The history of padel: from one Acapulco garden to 35 million players
Padel began in 1969 with a Mexican businessman who didn't have room for a tennis court. How a garden improvisation conquered Spain, Argentina and, half a century later, Britain.
By Padel Roundup ·
Every sport has an origin story, and most of them are murkier than the official version admits. Football emerged from centuries of village chaos. Tennis descended from monks batting balls around cloisters. Padel, unusually, has none of that ambiguity. It has a name, an address and a date: Enrique Corcuera, Las Brisas, Acapulco, 1969. The fastest-growing racket sport in the world began because one man’s garden was too small.
The problem with Enrique’s garden
Corcuera was a Mexican businessman with a holiday home in Acapulco and a fondness for racket sports. What he didn’t have was room for a tennis court. A full court needs a footprint of well over 30 metres by 15 once you include the run-off areas; his available space was closer to 20 by 10.
So he improvised. He laid out a court to fit the space, strung a net across the middle, and — this is the stroke of accidental genius — enclosed the whole thing with walls, partly to stop balls disappearing into the neighbouring vegetation. Rather than treating the walls as a nuisance, the game that evolved on that court treated them as part of play. A ball that bounced and came off the back wall was still live. The defining mechanic of padel, the thing that separates it from every other racket sport, the rebound that turns defence into attack, exists because Enrique Corcuera didn’t want to spend his afternoons fetching balls.
According to the International Padel Federation’s own history, the first written rules were drafted by Corcuera’s wife Viviana — a former Miss Argentina — as a birthday present for her husband. The game was played with the short, solid paddle-style bats of platform and paddle tennis, American games dating back to the 1910s that supplied padel’s equipment and, eventually, its name: “paddle” became the Spanish “pádel”, and pádel became the padel we know.
The marquis, the Marbella Club and the Spanish takeover
Games invented in private gardens usually die in private gardens. Padel escaped because of who happened to visit.
Alfonso de Hohenlohe — a Spanish aristocrat, entrepreneur and founder of the Marbella Club Hotel, playground of the European jet set — stayed with Corcuera, played the game, and was smitten. In 1974 he built the first two courts in Spain at the Marbella Club on the Costa del Sol, tweaking the design as he went. The clientele was exactly the sort of crowd whose enthusiasms travel: wealthy, well-connected and competitive. Padel spread along the coast, then inland, club by club.
One of those Marbella guests was Julio Menditeguy, an Argentine millionaire, who took the game home with him in 1975. Courts went up at the Tortugas Country Club and the Mar del Plata Ocean Club, and Argentina took to padel with a fervour even Spain took years to match. By 1988 Argentina had founded the world’s first national padel association, and in January that year Spain and Argentina met in Mar del Plata for the sport’s first international competition. Those two countries built the sport between them — which is why, half a century on, the professional game is still overwhelmingly Spanish- and Argentine-accented.
The court itself got its finishing touch in 1989, when Jorge Galeotti introduced the first transportable glass-walled court. Glass replaced solid walls, spectators could finally see in, and padel became a sport you could stage in a stadium, a shopping centre or — as we’ve seen recently — a Victorian exhibition hall in west London.
Federations, world championships and a long, slow simmer
The 1990s were when padel put on a blazer and became official. On 12 July 1991, the Argentine, Spanish and Uruguayan associations founded the International Padel Federation (FIP) in Madrid. The first World Championships followed in 1992, split between Madrid and Seville. Spain’s Sports Council formally recognised padel as a sport in 1993, and in 1997 Spain and Argentina sat down in Barcelona to unify their slightly divergent rulebooks and settle the sport’s name once and for all: padel, no “paddle”, no arguments.
And then… not much, for a surprisingly long time. Padel spent the 2000s as a beloved regional obsession — genuinely massive in Spain and Argentina, where it became one of the most-played sports in the country, and a curiosity almost everywhere else. The first professional circuit, the Padel Pro Tour, launched in 2005, succeeded in 2013 by the World Padel Tour, which carried the professional game for a decade. The talent pool was deep but narrow; the prize money modest; the television coverage sparse.
What changed everything was the 2020s. Padel’s social, easy-to-start format proved perfectly suited to a post-lockdown world looking for outdoor, small-group exercise, and the sport went from simmer to rolling boil across Europe, the Gulf and beyond. The money followed: Qatar Sports Investments launched Premier Padel in 2022, acquired the World Padel Tour outright in 2023, and unified the professional game under a single global tour from 2024. The FIP now counts 100 affiliated national federations and estimates some 35 million players across more than 150 countries — numbers that would have seemed fanciful when the federation was founded by three countries in a Madrid office in 1991.
Britain arrives late, then all at once
The UK’s padel history is short and steep. There were British enthusiasts early — expats who had encountered the game in Spain formed a paddle association as far back as 1992 — but for decades padel in Britain meant a handful of courts and a few hundred devotees. When the LTA took over as the sport’s official national governing body in 2020, absorbing British Padel into its operations, Great Britain had precisely 69 courts.
Then the boom hit. By the end of 2024 there were 870 courts; by the end of 2025, 1,553 courts across 559 venues, with the LTA reporting 860,000 Britons playing annually — up from roughly 15,000 in 2019. We’ve charted the full numbers on our UK padel statistics page, and the story they tell is of a sport compressing thirty years of normal growth into about five. The court-building rush has turned tennis clubs, gyms, warehouses and car parks into padel venues, and this month the professional tour finally arrived on British soil, with London’s first Premier Padel P1 at Olympia.
It’s a familiar pattern, in fast-forward. Spain in the 1980s, Argentina in the 1990s, Sweden and Italy in the late 2010s — padel tends to arrive quietly, sit unnoticed for a while, and then grow faster than anyone plans for. Britain is simply the latest country to discover what Corcuera’s dinner guests learned in the 1970s: the game is absurdly easy to enjoy and strangely hard to put down.
Half a century on, still the same game
What’s striking, looking back across padel’s 57 years, is how little the actual game has changed. The court Corcuera built in 1969 was 20 metres by 10; so is the one at your local club. The walls are still in play. The scoring is still borrowed from tennis. The rackets have swapped wood and rubber for carbon and foam, and the back walls are now glass rather than masonry, but a player teleported from 1970s Marbella would recognise everything about a modern match except, perhaps, the price of the rackets.
That continuity is part of the charm. Padel wasn’t designed by a committee or focus-grouped into existence; it was improvised by one family, refined by their friends, and passed from garden to garden until the gardens ran out and the stadiums began. The sport now filling British sports halls and headlines is, at heart, still the game a man in Acapulco invented because his lawn was too small — proof, if nothing else, that the best ideas rarely look like ideas at the time.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented padel?
Enrique Corcuera, a Mexican businessman, built the first padel court at his home in Acapulco in 1969. He did not have space for a full tennis court, so he enclosed a smaller 20-by-10-metre court with walls — and the walls became part of the game.
Why is it called padel?
The name comes from the English word "paddle", after the solid paddle-style rackets the game uses. Spanish adopted the phonetic spelling "pádel", and in 1997 Spain and Argentina formally standardised the international name of the sport as padel.
When did padel arrive in the UK?
British expats formed a paddle association back in 1992, but the sport stayed tiny for decades. The LTA became the official national governing body for padel in Great Britain in 2020, when the country had just 69 courts. By the end of 2025 there were over 1,500.
When did padel become a professional sport?
The first World Championships were held in 1992, and the first professional circuit, the Padel Pro Tour, launched in 2005. It was succeeded by the World Padel Tour in 2013 and then by Premier Padel, which became the sport's single unified global tour in 2024.