Daddy Yankee Buys Into Pro Padel League Ahead of May Launch
Pickleball has become America’s fastest-growing racquet sport since 2019. But a new distant cousin hailing from Mexico is challenging its status.
Padel (not paddle), a racquet sport that originated in the 1960s, has recently gained popularity, especially in Spain and Latin America. Now, the Pro Padel League (PPL), which will launch May 13 in Florida, promises to bring a higher level of competition to the sport.
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The PPL’s inaugural season will feature seven teams that will play a round-robin tournament during the first four weeks of the season. Teams will be comprised of four players including two men, two women and four alternates, and will follow the international scoring format.
The league was co-founded by former professional tennis and padel player, Marcos del Pilar, and lawyer Keith Stein. The PPL has seen a slew of celebrity and athlete investments over the past year, including Puerto Rican rapper Daddy Yankee, who bought the league’s eighth franchise in Orlando this week. (His team will not be playing in the 2023 season.)
The first group to buy a PPL franchise was EEP Capital, a padel-focused venture capital firm backed by Swedish NHL players including Filip Forsberg, Jacob Markstrom, Mattias Ekholm, Andres Nilsson and entrepreneur Christ Ishoo.
The NHL players “actually had the idea very early on that padel would be big in the U.S.,” Alan Flatt, the president of EEP Capital and the CEO of the PPL’s Los Angeles Beat, said in a phone interview.
Former Sacramento Kings owner and Las Vegas Golden Knights co-owner Gavin Maloof (who owns the Vegas PPL franchise), former Serie A and MLS star Sebastian Giovinco (Toronto), and former tennis pro Tommy Haas (San Diego) have invested in PPL teams, while 2009 U.S. Open tennis champion Juan Martin del Potro is an advisor to the Miami franchise.
“Our teams now are selling in the seven-figure range,” del Pilar said. “Some of the original owners already made a 5x increase in value,” del Pilar said.
But growing team valuations is not the only goal for the PPL; del Pilar expects the sport to explode in the U.S., similar to how pickleball grew. “There are 240 padel courts in the U.S. now, including public and private ones,” del Pilar said. “The number of padel courts is to double in 2023. Our expectation is to achieve 25,000 courts and over 12 million players by 2030.”
According to the FIP (International Padel Federation), over 25 million people play padel in over 90 countries around the world. There are over 6 million active padel players in Spain and more than 20,000 padel courts, making it the second most popular sport behind soccer. In Argentina, there are over 2 million padel players. Padel is trending in Sweden, too, where 500,000 people play the sport. It’s estimated around 15,000 new padel courts were registered in Europe in 2021.
“Florida has been the catalyst to growing the sport in the United States,” Ryan Redondo, one of the San Diego Stingrays co-owners and an investor in Taktika Padel, said in a phone interview. Taktika recently opened a seven-court facility in San Diego, at the Barnes Tennis Center, and another facility at the home of MLS club LA Galaxy.
“A lot of the professional soccer players play padel in their spare time,” Redondo said. “Now they have courts at their own stadium.”
The PPL has partnered with 40 different networks—including BeIN Sports, AT&T Sportsnet, MASN, SWX Sports and Spectrum—to broadcast the inaugural season to over 100 million homes, Maloof said in a phone call. Internationally, the season will be aired on select networks such as CaribVision, BeIN Sports en Español, and Game+ Network in Canada.
“This is a sport that’s hugely popular in the world,” Maloof said. “Just a matter of time before it really takes off in the U.S.”
The season will conclude with the championship weekend on June 10-11, where there will be a semifinal round followed by the two best teams competing in the finals for the PPL Cup. The total prize money and player compensation is expected to be mid-six figures for the 2023 season.
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