The Padel Paradox

Everyone in the GCC sports industry has heard the same sentence for four years running: padel is the fastest-growing sport in the world. According to the FIP World Padel Report 2025, there are now over 35 million players globally, a 16.1% increase in clubs, a 15.2% rise in courts, and a 42% growth in federation-registered members year on year.^[1] The sport is now played in 150 nations and 20 dependent territories.^[2]

But global growth headlines obscure something more important: what is actually happening at ground level in the GCC. And the GCC picture is more complicated — and more instructive — than the headline narrative suggests.

The GCC is not just a padel market. It owns professional padel.

In 2023, Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) acquired the World Padel Tour and unified it with its own Premier Padel circuit to create a single global professional tour, governed by the International Padel Federation.^[3] This isn't sponsorship. This is structural ownership of the world's only unified professional padel tour. The same QSI that owns Paris Saint-Germain — backed by the Qatari government — now controls professional padel worldwide.

Qatar hosted the FIP World Padel Championship in 2021 — the first time the event was held in the Middle East.^[4] Saudi Arabia has committed $50 million to padel development under Vision 2030.^[5]

The court numbers: GCC infrastructure by country

Where padel sits in the sports event landscape

This is where most operators make their first strategic mistake. Padel in the GCC is not one event type. It is three distinct businesses running simultaneously inside the same sport — each requiring a different strategy, operating model, and success metric.

Padel type	Examples	Strategic implications
Professional / Spectator	Qatar Major, Kuwait P1 & World Cup Pairs, Saudi Riyadh events	Scale: 1,000–20,000 spectators. Revenue: broadcast rights, sponsorship, ticketing. Success metric: viewership, sponsorship value, media reach. Not accessible without direct QSI/FIP alignment.
Competitive Amateur / Club Circuit	PadelIN Tour, Gulf Padel Championship, BNK Open, local leagues	Scale: 200–1,000 participants. Revenue: entry fees, membership, sponsorship. Success metric: repeat participation rate. The most commercially accessible tier — and the most underdeveloped layer in the GCC today.
Social / Recreational / Corporate	Club Americanos, team days, brand activations, NIC-sponsored events	Scale: 20–200 participants. Revenue: court rental, coaching, F&B, sponsorship. Dominant tier by volume — but businesses routinely overestimate how many social players will move into competitive formats.

The player profile: who is actually playing?

Globally, FIP counts over 35 million amateur players, roughly half of whom play weekly or more, with 40% female and the core demographic being adults aged 26–50.^[15] In the GCC context, that player base divides across three types:

• The recreational social player — the dominant segment. Plays 1–3 times per week through club memberships or hourly bookings. A large proportion are expats, particularly Spanish, European, and Latin American nationals who brought the sport with them.
• The competitive amateur — the growing segment. Saudi Arabia organised more than 100 local tournaments in 2024.^[8] PadelIN's regional tour attracts 600+ players per event across the Middle East.^[13]
• The elite national player — the underdeveloped segment. Saudi Arabia currently has only 8 players with FIP ranking points. The talent pipeline from junior academies to professional competition remains a long-term project across all GCC markets.^[8]

The Spanish connection: why coaching origin matters for event strategy

The Registry of Padel Professionals (RPP) has trained more than 19,000 coaches through its programmes, with 10,500 certified coaches active in 95 countries.^[16] A significant share of GCC club coaches hold RPP or FIP-recognised certifications derived from Spanish training methodologies.

The coaching origin matters for event strategy because it shapes player development velocity — and player development velocity shapes your competitive participant pool. It also shapes participant expectations: the GCC's most engaged padel players have international reference points. The player who trained at a Spanish academy expects a tournament experience designed like a Spanish tournament. Most GCC padel events aren't built at that level yet. That gap is both a problem and an opportunity for the right operator.

The professional tournament picture: the GCC as global stage

FIP-organised tournaments grew from 182 in 2024 to 290 in 2025, involving over 11,000 athletes.^[1] The GCC's presence on that calendar:

• Qatar has hosted the Ooredoo Qatar Major (Premier Padel P1) annually since the tour's launch in 2022.
• Kuwait hosted its first Premier Padel P1 at The Arena Kuwait in November 2024, preceded by a CUPRA FIP Tour event in November 2023.
• Saudi Arabia hosted five FIP circuit events between 2023 and 2025: FIP Star Riyadh (May 2023), Riyadh Season P1 (February 2024), FIP Rise Riyadh (June 2024), FIP Rise Jeddah (October 2024), and Riyadh Season P1 (2025).^[8]

Is anyone watching? beIN, TOD, and the broadcast story

In February 2026, beIN Media Group secured rights to the full 2026 Qatar Airways Premier Padel Tour and the 2026 FIP World Cup across 39 territories spanning MENA, Türkiye, Asia-Pacific, and North America.^[18]

The beIN–TOD–QSI triangle is the most important structural fact in GCC padel media: the same Qatari ownership group controls the professional tour, the broadcaster, and the media rights. This is not a coincidence — it is a deliberate vertical integration strategy that gives QSI complete control over how padel is distributed and monetised in the region.

