Mixed everywhere but the top

Alex and I play out of Padel4all in Lockleaze, on the north edge of Bristol, and like most clubs it runs its competitive life through box leagues. The pairs are split into boxes, A at the top and running down through the alphabet as far as the numbers require, sometimes the whole way to M; inside each box everyone plays everyone, round-robin, and every six weeks, with a week's breather between rounds, the results promote and relegate you and the thing resets. It is the closest the amateur game has to a season, and it runs the year round.

For a good while now one of the best pairs in the place has been Alex and Beth Matthews, who partner each other on the court and off it. They have won Box A, the top box, several times over, beating pair after pair of men to do it. A man and a woman at the summit of the club, and nobody arranged it as a statement. They are simply good, and they win.

What you notice, once you have noticed them, is that they are the only ones. Down the top two boxes, theirs is the single mixed pair in it. The mixed partnership, the most ordinary thing in the world lower down, gets rarer with every box you climb, until near the top it is Alex and Beth and nobody else.

Lower down, it is everywhere, and the formats see to that. The americano and its livelier cousin the mexicano are the staple of the club social night, and both are built on the mixed pairing: you change partner every few games, the partner you change to is as likely to be a woman as a man, and the points are scored to the individual. Clubs run them because they mix the membership, which is what a club is for. Nobody runs them as a gesture toward inclusion. It is simply how the evening works.

The numbers back the impression. By most counts around 40 per cent of padel players are women, one of the highest shares in any racket sport. The figure comes from the booking platforms and the federation, and it averages out a great deal of regional variation, but the direction is not in doubt. At the level where the sport is actually played, it is a genuinely mixed game.

And some people make a proper thing of it. At Lockleaze, Claudia Paoloni runs the Sunday Padelers Group, a mexicano that goes every Sunday and takes all comers, every standard welcome. It is the inclusive end of the game in its most natural form: a room of players of every level, reshuffled into pairs across the afternoon, a good share of them mixed by the plain arithmetic of who turned up. Nobody is being made a point of. They are being given a game.

It is not only the loose social night, either. iPadel, the club-league competition Ian Colligan has run across Britain since 2021, gives the mixed idea a competitive spine. Clubs field teams and play one another regionally, two pairs a side over a pair of rubbers, the regional winners going through to national finals; it has grown to something like a hundred and fifty teams across twenty-odd leagues. What matters here is that it runs in three categories, men's, ladies' and mixed, the mixed division on exactly the same footing as the other two. Below the professional tier, the mixed pairing is not a compromise anyone puts up with. It is a recognised competitive category, and a good watch.

Then you look up, and it stops. The professional game, run since 2022 under Premier Padel with the backing of the international federation, is two tours that never meet: a men's draw and a women's draw, separate brackets, separate finals, separate rankings, contested across the same Majors and P1s and P2s but never on the same court at the same time. The nearest thing to an exception is the Hexagon Cup, the team competition in which each side fields a men's pair, a women's pair and a Next Gen pair and plays for a single prize. Even there the pairs stay single-sex: what is mixed is the team, not the partnership. And it is a telling exception, because the format is rising fast. At the end of 2025 the Hexagon Cup, the investment group 54 and the international federation folded it into a new Hexagon World Series, billed as the sport's first official team circuit, set to run alongside Premier Padel. The professional game is learning to put men and women on the same team. The mixed pairing, a man and a woman in the one pair, it still has no place for.

The reasons are not mysterious. The first is inheritance: padel built its professional tier on the single-sex architecture that tennis and most of sport have always used, and a structure like that, once set, tends to hold. The second is the reason every sport gives for separating its elite competition by sex, a physical gap that widens at the top. At the club the mixed pair works because placement, position and patience decide most points, and those do not sort by sex. The professional game is played at speeds and powers where they begin to, and a mixed draw at that level would sit awkwardly across the difference in a way it never does on a Thursday night. Whether that gap is as decisive as the structure assumes is a question for the players to answer, not this piece. What is not in dispute is that separate competition at the summit is a norm padel inherited, rather than one it chose. Nor is it that mixed cannot be made to pay at the top: across the Atlantic the American Pro Padel League already runs mixed doubles as part of its format. The two circuits that define the sport simply have not, at least not yet.

None of which is an argument that the professionals should be playing mixed. It is only to notice the shape of the thing: a sport whose whole life at the base is the mixed pairing arrives at its summit wearing the same single-sex face as everything else, and the distance between the two is further here than in almost any sport you could name.

That is the question this piece cannot yet close, and I will not pretend otherwise. We watched Astrid Thams present the team format twice this year, at the Padel Directory's UK Padel Convention and again at the Padel World Summit in Barcelona; the next time we find ourselves in a room with her, we mean to put the plain version of it to her, on the fair assumption that it is the question you would most want answered too. When we have her answer, you will have it.

What keeps the mixed game the norm, meanwhile, is not the tour but the people running the rooms beneath it: the box leagues, the Sunday mexicanos, the Ian Colligans and Claudia Paolonis who build the events and set the rules. Some go further, building for players the mainstream has been slower to reach; the LGBTQ+ game has its own growing corner, Pride Padel among it, which we will come to properly in a later issue.

For now the most modern thing in the sport is also its most ordinary: a man and a woman across the net from another man and another woman, the arrangement nobody thinks to remark on because it is simply how the night is set. At Lockleaze it is Alex and Beth, near the top and climbing. At the top of the professional game it is nobody at all, and there are no plans to change that. Which of the two arrangements ends up looking like the dated one is not yet settled. The club, without trying, is making the more modern case.