From Acapulco to America: A Short History of Padel

Padel is fifty-six years old. For the first decade, it was a single court in Mexico. For the next four, it was a Spanish national sport with strong Argentine roots and almost no presence anywhere else. Then it changed.

Padel is fifty-six years old. For the first decade of its existence, it was a single court in Mexico. For the next four decades, it was a Spanish national sport with strong Argentine roots and almost no presence anywhere else. In the last seven years, it has reached the United States, become global, and started accelerating in a way that suggests the previous fifty-six years were only the warm-up.

Here is the short version of how it got here.

1969 — Acapulco, Mexico

Enrique Corcuera was a Mexican businessman with a beach house in Acapulco and a problem with his back yard. He wanted a tennis court. The available space — bordered by a wall on one side and the house on the other — was too narrow for a regulation tennis court. Most people would have put in a swimming pool. Corcuera kept the dimensions, dropped a net through the middle, and decided that balls deflecting off the walls were still in play.

He called the result paddle. The first match was played between Corcuera and his wife's brother. They liked it. Within a few years, several of Corcuera's friends had built versions of the court at their own homes. The dimensions stuck — twenty meters by ten — because they were what Corcuera had had to work with.

1974 — Marbella, Spain

Alfonso de Hohenlohe was a Spanish prince and the founder of the Marbella Club, the resort that more than any other property defined Spanish high-society leisure in the 1960s and 1970s. He visited Corcuera in Mexico, played the new game, and did the obvious thing: he built two courts at the Marbella Club. The Spanish elite who summered there picked it up. By the late 1970s, padel had become a fashionable pastime among Spain's richest and most visible families.

This is the moment the sport stopped being a curiosity and started being a product. Marbella's courts became the seed for the Costa del Sol's broader padel network, which by the early 1980s had expanded to Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Seville.

1980s — Argentina enters

Julio Menditeguy, an Argentine industrialist who knew the Marbella set, brought padel to Argentina around 1980. Argentina took to it faster than Spain had. The reasons were practical — Argentina had the climate, the underused real estate, and a sports culture already comfortable with racquet games — but they were also cultural. Padel's social rhythm fit Argentine middle- and upper-middle-class life almost perfectly. Within a decade, Argentina had more padel courts than tennis courts. The sport became, briefly, the most-played sport in the country after football.

The two-country dynamic shaped everything that followed. Spain provided the institutional infrastructure — the federations, the gear brands, the early professional scene. Argentina provided the players. The men's pro tour, when it was finally organized, was almost entirely Argentine and Spanish. It still is.

1991 — The federation

The International Padel Federation was founded in Madrid in 1991, joining Spain, Argentina, and Uruguay as charter members. The first World Championship was held the same year. For most of the next two decades, it remained a sport with two centers of gravity, marginal everywhere else.

2005–2017 — The Pro Tour years

The World Padel Tour launched in 2013, replacing earlier and less consolidated professional circuits. Spanish television began broadcasting it. The economics of professional padel — small purses by tennis standards, but enough to support a top-twenty career — gave the sport its first real generation of full-time pros. Names like Fernando Belasteguín, Juan Martín Díaz, and Sandro Pérez became famous in Spain in a way they were not anywhere else.

2018 — The export begins

In 2018, the International Padel Federation counted padel courts in roughly fifteen countries. The growth had stalled. Most outside-Spain expansion was coming through expat communities — Spanish bankers in London, Argentine engineers in Miami — and the supporting infrastructure was minimal.

Two things changed almost simultaneously.

The first was social media. By 2019, World Padel Tour highlight reels were getting millions of views on Instagram, almost none of those views coming from Spain or Argentina. The clip that went furthest — Juan Lebrón hitting a between-the-legs winner off the back glass at the Madrid Master in 2019 — was, by some accounts, the moment the sport became visible to American audiences who had never seen it played.

The second was COVID-19. Outdoor sport, doubles, modest equipment requirements, social — padel was almost cynically designed for the conditions of 2020 and 2021. Court construction in non-traditional markets — Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, the United States — accelerated through the lockdown.

2022 — Premier Padel arrives

Premier Padel, a rival professional tour backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, launched in 2022. It paid more, broadcast more globally, and within two years had merged effectively with the World Padel Tour into a unified circuit. The financial gravity of the sport tripled.

This is the moment when American capital started taking the sport seriously. Reserve Padel's first U.S. location opened in 2023. Padel Haus opened the same year. Padel Nuestro announced its U.S. expansion in 2025.

Now — The American chapter

Fifty-six years after Corcuera's accidentally-shaped back yard produced the first padel court, the sport is in the early innings of its American chapter. It is not yet pickleball — but the curve is not unlike pickleball's curve in 2017. The next ten years will determine whether the United States becomes a third center of gravity, alongside Spain and Argentina, or whether it becomes the single largest market for a sport whose cultural center stays elsewhere.

Either way, the American chapter is not optional anymore. It is just being written.