As the old saying goes, “What a difference a year can make” — or more accurately in the case of North America’s burgeoning Pro Padel League (PPL), what an incredible difference two years can make, as I’ve witnessed firsthand between 2024 and now.
In August of that year, I flew to San Diego both to check out local padel clubs like Padel California (just up the coast in Oceanside) and The King of Padel (which has since moved and been rebranded as Kingdom of Padel) and to see pro padel live for the first time ever at a PPL event hosted by Taktika Padel in the heart of the city.
While the level of play was impressive to say the least, the event itself felt less like a professional sports tournament and more like some sort of high-school athletic competition.
Granted, I was there on the early side of the event, but I wasn’t exactly blown away by the experience. A single makeshift concession stand sold overpriced beers and bottled waters. There was no merchandise to speak of. The “VIP Section” appeared to be just a few roped off high-top tables. And the crowd (if you can call it that) seemed to consist of little more than the franchise owners along with friends and families of the players.
Meanwhile, I watched as several groups of people carrying padel racquets walked right by the PPL show courts ostensibly on their way to play padel on the courts at the back of the facility without stopping to watch or likely even realizing a professional tournament was going on.
I left the tournament excited about the fact I’d finally seen pro padel in person but doubtful the PPL would ever be able to attract a mainstream audience in the U.S. same way tennis or even pickleball has.
Adding to these doubts was the fact that most of the people I personally played padel with at the time had little to no clue about — or interest in — pro padel, save for all the Instagram and YouTube clips they’d share with one another showing players running off the court to prolong a point.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Fast forward two years and the PPL has made some pretty huge strides towards gaining more visibility across the U.S. and the world (thanks in no small part to securing $15 million in Series A fundraising earlier this year), including…
Expanding their event calendar to include competitions in countries like Mexico and Spain, where padel is much more mainstream than in the U.S….
Collaborating with widely read and recognized racquet sports media brands like Racquet (that aren’t specifically focused on padel) to increase awareness across the racquet sports ecosystem in the U.S., and…
Landing a broadcast partnership with USA Sports to air five PPL championship matches on CNBC during the 2026 season, marking the first time the PPL has been broadcast exclusively on a national TV network in the U.S.
What’s more, PPL CEO Mike Dorfman also recently appeared on CNBC to try to help set the record straight about how to properly pronounce the sport here in the U.S. (which, spoiler alert, is the same way you pronounce it in the 190+ other countries it’s played in).
So, I jumped at the chance to chat with Dorfman shortly after that interview to learn more about his plans for the future of the PPL, beginning with their next event — which is set to take place at MGM Live on the Las Vegas strip from November 18 - 21, and which, not coincidentally, is the same weekend an estimated 300,000+ people from around the world will descend on Sin City for F1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix race.
Of the league’s decision to host their last regular season event in Vegas (rather than in Guadalajara, Mexico, where it was originally scheduled to take place) Dorfman tells me:
So, I think there’s a few factors driving the partnership with MGM.
As we continue to scale the league, it’s a goal for us to continue to tap into the local markets where we have franchises to build kind of fandom and community around our local teams.
Vegas is the hometown of Las Vegas Smash, and we’ve never been [there] before. And as we look to our 2027 and beyond schedule, the goal is really to go to all of our home markets each season. You’ll see and hear more about that later. But this is kind of a step to doing that.You know, our other stops for tournaments this year, New York, L.A., Playa del Carmen, Miami, and now Vegas are five out of five markets where we have home teams. So, that is a new concept for us that we’re continuing to lean into. And the first time we’ve ever done that, making stops only in markets where we have team space.
Going Hollywood?
Two years after attending my first PPL event, I returned to California (this time L.A.) this past August to see firsthand how the PPL had evolved over that time period (which I did my best to capture with this photo essay from Ben Blair) — and, I must say, I was duly impressed with the progress they’ve made.
Rather than just sectioning off part of a massive racquet sports center, they instead rented out an entire (and very iconic) event space. There were multiple vendors and sponsors, merchandise for sale, a proper bar, and even food trucks. And the entire space looked like it was reserved for VIPs.
First impressions were definitely favorable, though compared to the Premier Padel tournament I attended in Spain the month prior, the event admittedly felt a bit more like a see-and-be-seen, luxury lifestyle event than an actual sporting event.
