The Next Diamond in the Rough

The United States is, this summer, the centre of the sporting world, hosting a World Cup that not even Homeland Security could keep the Tartan Army out of. It tried: in the name of immigration enforcement, Scottish fans found their US travel permits revoked in the days before kick-off, and came anyway. Scotland, true to form, went out in the group stage; the Tartan Army, also true to form, stayed on regardless, drank a Boston brewery through seventy kegs in four days, and left statues across the host cities wearing traffic cones. Padel is the next American enthusiasm in the queue, a sport made for a country that likes its leisure organised and monetised, ideally in good weather. Playtomic's latest report duly crowns the United States its headline diamond in the rough.

At the Padel World Summit in Barcelona this May, on the Wednesday afternoon, Playtomic put a map of the world's padel markets on the main-stage screen and sorted every country on it into one of five kinds. We were in the room. The one that held us was the category for the markets with the furthest still to climb: diamonds in the rough. There are six: the United States, India, Australia, Indonesia, Brazil and Poland, all of them markets at a very early stage, fewer than one court for every hundred thousand people, growing at around eleven per cent a year, with large populations and what the company calls long-term growth optionality. One caveat travels with every figure here and we will state it once: this is a vendor's dataset, drawn from the clubs that run Playtomic's software. Read it as a map whose cartographer also sells the land. None of which makes the numbers wrong; it means they arrive from a party with a reason for them to read the way they do.

The headline diamond is the United States, and it is the one the report cannot stop naming. Worth noticing is the company it keeps: by the report's own penetration maths America sits in the very same bucket as India and Indonesia, barely a court per hundred thousand people. The country everyone is watching is, by this framework, exactly as early as the markets it overlooks. So leave it to the World Cup crowds. We want to talk about three of the others: the one the man who maps the game for a living would bet on, the one we have already played in, and the one we are quietly watching from across Europe.

Start with the one the expert would back. We put the obvious question to George Modler, who runs the Padel Directory and spends his working life tracking where the game is and is not, and who sat down with Alex for the first of our Sessions at the Summit. Of the six diamonds, he did not hesitate: he picked one, and made the case for it in a sentence. We are not going to give it away here. To hear which of the six George Modler would put his own money on, you will have to listen to the Sessions. The report hedges across all six. He backed just one.

The diamond we knew first-hand was a different one again. In February, Ana and I played on Gili Air, a coral island off Lombok with no cars on it, where the court had been brought over by boat and cart and you book a game through a WhatsApp group. Indonesia is on the report's diamond list, and the report's own numbers show why that category is the riskiest as much as the largest: Indonesian revenue per court fell sixteen per cent in a single year, from €6,300 a month to €5,300, the steepest fall on the report's own revenue chart. A diamond already flickering, on an island you reach by boat.

Poland is the one European name on the list, the game spread across some sixty venues in thirty-two cities. The one we would cross a continent to see sits in Gdańsk, where padel is being laid out on the grounds of the old shipyard, under the cranes that still stand over the birthplace of Solidarity. The club calls itself Kortownia, stocznia padel: shipyard padel. It is the report's own real-estate thesis made concrete, the game arriving as an activation layer on a piece of industrial heritage, in a market the data files as barely begun. We have not been yet.

Dublin we will see sooner. In October Alex and I are going, to a market that is not a diamond at all but a hotspot, a rung further along: sixty-four per cent court growth and already straining at peak hour. We want to know what the tier above the diamonds looks like on the ground before the next report records it.

Nobody yet knows which of the rough stones is the real one. George Modler has made his pick, and you will find it in the Sessions.