Saidja Drentje: Finding solutions to padel’s broadcasting paradox

As padel’s media landscape evolves at pace, the gap between the sport’s participation growth and its broadcast monetisation is coming under ever closer scrutiny. Here, Saidja Drentje – partner at global sports strategy consultancy CAA Portas, and author of ‘The Racket Sports Race: Tennis And The Advent of Padel & Pickleball’ (January 2026) – draws on his firm’s research across broadcasting, media rights, and commercial strategy to examine the structural challenges facing padel’s broadcast ambitions, the innovations seeking to address them, and what needs to happen next.

On the surface, padel’s broadcasting moment has arrived. According to the International Padel Federation (FIP), the sport has more than 35 million global players – a 133% increase since 2020, while Premier Padel’s 2026 season spans 26 tournaments across 18 countries, with nearly 75% held indoors.

In 2025, worldwide broadcast viewership for Premier Padel grew 30% year-on-year, with the tour now reaching 244 territories. Heineken has signed on as its first-ever global beer partner. WHOOP has committed to a three-year wearable technology deal. And in August, padel’s elite tour arrives in London for the first time, taking over the £1.3bn-transformed Olympia.

Yet beneath these encouraging headlines lies a paradox. In our CAA Portas Global Racket Sports Report, published in January 2026, we identified broadcasting as the single biggest bottleneck standing between padel’s participation boom and its commercial maturation.

Four months on, that diagnosis still holds. The question is no longer whether padel can get on screens – it is whether it can keep people watching, and whether it can monetise that attention at scale.

A broadcast architecture built in record time

The speed at which padel has assembled a credible global distribution infrastructure deserves recognition. Red Bull TV, as the primary free-to-access streaming partner for Premier Padel under a deal running up to 2027, covers all 26 tournament stops from quarter-finals to finals. A paid Premier Padel TV subscription offers all rounds with multilingual commentary.

The CUPRA FIP Tour streams free via FIP TV. beIN’s February 2026 deal spans 39 territories across MENA, Turkey, Asia-Pacific, and North America, covering both the Premier Padel tour and the FIP World Cup.

The strategic significance is worth noting: beIN is owned by Qatar Sports Investments, the same entity that controls Premier Padel and whose flag carrier Qatar Airways is the tour’s title sponsor. This vertical integration of ownership, operation, and distribution mirrors a model familiar from other Gulf-backed sports properties.

The Hexagon Cup’s evolution into the Hexagon World Series – through a partnership with 54, the agency behind LIV Golf, and FIP, backed by Saudi PIF investment – adds a team-based format to the professional calendar. DAZN distributes globally (free-to-air), while FanCode has secured exclusive rights in India.

In North America, the Pro Padel League is taking a different approach entirely: building a franchise-based league explicitly designed as a media product, with distribution already reaching an estimated 300 million households.

A comparison with Major League Soccer (MLS) is instructive. MLS became valuable not because it competed with the Premier League or LaLiga for the same global audience, but because it created appointment viewing for a domestic American audience that did not care about European football.

If the PPL can do the same for padel in the US – creating a broadcast product that stands independently of Premier Padel – it unlocks a second monetisation pathway in the world’s most valuable media market.

The structural challenges that distribution alone cannot solve

Distribution is necessary, but it is not sufficient. In our report, we mapped five structural challenges constraining padel’s broadcast appeal. These persist – and one additional problem has become harder to ignore.

Camera angles and visual intimacy
Padel’s enclosed court dimensions restrict camera positions. Most broadcasts default to wide, overhead angles that capture tactics but lose the close-up drama and player personality that drive emotional investment.

Tennis benefits from diverging styles, surface variety, singles-versus-doubles variation, and clear one-on-one momentum swings. The deployment of Ease Live’s interactive overlays on Red Bull TV’s coverage of Premier Padel – featuring real-time stats, fan polls, and educational explainer videos – is a smart attempt to compensate, but it addresses the symptom rather than the structural constraint.

Audio, atmosphere, and the empty-stadium problem
The enclosed glass-and-wall structure creates echo effects that reduce broadcast audio quality, and 75% of the 2026 Premier Padel tour being indoors offers better production control. But there is a more fundamental atmosphere challenge that the industry needs to confront: outside of weekend sessions, Premier Padel venues are often visibly empty.

