Jonathan Rowland interview: R3 Sport founder outlines vision to transform UK padel with new tour

The investment firm R3 Sport has unveiled plans for a series of new padel tournaments in the UK, including a Hexagon Cup-style Super League, designed to give a major boost to the sport in the country. The company, which already backs ten British padel players, has set a target of establishing GB players in the world top 20 within five years. R3 Sport’s founder Jonathan Rowland, a former financial services executive and passionate padel player, tells Padel Business Magazine about the plans for the new tour, his company’s overarching strategy, and how he views the future for the sport in the UK.

Having played padel for over 20 years, and witnessed its recent dramatic increase in popularity in the UK first-hand, Jonathan Rowland is on a mission to help drive the sport to a new level across the country over the coming years.

Last week, his sports and entertainment investment firm R3 Sport, which he set up around two years ago to help support the expansion of padel and other emerging sports, announced the launch of a new “premium professional padel tennis cup” which it says will offer the most prize money ever paid for a padel tournament in Great Britain.

The R3 Bullpadel Cup 2025, launched with Bullpadel Spain, will give new opportunities to men, women and junior players to compete more regularly, and ultimately aims to help build a GB team which could compete at the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane if the sport is adopted by the IOC.

The Cup will be played over a maximum of six events at padel venues across the UK, delivered in conjunction with the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) and International Padel Federation (FIP).

The events will be open to the public to experience the sport along with food and entertainment, padel merchandise stands and opportunities to get close to the professional players.

The first event is expected to be held in April 2025, culminating with the Cup Finals in December 2025 and the launch of the R3 Bullpadel Super League for 2026. R3 will be announcing a number of high-profile partners of the tour in the coming weeks and months.

Helping padel in the UK fulfill its potential 

Rowland says: “Padel tennis is surging in popularity but needs an event to take it to the next level which the R3 Bullpadel Cup will do.

“All sports need role models for young players to aspire to be and the Cup is designed to achieve this by providing current players with the platform and finances to be the best they can be.

“We want to help the sport meet its potential as well as getting British players into the world top 20 and helping to build a strong GB team so that the country can be competitive when padel is as expected included in the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.”

R3 Sport already provides financial and management support to ten British padel players, including UK No.1 Christian Medina Murphy, and Catherine Rose, whose world ranking has soared from outside the top 300 to 116 in the past 12 months after a series of wins against players ranked 69^th and 100^th, as well as the U18 World No.1, at tournaments in Doha, Sydney and Melbourne. Among R3 Sport’s roster are also the 17-year-old Gomes twins Luke and Cam.

Rowland says that with its plans for a new major UK tour, the aim is to rival the global padel powerhouses of Spain, Sweden and Italy, with a target of establishing GB players in the padel world top 20 within five years.

Plans for Hexagon Cup-style Super League

While it is not due to take place until 2026, R3 Sport’s plans for a Super League are in many ways the most eye-catching part of its announcement.

Rowland reveals the idea is for it to be a Hexagon Cup-style tournament taking place at a large sports arena, with professional padel players in franchise teams owned by celebrities or senior business figures – as well as an R3 Sport team comprising some of the players it backs.

“We've done a lot of work on the Super League,” he says. “It's a big investment. This year, it was too early for that size of investment in the UK padel scene, but next year we think it will work. The main event will involve professional players hopefully from around the world, and there will be a celebrity Pro-Am angle to it as well.”

He adds: “We'll probably start with four teams. At the moment, we're in discussions with various potential team owners about buying franchises. We are talking to four or five very well-known celebrities. They're big names in the UK – sports people, celebrities from TV, singers, musicians. We've also been talking to some of the bigger banks about having a team and there's been a lot of interest from them. So there's really unlimited options.”

Rowland says “significant sponsors want come to in,” with several from financial services where he previously worked. He established the challenger bank Redwood in 2017, targeted at SMEs, which he says was the largest sponsor of British padel from 2017 to 2019.

