the walls that are now central to the game were originally a fence.

Corcuera's wife, Viviana, reportedly wrote up an early set of rules as a gift for him, adapting elements of tennis scoring to the smaller, walled court. It is a detail worth knowing because it explains something people new to the sport often ask: padel's scoring is basically tennis's 15-30-40-game system, carried over wholesale rather than invented separately. See how scoring works for the full breakdown.

1974: The jump to Spain

Padel might have stayed a curiosity confined to one backyard if not for a visitor. Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a friend of Corcuera's, played on the Acapulco court and brought the idea back to Spain, building the first two padel courts at a tennis club in Marbella in 1974. Marbella at the time was a magnet for wealthy European and Latin American visitors, and the sport spread from that single club outward through Spain's tennis and social clubs over the following decade.

Argentina picked it up on a parallel track around the same period, independently building its own enthusiastic base — enough that by the 1990s, Argentina and Spain were the sport's two clear centers of gravity, each with its own name for it (Argentina used "paddle" before the two countries agreed to standardize).

1991: Padel becomes an organized sport

Padel spent its first two decades as a growing but informal pastime. That changed on July 12, 1991, when the national federations of Argentina, Uruguay and Spain met in Madrid at the Club de Golf La Moraleja and founded the International Padel Federation, with Julio Alegría Artiach, a Spaniard from Bilbao, elected as its first president. By the end of the 1990s, eleven national federations existed across Europe and the Americas, and in 1997 Spain and Argentina met in Barcelona to formally agree on a single name and rulebook — settling on "Padel" over Argentina's earlier "Paddle" spelling.

That period also produced the version of the rules still played today, which is why padel's fundamentals — the underhand serve, the walls in play, doubles as the default format — have stayed remarkably stable for 30-plus years. Our padel rules guide covers exactly how those settled rules work in practice.

The 2010s-2020s: from regional passion to global boom

For most of its history, padel was a Spanish- and Argentine-dominated sport with pockets of interest elsewhere. That changed sharply in the 2010s as clubs opened across the rest of Europe, the Gulf states, and Latin America, and it accelerated further in the 2020s. Industry tracking now puts global padel at more than 58,000 courts and around 19-20 million players as of the 2026 Playtomic Global Padel Report, while the sport's international federation has cited even higher figures — a gap that reflects different counting methods (registered federation members versus total participation estimates) rather than a factual dispute.

Spain remains the clear leader by density, with more than 17,000 courts and over 6 million players reported in-country. The newer growth story is the United States, where the player base is reported to have gone from under 100,000 in 2023 to roughly 500,000 by the end of 2025 — still small next to Spain, but among the fastest-growing racquet-sport segments in the country over that window. If you are picking it up in that wave, what is padel is the right starting point, and how much padel costs covers what to expect to spend getting started.

A quick timeline

The current building wave, in numbers

What makes the last few years different from padel's earlier decades of steady, regional growth is the pace of court construction. The 2026 Playtomic Global Padel Report puts 2025's new-court total at roughly 7,898 courts built worldwide in a single year, pushing court growth to around 16% year-on-year and bringing the global total to about six times what it was in 2016. Industry forecasts cited alongside that report project global court counts could reach roughly 91,000 by 2028 if the current pace holds — though, as with any multi-year forecast, that number is a projection rather than a certainty, and actual growth will depend on how fast operators can keep building and staffing new clubs.

That building wave is also why the sport can feel simultaneously brand-new and decades-old depending on where you encounter it. A club in Madrid or Buenos Aires might be operating on land that has hosted padel since the 1980s, while a facility in Texas or Florida could have opened its doors in the last twelve months. Both are the same sport, running on rules that have not meaningfully changed since the 1997 Barcelona agreement — which is unusual for something expanding this quickly.

Why the walls-first design still matters

It is worth returning to the founding detail because it explains a lot about how padel plays differently from the sports it superficially resembles. Padel was not designed top-down as a squash-tennis hybrid; the walls were bolted on to solve a backyard-sized problem, and only later did players and coaches realize how much strategic depth that accident created — rallies that survive a wall bounce, defensive lobs that buy time, shots played off the back glass. That is also why comparisons to tennis and pickleball only go so far: see padel vs tennis and padel vs pickleball for where the resemblance ends.

FAQs

Last updated September 1, 2026 · PadelAnywhere Editorial

Sources

Origin details are drawn from the International Padel Federation's published history and multiple independent padel history write-ups that corroborate the same facts (Corcuera, Acapulco, 1969; the Marbella courts, 1974; the 1991 federation founding in Madrid). Current court and player counts are from the 2026 Playtomic Global Padel Report and related industry coverage; figures vary by source depending on methodology, which is noted above rather than resolved into a single number.