Padel has gone from a single backyard court in Mexico to the second most popular sport in Spain in under fifty years.
It’s a short history, but an unlikely one.
Nobody had a name for the new sport yet, and nobody would have predicted that within fifty years it would run a professional world tour and start appearing in leisure clubs from Glasgow to Gothenburg.
This is the story of how padel went from that first court in Acapulco all the way to Glasgow today. Where it came from, how it took over Europe, and why we love it so much, we created our Glasgow padel club around it.
Where did padel originate? Acapulco, Mexico
Padel was born in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1969.
Enrique Corcuera, a Mexican businessman, had a plot next to his home that he wanted to turn into a tennis court.
The issue was space.
His garden was too small for a full tennis court and hemmed in by his neighbour’s wall on one side.
Rather than drop the idea, Corcuera built a court at his home that was smaller than a tennis court, put walls around it to stop the ball flying into the neighbours’.
He named the result paddle corcuera, after himself.
His solution was to allow the ball to bounce off the walls as part of the rally, borrowing a trick already used in platform tennis.
The scoring system followed familiar territory: 15, 30, 40, game, deuce, advantage.
Corcuera used a standard pressurised tennis ball and short wooden paddles, with wire fence sections above the side walls to stop stray balls escaping.
The game played well straight away.
Friends came over to play, word spread through Acapulco’s social circuit, and the new sport started showing up in other Mexican homes.
When people ask, where did padel originate? The answer is one garden in Acapulco, built by one man who just wanted somewhere to hit a ball with his wife and his visitors.
How padel reached Spain
The next chapter in padel history was written by Alfonso of Hohenlohe, a Spanish prince and close friend of Corcuera.
Hohenlohe visited Acapulco in 1974, played a few games at Corcuera’s home, and liked it enough to take the sport to his country.
He returned to Spain and built the country’s first two padel courts at his resort, the Marbella Club Hotel, on the Costa del Sol.
The first two padel courts in Europe were open for play by 1975.
Marbella in the 1970s was a holiday town for European aristocracy and Spanish high society, so the sport spread through exactly the right social network for padel in Europe to take root fast.
Famous padel players who spread the word
One of the earliest and most influential adopters was Manuel Santana, the Spanish tennis champion who won Wimbledon in 1966.
Santana discovered padel in Marbella.
He instantly became obsessed and started organising informal tournaments at his own tennis club in Marbella.
His involvement pulled in other tennis players, coaches, and club owners, and padel in Marbella turned from curiosity into an established local sport within a few years.
The other figure worth naming is Julio Menditenguía. He was an Argentinian friend of Hohenlohe who watched a game at Marbella and took the idea home.
He built padel courts in Argentina in the 1970s and seeded a sporting explosion across the country.
Padel in Argentina
Argentina took to padel with more enthusiasm than Spain for a while.
Padel clubs appeared in Buenos Aires, then smaller cities, then almost every suburban neighbourhood in the country.
By the mid-1980s, Argentina had more padel courts than anywhere else in the world.
The game was cheaper to build than tennis, the sport that combines elements of tennis and squash made sense to Argentinian tennis culture, and the social side suited a country that already valued communal sport.
The country produced the first generation of serious padel players.
Spain and Argentina dominated the early professional tournaments together.
The Argentinian player Fernando Belasteguín later went on to hold the world number one ranking for sixteen straight years! Running from 2002 all the way to 2018.
To this day, a large share of the top-ranked padel players on any professional world tour are still Argentinian or Spanish.
From paddle to padel
The sport was still called paddle through most of the 1980s.
The Sports Council of Spain recognised paddle as a sport in 1983, which unlocked public funding and gave the sport a legal framework.
The Council of Spain recognised paddle as a sport under the Spanish spelling, but the pronunciation in Spanish (“pa-del”) didn’t match how English speakers read “paddle”.
In the late 1980s, the sport changed it name to padel for pronunciation purpose, matching the Spanish language spelling used in Madrid and Marbella rather than the English version.
That’s why you’ll still see older UK publications call it “padel tennis” or even “paddle”, and why padel or paddle is an ongoing source of spelling confusion.
The International Padel Federation (FIP) was founded in Madrid in 1991, pulling together the national federations of Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and several other countries.
The federation’s first job was standardising the rules, court dimensions, and racket specifications so that professional tournaments could be played exactly the same across borders.
The World Paddle Championships
The first world championships were held in Madrid in 1992.
It brought together teams from Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, France, and the United States.
Argentina won the men’s title. Spain won the women’s.
Events held across the world followed quickly.
Mendoza in 1994, Madrid in 1996. And in recent years, Qatar and Dubai have taken the reins as hosts
Premier Padel and sponsorship opportunities
Professional padel started to take shape in the 2000s.
The Padel Pro Tour launched in Spain in 2005, offering enough prize money for the top players to compete full-time.
It was renamed the World Padel Tour in 2013 and expanded beyond Spain into Portugal, Argentina, Sweden, and Italy, running the elite circuit through to 2023.
In 2022, a new tour called Premier Padel launched, backed by Qatar Sports Investments and the International Padel Federation. The two eventually merged, and Premier Padel now runs the global professional game.
Television coverage, sponsorship from brands like Estrella Damm, and an influx of high-profile tennis players crossing over have helped make padel one of the fastest-growing professional racket sports in the world.
How padel sport came to the UK
For a long time, padel in Britain stayed niche.
A handful of courts at private clubs, mostly in London, mainly used by people who had picked the game up abroad.
That began to change in the late 2010s when the LTA took over as the sport’s governing body.
But the real acceleration came after the pandemic.
People were looking for new ways to be active and social.
Padel is easy to learn, quick to play, and built around doubles. It fitted the moment perfectly. And its growth hasn’t slowed down since then.
Padel history at The Court Glasgow
Glasgow’s padel story is a small chapter in the full history of padel, but it’s our chapter.
We opened as the city’s first dedicated padel and pickleball club in 2024, with four indoor panoramic padel courts with glass back walls, built specifically for padel to FIP specifications.
We run coaching, social sessions, club nights, and league play, and we’re slowly building a community of Scottish padel players that didn’t exist five years ago.
If you want to see where padel history is heading next in Scotland, book a padel session and try the sport yourself.
Our coaches will walk you through the basics, explain the scoring, and have you rallying within your first hour on court!
Come and see what the hype is about for yourself. Your first session is just a book away.