When I ask Dorfman about the changes in the look and feel of the PPL’s events over the past few years he says:
We’ve done these kind of… I’ll call them “cross cultural events” before. We popped up a court on the beach last December, we had our activation at the Miami Open tennis as well. We’ve done a “Padel Bowl” during the Super Bowl out in San Francisco.
So, we’ve kind of tested these cross cultural moments where we could kind of surprise and delight people with padel. But to date that’s only been with kind of exhibition courts and more kind of casual padel.
This [Vegas event] is the first time we’re going to get to do that with a real tournament with a lot on the line for the season. So, really excited about being part of that event and the week given all that’s going on in the city.
His excitement about hosting a PPL event in Vegas alongside an F1 race is palpable as he continues:
Obviously MGM is one of the biggest brands in the country, if not the world.
Las Vegas is becoming one of the sports capitals of the U.S. and the world, as well. And obviously with the Grand Prix happening concurrently, it felt like there was a really interesting moment for us to be a part of one of the tent-pole sporting events of the year that is also bringing a very international audience — which, you know, is friendly for padel and also an audience that I think has a pretty strong overlap in demographics with who is watching and playing padel in the U.S. right now.
Big Bet, Long Odds
While this upcoming PPL event in Vegas will no doubt bring significantly more visibility and attention to the sport in the U.S., it remains to be seen if watching pro padel will ever become as popular as just playing it in the U.S.
For instance, I know at least half a dozen rabid padel addicts (mostly with squash or tennis backgrounds) who’ve paid top dollar for a Coello racquet, yet seemingly have no idea that’s the last name of Spanish padel pro who looks destined to be among the all-time greats.
Meanwhile, I’ve been at clubs where players have requested a TV showing pro padel be switched to a football, baseball, or even soccer game.
And when I told fellow padel-playing friends I was traveling to both Los Angeles and Málaga, Spain this past summer to watch pro padel, most reactions seemed to fall between confusion and indifference — as opposed to the reactions I’ve gotten when I’ve told people I was headed to London to attend Wimbledon or Green Bay to catch a Packers game at Lambeau Field.
When I bring this challenge up to Dorfman, he responds:
We’ve built a lot and continue to build on the live experience itself. As the world gets more and more automated away, I think people are craving human experiences and live experiences, and I think we’ve got an amazing product for live experience.
If you’re a new padel player and you’ve never seen the pros play, I think there is not yet an appreciation of just how good they are. So, that’s kind of an awareness thing that we’re trying to tackle in a myriad of different ways.
But usually we find that just getting people to come through the door, they’re blown away within a matter of seconds or minutes of seeing the pros competing. And so it’s pretty easy to convert new fans once we get them through the door.
Getting them through the door, I think, is a pretty long funnel right now of making sure that padel is a sport that they are aware of.
In Vegas, Dorfman and the league obviously plan to tackle this particular challenge head on, as he explains:
Padel is still top of the first inning in terms of its maturity in the U.S. So, it’s not an overnight process. It’s kind of a long build. But if you take Vegas, for example, part of the strategy is bridging the gap between awareness and playing and then the gap between playing and spectating.
So, we are building our tournament in the Dolby Live center, which is right outside the Park MGM. But we’re also building an exhibition court in front of the Bellagio fountain, which is right next to the [F1] racetrack. And so that is, you know, front-and-center awareness. We’ll have pros playing out there, practicing, getting people onto the court, hitting some balls.
Go Big or Go Home
I end the conversation by asking Dorfman if the ultimate goal is to build out a series of smaller, more high-end niche events that are jam packed with padel enthusiasts or to swing for the fences and sell out massive stadiums like the U.S. Open of tennis now does (though with some in attendance perhaps not being true tennis fans).
Dorfman doesn’t hesitate for even a second, telling me:
We see padel as a mass-audience sport. I think it has the potential to be one of the most played sports in the world and also one of the most watched sports in the world, and we’re not building for anything less than that.
We see stadiums being filled with tens of thousands of people in more mature padel markets across the world, and I don’t see any reason why it would be any different here. So, that is the goal.
That being said, we’re also aware of who our audience is today and what kind of experiences those folks want and expect. We want to deliver on those and we want to make sure that everyone can come in today and have an amazing seat and viewing experience and live experience — and, then as the audience scales, just go with it.
For more information on the PPL’s upcoming Las Vegas event — or to buy tickets to attend in person — be sure to visit their homepage.
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Love this history and context Austin!