by Atte Suominen, Founder & CEO, PADEL1969
One sport was invented because a man could not fit a tennis court on his land. The other was invented because two founders identified an untouched market segment and built a product to capture it. The difference is fifty years old, and it explains why most padel clubs fail.
In 1969, Enrique Corcuera stood on a small plot of land at his home in Acapulco. He wanted to play tennis. The plot was too small. He built walls around it and invented padel.
No focus group. No total addressable market. No persona development. No five-year projection. No investor deck. One man, one problem, one wall at a time.
For the next fifty-six years, padel spread the slow way. Person to person. Friend to friend. Country to country. No marketing department. No playbook. No standardised business model. The sport reached 165 countries because people who played it could not stop talking about it.
Now consider how Hyrox was born.
Hamburg, 2017. A different kind of founding story.
Christian Toetzke had spent thirty years organising marathons, cycling races, and triathlons before he co-founded Hyrox with two-time Olympic field hockey gold medallist Moritz Fürste, who took gold with Germany in Beijing 2008 and London 2012, and bronze in Rio 2016. He did not start with a sport. He started with a market gap.
Millions of people trained consistently in gyms, he observed, but unlike runners or cyclists they had no standardised competition to enter. No way to measure themselves against others. No event to train for. He named the gap publicly: a massive untouched space, with no concept built to serve that target group.
So he and Fürste built one. Eight kilometres of running. Eight functional stations. Identical format in every city. Standardised so global rankings worked. Affiliate gym tiers from day one. Sponsorship structure ready for Red Bull and Puma before the brand was famous. The first event in 2018 had 650 participants. By 2024, more than 650,000 athletes were competing globally and the affiliate network had passed 5,000 gyms.
Hyrox was not a sport that escaped into a business. Hyrox was a business that wore the costume of a sport from the first day.
Two inheritances: padel got soul, Hyrox got structure
Padel inherited soul. Hyrox inherited structure.
The romance of padel’s origin is real, and worth defending. A category born from genuine passion tends to outlast a category born from a spreadsheet, because the love is real before the money arrives. Padel survived more than five decades of indifference, false starts, and false dawns because nobody could explain why the people who played it kept coming back. They just did. The squash parallel is instructive here: categories that grow organically also stall organically, unless the discipline arrives in time.
The cost of a passion-first origin is also real, and rarely discussed. Padel arrived in 2026 with no industry-wide playbook. No standardised quality benchmark for courts that outsiders can recognise on sight. No agreed methodology for facility design. No demographic template for investors. No operating model adapted from hospitality discipline rather than borrowed from tennis nostalgia.
Hyrox investors do not have this problem. They know the format, the participant profile, the unit economics, and the sponsorship logic before they sign. The sport was designed to be investable. Padel was designed to be played.
Why most padel clubs fail
The current padel boom is producing two kinds of operators.
The first kind enters the sport because they have heard it is the fastest growing racket sport in the world. They specify courts on unit price. They draw facility layouts before studying the catchment. They borrow operating models from tennis or fitness without adjustment. They underestimate maintenance, overestimate utilisation, and discover after eighteen months that the cheapest court is the most expensive asset they own. The pattern is documented. In Sweden and Finland, up to 90 percent of operators have collapsed, filed for bankruptcy, or entered restructuring in markets that were the global benchmark only five years ago.
The second kind enters with the discipline a Hyrox investor would recognise. Catchment analysis before site selection. Premium courts specified on lifetime cost rather than acquisition price. Member experience modelled on hospitality, not on legacy racket clubs. FIP-compliant specifications as a baseline, not a negotiation. Investment cases written to standards a sophisticated capital partner would respect, with break-even analysis, CAPEX allocation, and three-year financial forecasts that do not rely on hope.
The first kind of operator is now selling stranded assets at a discount. The second kind is compounding.
The difference is not how much they love padel. Both groups love the sport. The difference is whether they brought the playbook the sport never wrote for itself.
The next decade is not for romantics or engineers. It is for operators who can hold both.
Padel does not need to become Hyrox. The whole point is that it never could. The sport has something Hyrox will never have: fifty-six years of organic devotion that no marketing budget can replicate. That inheritance is not a liability. It is the most valuable asset in the category.
What padel needs is the discipline its founders never had time to build. The hospitality standards. The investment frameworks. The court specifications written for thirty-year horizons rather than three-year payback windows. The brand standards that signal premium without claiming it. The International Padel Federation provides the technical baseline. The commercial playbook is still being written, club by club, by operators who refuse to repeat the mistakes of the last cycle.
The capital is there. Serious investors are entering the category from every direction: private equity, sovereign wealth, sports league franchises, and athletes who built fortunes in adjacent sports. Institutional capital has reached the professional league level. Olympic recognition is on the horizon. The opportunity is no longer being a first mover. It is being a disciplined one.
Corcuera built the first court because he loved the game. The next chapter belongs to operators who love the game enough to build the playbook the sport has been missing since 1969.
What this means for PADEL1969
This is the gap our advisory work was built for. Investors and entrepreneurs come to us because they have already decided padel is worth their capital. What they need is the playbook the sport never wrote, applied to their specific market, their specific catchment, and their specific business model.
Premium courts are the foundation. Without courts that hold their value over decades, every other layer of the business collapses on a maintenance schedule that no spreadsheet can absorb. ONE COURT FOR LIFE® by PADEL1969 is the position we hold because total cost of ownership, not unit price, is what separates clubs that compound from clubs that erode.
Hyrox proved that engineered categories can scale fast. Padel will prove that passion-born categories, finally given the discipline they deserve, can scale further and last longer.
That is the chapter we are writing now.
Continue reading
The Amazing History of Padel: From Acapulco Since 1969
How Many Padel Club Operators Fail and Why
From Boom to Bust: How to Invest Responsibly in Padel
The Crucial First Step: A Financial Business Plan for Your Padel Club
Similarities in the Growth of Squash and Padel
Who Is Investing in the Global Growth of Padel
PADEL1969 | SHAPE THE FUTURE OF PADEL
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