How padel is starting to make a racket in US sponsorships

There’s a new racket sport in town, and we’re not talking about pickleball.

It’s been more than five years since pickleball took off during the pandemic and subsequently cemented itself in mainstream culture with big-name sponsors and movies like Apple TV’s The Dink and Lifetime’s A Pickleball Christmas. Now, padel may be poised to follow a similar trajectory in the US.

The up-and-coming racket sport, which is somewhat similar to tennis and squash, is already quite popular in countries including Spain, Italy, and the UK. Almost 8,000 new padel courts were built around the world in 2025, including more than 300 in the US, according to a report from racket sports platform Playtomic and PwC’s Strategy& consultancy.

While that’s a small figure compared to the few thousand new courts added in France, the rest of Europe, and the APAC region, per the report, there are several indicators that padel could be the next king of the court when it comes to US sponsorship. As the number of courts and players grow, so too does interest from sponsors, celebrities, and mainstream media.

“Padel is growing so much across the US, but really globally right now, it’s blowing up,” said Jackie Widmann, SVP of marketing and commercial for Bero, the non-alcoholic beer brand started by Tom Holland that has hosted its own celebrity padel tournaments. “It sits at this cool intersection that we really love between social connection, culture, wellness, [and] a bit of lifestyle…Padel just felt like a really interesting lane that hadn’t been taken by any brands in our space so far.”

Westward expansion

Padel is most mature in countries including Spain and Italy, while countries like the UK and Germany represent “early-growth ecosystems with accelerating demand,” according to the Playtomic report. The US has long-term potential, the report noted, but is still considered an “early-stage market.”

So far, the sport is establishing footholds stateside in the Northeast—Brooklyn alone is home to three Padel Haus facilities, aka “luxury padel clubs”—as well as in Miami, Texas, and Southern California, according to Ben Nichols, founder and CEO of padel marketing agency Padel 22.

While increasing participation is key for the development of any sport, padel’s status as a participation-first game has been an obstacle in the US, where many of the most popular pro sports have audiences who don’t play themselves, Nichols said. Pickleball and running have faced similar hurdles.

“We are still trying to prove the business case in the US, but we’ve also seen clubs like Padel39 in Austin, or Padel X…in Miami, doing fantastically well from an economic performance perspective,” Pablo Carro, Playtomic’s co-founder and CCO, told Marketing Brew.

Serve it up

As running and pickleball have shown, there can be healthy sponsorship demand for sports that don’t yet have massive TV audiences. The Pro Padel League, which has 10 teams across the US, Canada, and Mexico, has sponsors including Adidas, Franklin, and Kalshi. At the start of its 2026 season, the league had seven mulit-year partners, and it is still searching for more, CEO Mike Dorfman said at a July press conference. CNBC is airing five Pro Padel League championship matches this season.

As is the case with many sports, sponsorship interest started with endemic brands, and “for a couple of seasons, we had to beg people to step up…and convince them that the US was going to be a real market for the sport,” Dorfman said. Now, teams including the Los Angeles Beat and New York Atlantics are starting to see inbound interest from brands, team execs said at the press conference. USA Padel, the national governing body, inked a deal with clothing company Psycho Bunny last month.

Some brands, like Bero, are taking a different approach by putting on their own padel events. Bero hosted its second annual Bero Padel Classic in LA in April, which paired celebrities and padel pros on teams of two. The brand’s event in London last year during the week of Wimbledon resulted in lift across metrics including awareness, impressions, and engagement, Widmann told us. Content from this year’s classic, which was shared on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, generated more than 1.4 billion impressions in 48 hours, she added.

“This paddle club culture has become something that we felt like Bero could really latch onto,” Widmann said. “It’s been a really fun way for us to create a little bit more of a narrative and a content series around who we are as a brand.”

Other brands like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Aston Martin, Barry’s, and Vuori activated at the Bero Padel Classic, too. Luxury and finance brands—like LA Beat presenting sponsor Atlas Card—have been early movers in the padel space, as well as non-alcoholic beverage and other wellness-oriented companies, Nichols said. Heineken 0.0, for example, kicked off a partnership with the Premier Padel pro tour this year.

Matter of time

Still, many other nonendemic categories have been slower to get involved with the sport, Nichols said, perhaps because awareness for padel in the US is still fairly nascent.

Celebrities like Holland, Eva Longoria, comedian Andrew Schulz, and a handful of F1 drivers getting involved help grow padel’s profile, as well as other athletes and influencers, Nichols said. But even with A-listers posting about padel, it takes time to develop a fandom, especially in a country where so many other sports have entrenched followings. In the UK, “it took four or five years [for padel] to become a real thing,” Carro said, and the US has just started on that trajectory.

“You can’t just break down barriers of tradition…overnight,” Nichols said. “It’s entrenched into families, and cities, and communities. It takes a long time, however cool a sport is, to break down that barrier.”