Padel's growing pains

A year ago, we published a Nugget about padel showing the extraordinary growth of the sport in South Africa. Given the audience, it may have been our most popular Nugget yet. Within many social circles – usually while waiting to fetch the kids outside the school gate – it’s nearly impossible to escape the topic.

Since then, padel has become even more mainstream and we thought it would be an apt time to get back on the court.

Quick reminder: Playtomic is the platform used for padel bookings, so those are the transactions we aggregated. Last February, we noted that the number of users paying on Playtomic for a padel game had increased by a whopping 14x since the year previously.

If padel was popular then, well… The number of users paying for games has since doubled again. (This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any full-time employed person hustling between appointments, amazed by the number of cars in the parking lot at 11am on a Tuesday.) While the number of people playing has increased, the frequency of games and cost per game has remained relatively stable: The average player is still paying for three games a month and R200 per event.

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The owners of these overpriced squash courts are certainly smiling, but they’re not the only ones. Padel has been good for other industries, too.‍

Specifically, physios. Just as it has become hard to escape conversations about padel, it has become even harder to escape conversations about padel injuries. Again, maybe it’s the circles that I hang out in, or the hard truths of physical activity when you’re older than 40, but padel can be devastating to knees, ankles, calves and elbows.

We ran the numbers, comparing the likelihood of a padel player also paying for physio (or a similar expense) to the likelihood of a non-padel player also paying for that service. Again, the answer is double: a padel player is twice as likely to also pay for physio.

To preserve the dignity of all middle-aged men reliving their youth on the padel court, we chose not to segment this result by age…

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Equipped with this empirical evidence, the most responsible thing for this middle-aged ‘athlete’ to do is buy a pair of those great-looking non-slip padel shoes. After all, it’s an investment in my health.

Do they qualify for a Vitality discount yet?

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