How about this: the next padel club does not need to be a padel club.
I came across a story this week that I think points to an interesting opportunity in padel (and pickleball).
Munich Airport in Germany has built three padel courts in its central foyer.
Around 5,000 people visited in the opening weekend, and the Munich City and Bavarian Championships are already fully booked.
What struck me wasn’t the demand but where the courts are.
DO WE HAVE THE WRONG MENTAL MODEL?
We still tend to think of padel and pickleball as sports that belong in sports centres.
The chain of thought usually is: find some land, build some courts, add reception, changing rooms, parking and a café, then convince people to drive there and play. But, I’ve spent enough time around racket-sport facilities to know how difficult it can be to get people to make that extra trip purely to play sport.
Here’s an alternate future: what if the sport comes to them instead?
Think about bowling: Bowling alleys have long understood that they don’t necessarily need to be standalone sporting destinations. You find them in shopping and entertainment centres, alongside restaurants, cinemas and other things people are already doing.
Why couldn’t padel do the same?
SPACE CHANGES THE EQUATION
This is where padel and pickleball have an interesting advantage.
A pickleball court is only 20 x 44 feet, considerably smaller than a tennis court.
That opens up a completely different real-estate conversation.
Shopping centres. Hotels. Airports. University campuses. Residential developments. Office parks. Rooftops. Unused warehouses. Even large car parks.
The question does not need to be: “Where can we build another sports centre?”
Let’s ask this instead: “Where are people already spending time that could accommodate a racket sport?”
SPORT BECOMES THE ACTIVATOR
And I think this is the really interesting bit.
Padel doesn’t necessarily have to be the destination.
It can be the activator.
Put courts next to restaurants and suddenly you’ve got dinner before or after playing. Put them in a shopping centre and you’ve got families and friends combining sport with shopping. Put them in an airport and you have an entirely new way of activating otherwise passive space.
The sport becomes part of a broader experience rather than the entire reason for visiting. That matters enormously for investors and property owners.
THE BIGGER OPPORTUNITY
Munich Airport may therefore be testing something that goes well beyond padel: whether racket sports can move out of the sports box.
I suspect they can.
And if they do, the winners may not simply be the operators who build the most courts, but the ones who realise that the best court is sometimes the one where people already are.
(Originally published on LinkedIn)