The tour is doing an excellent job diversifying its global footprint, but midweek rounds at half-empty arenas undermine the broadcast product. Empty seats are devastating on camera. Every sport that has scaled its media rights has solved the attendance problem first – whether through pricing, scheduling, or venue right-sizing. Padel needs to do the same.

Star power and narrative depth
Padel’s biggest name, Ale Galán, has 680,000 social media followers; Nadal has 21.6 million. There are early signs of commercial recognition – in January 2026 world number one Arturo Coello signed with Swiss performance brand On, its first move into padel, with a co-designed padel shoe planned for 2027 – but individual endorsement deals do not yet translate into mainstream name recognition.

The WHOOP partnership with Premier Padel, embedding player physiological data into broadcast narratives, is a step forward. But fundamentally, the sport has not yet produced its Drive to Survive moment.

Formula 1 was struggling to reach younger and American audiences until Netflix’s documentary series transformed its cultural relevance, driving a reported 70% increase in US viewership. Tennis has responded with Break Point and Carlos Alcaraz: My Way. Padel has no equivalent – no major documentary or scripted production on Netflix, Amazon, or HBO.

The raw material is there: the sport’s rise from a niche Iberian pastime to a global phenomenon, the rivalries, the Gulf investment, the Olympic bid. Someone needs to tell that story at scale.

Nationality concentration and the language barrier
All ten of the world’s top-ranked male players come from Spain or Argentina, constraining the national-pride viewership that is one of the most powerful audience-building mechanisms in sport.

But there is a subtler dimension to this problem that is often overlooked: the sport’s entire storytelling infrastructure – player interviews, coaching content, social media, post-match analysis – operates predominantly in Spanish.

For the English-speaking markets where padel is growing fastest – such as the UK, US, Australia and India – this creates a narrative barrier that persists even when distribution is solved.

You can put the match on every screen in Britain, but if viewers cannot connect with the players’ personalities because the content ecosystem speaks a different language, the emotional investment that sustains broadcast audiences does not form.

The UK’s surge to 860,000 players and 1,553 courts is extraordinary at the participation level, but until both the professional pipeline and the content infrastructure diversify beyond the Iberian and Latin American base, the viewership ceiling remains lower than participation alone would suggest. 

The monetisation gap – and the missing piece

Tennis generates around $0.7bn in annual commercial rights revenue – itself dramatically under-monetised versus the NFL ($10bn+), Premier League and NBA ($5–10bn), or UEFA Champions League ($2–5bn).

Padel sits lower still, with private equity and venture capital investment into the sport totalling around $190m since 2023 and total event viewership reaching approximately 19 million across more than 120 countries. The arrival of Heineken – a brand synonymous with Champions League and F1 sponsorship – signals growing commercial confidence. But sponsorship follows audience, and the audience depends on the broadcast product.

Key role for betting and fantasy

There is also an uncomfortable truth that the padel industry has largely avoided discussing: the role of betting and fantasy in driving broadcast engagement.

Every major sport that has cracked premium broadcast value – football, American football, basketball, cricket, tennis – has done so with a symbiotic relationship between live broadcasting and betting markets. 

Real-time wagering creates a reason to watch every point, not just the highlights. Padel does not have that infrastructure yet. By making match durations more predictable, Premier Padel’s new Star Point system is inadvertently creating a prerequisite for live betting products – bookmakers need schedulable windows and consistent game structures to offer in-play markets. 

Whether or not the sport’s stakeholders choose to actively pursue this relationship, they should recognise that the absence of a betting ecosystem is a structural gap in padel’s monetisation architecture compared to every sport it aspires to compete with commercially.

Format innovation as the bridge

The Star Point scoring system, unanimously approved by the FIP General Assembly and implemented from the 2026 Riyadh P1, is the most consequential rule change in professional padel’s history.

By capping games at a maximum of three deuces before a decisive point, it addresses broadcast’s oldest operational problem: duration unpredictability. FIP president Luigi Carraro cited a women’s quarter-final game lasting 18.5 minutes under the old system that would have resolved in just over four. For schedulers, arena operators, and broadcasters, this is material. And as noted above, it also lays the groundwork for the live betting products that drive sustained viewership in other sports.

