Starting With Sweden

Welcome to the fourth issue of The Alborán.

I want to use this letter to tell you about something we are starting rather than something we have finished. Over the coming months we are going to look at what happened to padel in Sweden.

The more clubs I see opening, the more I notice two things. The first is how good it is. In Bristol there are now lots of clubs. In Scotland, especially in Ayrshire, where I have been, more places are opening too. For years West of Scotland Padel, in Stevenston, was the only place to play in that part of the country, and many of the top players in Scotland have played there. David McCulloch founded it and, as he told me, gave the courts to the club. One player I met travels between forty-five minutes and an hour each way to play there. She still makes the trip, but she now also has courts fifteen minutes from home. Across Britain, people play closer to home, or wherever they find the coaching they want. That is what new clubs in new areas do. They give people the chance to play padel, which until now they did not have, or had very little of.

The second is the question I keep hearing: whether this is a bubble, what happens if it gets too crowded, and whether we are going to follow Sweden. People keep comparing the two. I do not think they are the same, and this is the right time to get to the bottom of what happened there.

The story usually goes like this. Padel arrived in Sweden and spread very fast. During the pandemic it was something people could still do together, four to a court and at a distance. When the restrictions lifted, people went back to their old routines, and the courts became harder to fill. Electricity prices rose, and a padel hall was a large space to heat and light through a Swedish winter. Clubs closed, and the companies that owned them failed.

Some of that may well be true. The figures you may have seen are round ones, ninety bankruptcies and half a billion euros. The ninety counts companies, which is not the same thing as clubs when one group can own many of them. The figures rarely say over how long. And the story has reached Britain as a warning.

We wanted to see the count behind those figures, so we started one of our own.

In September we went through the Swedish company records we could reach. On 18 October 2022 a padel trade site reported that eleven Swedish companies, owning sixteen padel facilities between them, had filed for bankruptcy that day. The records we searched show three bankruptcies opened on that date. Some of the others may have been concluded since, and the records we could search lose the date a bankruptcy opened once it closes. Others may sit under company names that give no hint of padel at all. Either way, in those records, the busiest months of the story are already the hardest to see.

We will take the usual story one part at a time. We will go to the official Swedish register, read the Swedish reporting from the time in the original, and talk to people who were there: about when the clubs opened and closed, who owned them, and what it cost to heat and light them. Anyone whose decisions we question will see what we intend to say, and will have the chance to answer it, before it appears.

We will set out where Britain and Sweden differ, and where they do not, rather than skip past either. We want to understand what happened well enough that the people building padel here, and the people playing it, can make up their own minds.

This is where you come in. If you played padel in Sweden, or still do, worked in it, built courts or put money into a club there, we would like to hear from you. Write to editors@alboransocialclub.com, in English or in Swedish, and tell us whether we may use your name. We will read everything, and we will reply in English.

We hope to bring you the first part next month. If it is not ready by then, it will wait until it is.

In this issue the Archive goes back to Jorge Galeotti's demountable glass court. The histories of the game date it to 1989; his own account implies a first showing no earlier than 1991. The Court reads the public record of Carolina Navarro, born in Málaga, who played her last professional match in Acapulco in November 2025 and now selects Spain's women's team. The Terrace sits down to dinner in Nerja, the day after playing in Málaga. More pieces will join the issue over the coming weeks.

As ever, thank you for reading.

See you at the club.

Andy Galt