Episode One · George Modler

The first one was recorded in Barcelona.

Tuesday, 26 May, the opening day of the Padel World Summit, inside the convention while the city was full of people who play. Alex hosted. The first guest was George Modler, co-founder of The Padel Directory, who gave us an hour before his own networking event that evening.

A word on Modler, for anyone who has not come across him. He found the game more or less where we did, at the University of Bristol, and out of the ordinary problem that nobody could find anything out about padel in one place, he and Ben Harris built The Padel Directory: a single hub for the UK's clubs, coaches, brands and players, since carried across to the United States. He knows the room as well as anyone in it, largely because he drew the map of it.

The Alborán Sessions is the talking arm of the club. Audio first, lightly filmed for the clips that travel. The register is the one you already know from the publication: people who know the game, in no particular hurry, saying true things to each other. A conversation, not an interview. Nobody is being grilled. Nobody is selling.

Monthly, from here. Twelve a year. Some recorded wherever the game has taken us, the rest from Bristol, where most of the work quietly gets done.

There is a reason episode one was not recorded in a studio. A studio is neutral, and neutral rooms make for careful, boring talk. The Summit floor was anything but. It was loud in the right way, full of people who came for the padel and stayed for each other. That was the room we wanted.

Alex writes the companion piece, as he will each month. It runs in The Coastline, and it does the thing the audio cannot: it slows down and tells you what Barcelona looked like the morning after.

The episode is out now. The companion piece follows.