The Hexagon World Series team format – fronted by celebrity owners including Sir Andy Murray, Robert Lewandowski, Eva Longoria, and Anthony Joshua – is doing what the Laver Cup has done for tennis: creating a made-for-television spectacle designed to attract viewers who may never have watched padel. The involvement of 54, with its experience building LIV Golf from scratch into a media property, signals serious production ambition. Generali Group has signed on as title sponsor, and DAZN’s free-to-air global distribution ensures maximum reach.

What will determine whether the gap closes

First, commission padel’s equivalent of Drive to Survive
The raw material is compelling: a sport that barely existed outside Spain a decade ago, now backed by Qatari and Saudi sovereign wealth, with an Olympic bid live, celebrity team owners, and a participation explosion across 150 countries.

The women’s game offers particularly rich territory – Gemma Triay and Delfina Brea’s dominance, the reshuffle of the top pairings for 2026, and the sport’s 40% female participation rate (among the highest in global sport) are stories that resonate far beyond the padel community. No major streaming platform has yet told any of them. Whoever does will create the cultural breakthrough that converts casual awareness into sustained viewership – exactly as Netflix did for Formula 1.

Second, solve the attendance problem before it becomes a broadcast problem
The London P1 at Olympia in August 2026 is the right kind of test: a world-class venue in a market with 860,000 players, delivered by Sela with LTA support.

Running alongside it, London Padel Week – a collaboration between Padel Consulting and Padel Travel X – will create pop-up courts, coaching clinics, and social events around the city, giving players the chance to play and then watch the world’s best.

This matters because, as operators across the industry increasingly recognise, tournaments in emerging markets need to feel like a day out, not just a series of matches. The Australian Open has mastered this – world-class sport as the anchor, surrounded by an experience that stands on its own even when the match doesn’t deliver.

Padel needs that same thinking applied to every stop on the Premier Padel tour. If the London P1 fills seats and delivers compelling broadcast content, it becomes the template. But the sport also needs to address midweek attendance across the calendar – through creative pricing, scheduling, right-sizing venues, or building the kind of fan culture that makes Tuesday’s quarter-final as compelling as Sunday’s final. 

Third, pursue Olympic inclusion as the single most powerful viewership accelerator
Our research shows a 60% uplift in sponsorship revenue for new Olympic sports, an eight-million social media follower increase for individual athletes, and a 75% surge in sports-related social posts.

Padel’s governance is IOC-ready: FIP has 87+ national member federations, ARISF status, European Games inclusion since 2023, and the sport will debut at the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 Asian Games – another critical milestone on the Olympic pathway.

The Star Point system aligns explicitly with IOC innovation objectives. The Brisbane 2032 timeline is live. And the women’s tour, with Triay and Brea’s dominant nine-title 2025 season attracting growing broadcast interest, offers a powerful narrative for Olympic inclusion in an era when the IOC prioritises gender equity. If padel secures a place, the broadcasting challenge transforms entirely.

The participation story is settled. The facility story is accelerating. The commercial story is gaining momentum – with Heineken, WHOOP, Red Bull, Qatar Airways all invested. But the broadcasting story is still being written. Padel has 35 million players. It has 244 broadcast territories. What it does not yet have is the broadcast product, the cultural content, or the betting infrastructure that turns distribution into dollars. The decisions being made in 2026 – on content, on attendance, on format, on monetisation architecture – will determine whether that changes.

·       Saidja Drentje is a partner at CAA Portas, a global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport, where he leads its racquet sports and golf advisory practices from Dubai. He is the author of ‘The Racket Sports Race: Tennis and The Advent of Padel & Pickleball’ (January 2026) and ‘India Padel Report: Navigating Asia’s next boom’ (May 2026). A former competitive tennis player who represented the Netherlands at junior level, he also founded Club Padel Dubai, providing both advisory and operator-side experience in the sport.

The full CAA Portas Global Racket Sports Report is available upon request.

Contact: [email protected] Website: caaportas.com


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