The GCC padel audience is unique in one important way: it is simultaneously a participant audience and a viewer audience. A Kuwaiti who books a court three times a week is also watching the Kuwait P1 final on beIN. That dual engagement — player and fan — is rare in sports and creates a different sponsorship value proposition than pure spectatorship markets.

Sponsorship in practice: what BNK Holding built in Kuwait

The most instructive sponsorship case study in GCC padel is not a multinational. It is a Kuwaiti conglomerate that recognised an opportunity early and moved with precision.

BNK Holding KSCC, chaired by Bader Nasser Al-Kharafi, was the primary sponsor and organiser of the Kuwait City Premier Padel P1 in November 2024 — the first Premier Padel P1 in Kuwait's history — held at The Arena Kuwait with a €470,000 prize pool.^[25]

The Kuwait P1 won the best Premier Padel tournament award for 2024, beating Monaco, Madrid, and Mar del Plata — voted on by the professional players themselves based on organisation quality, facilities, and experience.^[26] Based on that success, FIP chose Kuwait to host the inaugural FIP World Cup Pairs in November 2025: a brand new global competition featuring 48 men's pairs, 40 women's pairs, €1 million prize money, and 2,000 FIP ranking points for winners.^[27]

Three strategic lessons from BNK's approach:

• They entered at the right moment — during the build phase, not at the peak of hype, when Kuwait was establishing itself as a credible padel market.
• They invested in quality, not just visibility. The P1 winning best tournament in the world was driven by organisation excellence. That directly influenced FIP's decision to award the World Cup Pairs.
• They built institutional relationships at the FIP level. BNK chairman Al-Kharafi is named directly in FIP president Carraro's public statements — that is sovereign-level sports diplomacy from a private company.

So where is the paradox?

The GCC has world-class courts, growing player numbers, ownership of the professional tour, embedded Spanish coaching expertise, active FIP circuit stops, and a live broadcast distribution network spanning 39 territories. What it doesn't yet have is a sustainable, self-reinforcing event ecosystem at the grassroots and competitive amateur level.

Most padel events in the GCC are either premium professional productions (Qatar Major, Kuwait P1, FIP World Cup Pairs) or informal club tournaments run by individual venues with no federation aggregation or cross-market logic. The middle layer — the structured competitive amateur circuit that turns social players into competitive ones, builds rivalries, and creates event-going audiences — is still underdeveloped.

PadelIN's regional tour with 600+ players per tournament^[13] is the closest thing to that middle layer. But it does not yet have the institutional backing, media presence, or participant pathway logic of what exists at the equivalent level in Spain or Italy.

What the event industry should be asking

The question is not "is padel growing?" The answer is obviously yes. The better questions are:

• Who is the participant and what do they actually want? The GCC padel player in 2026 is primarily recreational, not competitive. Events designed for competitive players will reach a smaller addressable market than court utilisation data implies.
• What does retention look like over 3+ seasons? Kuwait's padel boom began around 2020–2021. We're now five seasons in. Are the same players returning, or are you constantly recruiting new ones? If court bookings grow but tournament participation plateaus — that is the signal.
• Is infrastructure getting ahead of audience? The FIP 2025 report notes that Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Denmark entered a "moderate" growth phase in 2024, while Sweden is "not yet showing signs of recovery" after its boom-bust cycle.^[2] Courts get built faster than players develop. The GCC is not immune to this pattern.
• What is the real addressable competitive market? Kuwait has 100,000+ amateur players and 580 courts.^[9] Of those 100,000, what fraction are regular competitors rather than casual court bookers? In Spain, with 6 million players, only a fraction participate in organised competition. Scale that ratio and the competitive event audience is significantly smaller than the infrastructure numbers imply.

The organisations that win in GCC padel over the next five years won't be the ones who launch the most tournaments. They'll be the ones who build the missing middle layer — the structured competitive amateur ecosystem that turns social players into event participants, and event participants into loyal returning audiences.

That is not a court problem. It's not a broadcast problem. And the BNK Holding case study shows it's not a sponsorship imagination problem. It is a strategy, CX, and operations problem. And in a region that has already solved the infrastructure question, that is exactly the kind of problem that gets interesting.