He acknowledges the R3 Bullpadel Super League is a “very similar concept” to the Hexagon Cup and reveals R3 Sport has been in discussions with the organisers of the Madrid-based competition about being a feeder tournament.

Christmas Invitational and charity events help spark interest 

As part of the preparations for the Super League launch, R3 Sport hosted a Christmas Invitational event at Padel Hub in Slough, 32km west of central London, in December, where R3 Sport players competed against each other, split into four teams in a round-robin format.

The event was attended by key padel industry players and enthusiasts, as well as various mainstream UK media outlets.

R3 Sport also organised the charity event Padel Aid in partnership with UNICEF held last May which raised around £50,000. The Pro-Am-style event, which Rowland says is due to take place again this year, is the largest padel charity event in the UK so far and last year featured padel players from R3 Sport and elsewhere, including Brazilian star Lucas Bergamini, as well as celebrities such as former England footballer John Terry, South African rugby player Francois Hougaard, and ex-England Rugby World Cup winner Jason Leonard.

Supporting British padel players with professional set-up

Central to R3 Sport’s operation and future plans is its backing of British padel players. The company helps fund and support the ten players under its management, at a time when padel lacks the professional structure seen in other countries.

“The player management side of things for us has been interesting, because there has been no real professionalism in Great Britain in terms of players,” says Rowland. “There's no concept of an agent. So we created a business where players came together, and we put some professional infrastructure in place for them. 

“They now know what it means to be represented by somebody, how to be professional and get new sponsors. 

“The ten players we manage have a contract with us for three years, for a certain amount of funding which will not go away. We also raise third-party funding from sponsors, but it's our risk to support those players, something that the LTA is doing, but not to the extent that we are.”

Bullpadel partnership drives strong growth for equipment sales

Another important aspect of R3 Sport’s plans for new tournaments, and its business as a whole, is its partnership with Bullpadel. Rowland’s firm has the exclusive distribution rights to sell the Madrid-based brand’s padel racquets and other equipment in the UK and Ireland.

“We started our business with Bullpadel, and that's been expanding well for us. We've gone from number five or six to number one in the market in the UK for several different racquet levels. So that's been a really good business and good starting place for us.”

Rowland says R3 Sport also wants to have its own padel venue but admits this aspect of the company’s strategy is proving harder to implement amid the high level of competition for space to build new courts in the UK at present.

“We are bidding on two venues now,” he says. “We've been looking for over a year, but we keep getting outbid. There's so much competition – there's people bidding all over the place. So we've lost quite a few because we weren't prepared to pay up for them, and we just can't find something that makes sense for us yet.”

Potential pitfalls for padel in UK as expansion accelerates

Reflecting on his previous experience across a wide variety of industry sectors during his financial services career, Rowland sees potential pitfalls for padel as its expansion accelerates across the UK and elsewhere.

“I've been involved in many sectors, and I've seen booms and busts. Padel is in a fast growth scale up phase in the UK right now. There's a huge push to build courts, and I don't know how economic all of those plans are.”

Assessing the oft-cited warning sign of Sweden, which is still suffering from the effects of an overexpansion during the Covid-19 pandemic, Rowland comments: “I think we've got to be careful that doesn't happen here. I don't think we're close to that yet, but in two or three years, if it carries on at this pace, we could have a problem. When it's saturated you've got problems. It's the same as any industry. Some of the valuations of businesses in the UK I've seen are unsustainable, for sure.”

As padel in the UK looks to navigate such challenges, Rowland stresses that R3 Sport is above all keen to support the sport across the country as it develops.

“We're funding players. We're trying to build a commercially viable business in a sport that is slowly coming of age and being promoted now through the FIP tournaments and hopefully the Olympics in Australia – that would make a big difference. So we're trying to help and support the sport of padel in the UK alongside people like Padel Hub and the LTA and everyone else.”

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