Padel Searches Hit 100,000 a Month. Britain Has 1,825 Courts.

Every so often something stops being a passing craze and settles in as a permanent part of British life. You can usually see it happen in search data a good year before it shows up in anyone's revenue.

Padel is at that point in Britain right now, and the numbers are more extreme than I expected when I started pulling them.

In the year to June 2021, "padel" averaged about 4,400 UK searches a month. In the year to April 2026 it averaged 90,500. That is a twentyfold increase in five years, and it is still climbing: the single busiest months in the series are all in the last twelve of it.

One caveat worth stating up front, because it makes the picture conservative rather than flattering. Semrush's index currently runs to April 2026, so nothing you have just watched happen over this summer is in any of these numbers. For a sport played largely outdoors, in a summer like this one, that is a significant omission in the direction of understatement.

The seasonality is the real tell

A twentyfold rise is eye-catching, but on its own it is just a bigger version of any fad. Fidget spinners had a lovely chart too. The question I always want answered is what the line does when the novelty and the good weather both wear off.

So I put padel next to tennis, indexing each to its own busiest month so the comparison is about shape rather than size.

Tennis behaves exactly as you would expect a British racket sport to behave. It peaks in July with Wimbledon, then falls off a cliff, and by December it is running at 8% of its summer peak. Two weeks of national obsession, then ten months of quiet.

Padel does not do this. December, January and February all sit at the same level as July. There is no off-season at all.

That single difference is worth more to an operator than the growth rate is. A tennis club's income rises and falls with the weather and with Wimbledon. A padel venue, most of which are floodlit and increasingly covered, sells court time in February at the same rate it sells it in July. It turns a seasonal leisure business into a year-round one, which changes what the asset is worth and how quickly it pays back.

It also changes the marketing job. Most leisure businesses in this country spend their year bracing for a summer peak. If you run padel courts, you have twelve peaks, and any month you are not visible in local search is a month of inventory you cannot sell again.

Supply is racing, and still losing

Here is where I have to correct a lazy assumption I went in with. I expected to find that British operators had been slow off the mark. They have not. The build rate has been genuinely impressive.

The LTA counted 68 padel courts in Great Britain in 2019. By the end of 2025 there were 1,553, and by May 2026 there were 1,825 across the country. That is more than a twelvefold increase since 2021, in a country not famous for building sports facilities quickly.

It still is not keeping up.

Index both lines to 2021 and the courts curve looks strong right up until you put the demand curve next to it. Courts are up about twelvefold. Searches are up about twentyfold. The gap has widened in every single year, including the years with the fastest construction.

The participation figures tell the same story from the other end. The LTA now counts a million padel players in Britain, up from 15,000 in 2019 and 400,000 at the end of 2024. Spread across 1,825 courts, that is roughly 550 players per court. And the queue behind them is longer still: the LTA's research puts awareness at 57% of the population, around 31 million people, with more than 10 million Britons saying they want to try padel.

Ten million interested people, one million players, 1,825 courts. That is the shape of this market in one line.

How far behind Britain actually is

The international comparison is where the scale of the gap becomes obvious.

Britain has one padel court for roughly every 38,000 people. Sweden and Spain both sit near 38 courts per 100,000, which is about fifteen times the British density. Italy passed 10,000 courts last year. Even after five years of rapid building, the UK is closer to Germany at the bottom of this chart than to anyone at the top.

Reaching Spanish density would mean about 26,000 courts in Britain, which is not going to happen and probably should not. The more sober industry forecasts put the long-term UK market at 7,000 to 8,000 courts. That is still four times what exists today, and it implies a construction pipeline running for years.

A word on these figures, because cross-country sports data is collected untidily. The court counts come from different bodies on different dates, from the LTA's May 2026 number for Britain to a February 2024 federation figure for Sweden. The ranking is sound and the order-of-magnitude gap is not in doubt, but do not read the decimal places too closely.

Where the commercial opportunity actually is

This is the part that made me want to write it up.

The consumer terms are the obvious ones. "Padel near me" runs at 18,100 searches a month and "padel courts near me" at 14,800, both up roughly fifteenfold in three years. They are also the terms everyone has noticed, and the difficulty scores have started to reflect that. Winnable, but no longer free.

The interesting cluster is underneath. "Padel court construction" does 590 searches a month at £1.95 a click with a difficulty score of 21. "Padel court cost" does 480 at difficulty 16. These are people planning to spend six figures on a court build, and the terms are sitting at difficulty scores you would normally only find in a category nobody has discovered yet.

Small volumes, obviously. But a court installation is a large contract, the terms have grown about fifteenfold in three years on the same trajectory as everything else here, and right now they cost almost nothing to compete for. If you build, surface, finance or supply padel courts and you are not ranking for those, that is the cheapest gap in this entire dataset.

What I would take from this

If you run courts or clubs, local search is the whole game and it runs all year. "Near me" terms are where nearly all of this demand lands, they do not dip in winter the way your instincts say they should, and a venue with a thin Google Business Profile is invisible in exactly the searches that convert. The demand is already there in your town. The question is only whether it finds you or the club one junction up the M6.

If you sell into the padel supply chain, the B2B terms are underpriced and will not stay that way. A category growing this fast attracts competent competitors, and difficulty scores of 16 to 21 are a temporary condition, not a permanent one.

And if you are in another sector entirely, the transferable point is the seasonality chart rather than the growth chart. Growth curves are everywhere and most of them are noise. What told me padel was structural rather than faddish was that its winter looks like its summer. When a category stops having an off-season, something real has changed about how people fit it into their lives.

We will keep pulling these apart sector by sector. If you want to know what the search data says about yours, come and ask us.

Sources

• 1,000,000 padel players in Britain (LTA, May 2026)
• LTA figures on the growth of padel in Britain (March 2026)
• Great Britain reaches 1,000 padel courts (LTA, July 2025)
• Search volume, cost per click and keyword difficulty: Semrush UK database, pulled 17 August 2026. Monthly series reconstructed from six overlapping 12-month windows.
• International court counts: national federation and industry figures, collected on varying dates between February 2024 and 2026.