Great padel courts. Forgettable club. Here's why.
What separates the padel clubs still full on a Tuesday night in five years.
Britain now has over 1,800 padel courts across more than 550 venues, up from under 900 courts just two years ago. The sport has crossed a million active players (growing by the day) and somewhere near you, right now, someone is pouring six figures into building courts in all corners of the country because the demand is real and it isn’t slowing down.
What’s more fascinating is who that’s attracting, and how. Padel courts are being built as standalone venues, as an additional offering at an existing club (tennis, football, rugby and more), or attached to other commercial businesses entirely such as housing developments. Three very different starting points, all feeding the same boom.
With that diverse an audience comes high expectations. Plenty of people’s first introduction to padel has already happened somewhere polished, a swanky new venue a friend invited them to, somewhere they visited after work, or photos they saw on Instagram. Because the standard has already been set so high, the bar for a new club is higher than people realise. Not an unreachable bar it must be said, reaching it is really just about getting the fundamentals of brand right, and getting the timing right too. If you’re reading this and your courts are already built, don’t worry, everything here still applies. It’s never too late, though the earlier in the project it’s considered, the better.
Worth saying clearly: we know a lot of new courts become part of a brand that already exists (as mentioned above) So this piece is really aimed at entirely new padel clubs starting from nothing, or a sports club introducing padel as its own sub-brand.
Important also to say that plenty many padel clubs have genuinely nailed their brand, and it shows. But for a lot of new sites, the brand still ends up being a bit of an afterthought. Court dimensions, suppliers, planning, lighting, surface type, membership pricing, all of that naturally dominates discussions, and rightly so. The brand, more often than not, gets squeezed into whatever time is left and with whatever budget is left once everything else is signed off, or in some cases only considered once the courts are already built (the thought of which gives me cold sweats in the night!)
For the clubs about to open in the next wave of this boom, it's worth nailing that brand early rather than retrospectively fixing later.
We spoke to an operator recently who'd built a genuinely excellent padel site, great location, top spec courts, everything done properly, no expense spared. But the branding had been squeezed in at the last minute, so they were always playing catch up with no real visual identity anywhere on site or online. It didn't reflect anywhere near the time, money and effort that had gone into the courts.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in a market growing this fast, your court is not your differentiator. Everyone’s courts look roughly the same, that’s just what padel courts look like. What actually makes someone choose your club over the one ten minutes away is everything around the court, how it feels, what it says about the people who go there, whether it looks like somewhere they belong, whether they can share a photo on Instagram. From the second someone walks in to the second they leave, that experience is your brand.
Three questions every new padel club should be able to answer before opening day:
Who is this actually for? Competitive players chasing rankings, or friends after a fun social hour? Corporates after work, or families at the weekend? Modern, vibrant, neon lights and DJs, or traditional and refined? There’s no wrong answer, but you need to know who you’re speaking to first, a club trying to appeal to everyone usually ends up appealing to no one distinctly.
What do people say about us when we’re not in the room? As Jeff Bezos famously put it, that’s your real brand, whether you’ve designed it or not. Padel is deeply intertwined with online life, so giving people a space worth photographing and sharing isn’t vanity, it’s a genuine part of building the brand.
Would a photo of our club, with the logo covered up, still be recognisably us? If the honest answer is no, you’re relying entirely on location and price to compete, a genuinely risky position in a market this crowded. This is where understanding your brand early in the process matters so much, the colours on the walls, the furniture, the shape of the bar, the colour of the courts, all of it should serve the same overall identity.
When we say brand, that doesn’t just mean a logo. A logo is but a small part of what makes up a brand’s identity. The look, the feel, the sense, the colours, the photography style, the fonts, the visual language, all of it together forms your brand. Applied consistently, that’s what gives you a recognisable identity, one that, when done well, becomes the bedrock for everything you believe in as a club and ultimately, propel you to success!!
Building a brand properly starts long before you dust off the pencils and begin sketching a logo. It starts with genuinely understanding the why, what’s led to this point, what the vision is, and what’s already out there to benchmark from. From there comes real audience segmentation, not just “padel players,” but the specific people you’re talking to and the specific people you want to be reaching. Only once that’s settled do you move into visual identity, colour, typography, photography style, the tone of everything you put out, built to match what you’ve just defined rather than picked because it looked nice in isolation. Get that order right, and the visual identity becomes an expression of something real, not a guess.
Who’s actually doing it well
Racketeer, London, an excellent example of brand experience carried through from the very entrance to every corner of the site. The colour palette is consistent, the brand is eye catching, and the experience mirrors the values of the business itself, creating a true destination rather than just a set of courts. Their signature burgundy identity runs through everything, courts, bar, even the changing rooms, and it’s no accident, the brand was built with real creative input rather than an afterthought.
Surge Padel, Bristol, one of the early leaders in the padel race. The Surge site is a genuine example of the energy in the brand being mirrored across every inch of the building. Worth noting too, Surge’s backers built their reputation in high end hospitality, and it shows, the same operational polish you’d expect from a luxury hotel has clearly been carried straight into how the venue looks and feels.
Padel Social Club, a slightly different kind of example. Rather than leading with luxury or atmosphere first, this one started with a clear brand position, “Play Original”, and let everything else follow from that single idea. The visual identity is understated rather than loud, drawing shapes and forms directly from the sport itself. It’s proof that standing out in a crowded market doesn’t always mean shouting the loudest, sometimes it’s about having the clearest point of view and sticking to it.
Padel is still young enough in the UK that most clubs haven’t figured this out yet. That’s actually good news if you’re paying attention now, the clubs who treat brand with the same seriousness as their court investment are the ones who’ll still be full on a Tuesday night in five years, once the initial boom naturally settles and people start choosing based on loyalty rather than novelty.
The courts get you noticed once. The brand is what gets people coming back, and telling their friends to come too. So if you’re considering building courts, or you’re still early in your padel venue’s journey, think brand. It’s as important as the courts themselves.