Padel is more fun than pickleball. But can the pricey racket sport enjoyed by America’s top 1% win over the whole country?

Wulff, who grew up playing competitive tennis in Venezuela, was introduced to padel in 2017 while living off the coast of Spain in Mallorca. “I found a job in a padel center, and I started playing,” he said, adding that the courts were consistently “packed.” After his stint in Mallorca, he moved to LA, where the sport was virtually unknown at the time, and tucked away his newly developed skill.

Fast-forward seven years to 2024, and coaching padel is his main source of income. He primarily works with high net-worth clients who have built private courts in their backyards.

For years, to play the game in LA, “you had to know someone,” said Wulff. That’s only recently starting to change with the opening of The Padel Courts, a two-court club in East Hollywood, and Taktika Padel, a four-court club located in the LA Galaxy facility in Carson.

Now, you don’t necessarily have to know someone; you just need money — and the patience to sit through LA traffic. Booking a court at The Padel Courts costs $50 per half hour. That’s $150 for a quality 90-minute session, or about $38 per person when you split the court four ways. Taktika is cheaper and maxes out at $13 per hour per person, but 23 miles away from my apartment.

It’s not worth it, even for me, a padel-loving Santa Monica resident. Tennis and pickleball are less fun but more accessible. I can bike to public courts and walk through the chain-linked fence free of charge — and that’s a major problem for padel.

The barriers holding padel back from exploding in the US

As I’ve found firsthand, it’s hard to play padel in the US. I have limited court options in LA, where I live. When I lived in Brooklyn last fall, I was within walking distance of Padel Haus Dumbo and could pay $60 an hour (per person) during peak hours to play on one of the four pristine, indoor courts, meaning a 90-minute session would cost me about $90. There’s a reason this sport is popular among high-net-worth individuals.

Unlike pickleball, where you can set up your own court on practically any level surface with a portable net and tape to mark off the lines, padel requires a facility.

The sport, which dates back to the 1960s and is linked to a Mexican businessman who set up a court at his holiday home, was originally for the wealthy.

“It started in 1969 in Acapulco with Enrique Corcuera,” said Christ Ishoo, cofounder of the venture firm EEP Capital, which invests specifically in the padel market. “He did it in a way where it was a high-society sport in Mexico. It was never a sport for the people, so it never hit off.” Until, that is, Argentine friends of Corcuera “took it to Argentina, and from Argentina to Spain.”

Spain and Argentina have had the best players in the world for the last 30 years, Ishoo added, “without a doubt.”

Ishoo, like the author, had a moment with the sport when he first picked up a paddle.

“I played and, what a beautiful sport. It’s athletic, sexy, and fast,” he recalled. “As a human being, we want to be good at stuff, and this makes you feel good very fast.”

Wulff, a master of racket sports, recognizes the magic of padel perhaps better than anyone.

“It’s like four-dimension tennis. You have an afterlife: When the ball goes by you in tennis, it’s over; in padel, the ball can come back. It opens a new world,” he said.

But is the magic of the game enough to create a movement in the US? He’s not as convinced as Ishoo, especially with a behemoth like pickleball to compete with.

“Pickleball, to me, is in the DNA of Americans. It’s cheap, or free in most places, and the court is smaller, so you don’t have to move that much,” said Wulff. “It doesn’t have the sexiness but it gets people going, it gets people playing, it gets people saving money. How do you beat that?”