When Was Padel Invented? The Story of a Sport Britain Fell For

Walk past a leisure centre or a converted warehouse in almost any British town this year and there is a fair chance you will hear it: the pop of a ball off glass, a shout of “mine”, the scuff of quick feet on artificial turf. Padel has arrived, and it has arrived fast. Yet for all the new courts and the growing waiting lists, most people picking up a racket for the first time have no idea where the game actually came from. The answer is a lovely one, and it starts not on a tennis tour or in a sports lab, but in a garden in Mexico.

When was padel invented?

Padel was invented in 1969. That is the date most historians and the sport's own governing body settle on, and it points to one man and one place: Enrique Corcuera, a Mexican businessman, at his holiday home in the Las Brisas district of Acapulco. Corcuera loved tennis but did not have the space for a full court on his property. Rather than give up on the idea, he built something smaller and boxed it in, and in doing so he accidentally designed a completely new game. This is no fitness-trend invention of the 2020s: it is a sport with more than fifty years behind it, one that spent decades booming abroad before Britain caught on.

Who invented padel, and why the walls?

Enrique Corcuera is the name to remember. The detail that makes his story stick is the reason for the walls. His plot was hemmed in by his neighbour's garden and by the surrounding vegetation, so to stop the ball constantly disappearing next door he ringed the court with walls, some of them a few metres high. What began as a practical fix turned out to be the heart of the game. Those walls meant the ball stayed in play after it bounced off them, and suddenly rallies could go on far longer than in tennis, with players learning to read angles and rebounds rather than just chasing winners.

Family lore adds a nice touch: Corcuera's wife, Viviana, is credited with helping shape the earliest rules for the court, which he called Paddle Corcuera. From that single walled-in court, everything else followed. If you want to understand why a modern padel racket is a solid, stringless bat and why the tactics feel so different from tennis, it traces straight back to that enclosed garden. Our ultimate padel racket buying guide goes into how that equipment evolved, but the short version is that the walls came first, and the gear grew up around them.

Where did padel originate, and how did it spread?

Padel originated in Mexico, but it did not stay there for long. The next chapter belongs to Spain. A Spanish aristocrat, Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe, visited Corcuera, played on the court, and loved it so much that he built the first courts in Europe at the Marbella Club on the Costa del Sol in the mid 1970s. Marbella was a magnet for the wealthy and the well connected, and padel spread through that social scene quickly. The Spanish tennis great Manolo Santana was among its early champions, which gave the young sport real sporting credibility.

At almost the same time, an Argentine businessman named Julio Menditeguy came across padel in Marbella and carried it back to Argentina. There it exploded. Argentina embraced padel with a passion that Spain would come to share, and between the two countries the sport found its spiritual homes. To this day Spain has more than 20,000 courts and roughly six million players, making padel its second most popular sport after football, while Argentina counts its licensed players in the millions. If you have ever wondered where the best players and coaches tend to come from, this is the reason.

From a private garden to a global tour

For a game dreamed up on holiday, padel became organised remarkably quickly. Argentina formed the world's first national federation in 1988, and on 12 July 1991 the International Padel Federation was founded in Madrid, bringing the Spanish, Argentine and Uruguayan associations together. The first World Championships followed in 1992, split between Madrid and Seville. Around the same time, the invention of transportable glass courts freed padel from needing permanent walls, which is a large part of why it can now pop up inside a shopping centre or on a rooftop.

The professional game grew from there. A Padel Pro Tour launched in 2005 and became the World Padel Tour, and in 2022 Premier Padel arrived as a new global circuit backed by the sport's federation. Today padel is played in more than 150 countries by an estimated 35 million people. Not bad for a sport that started because one man did not have room for a tennis court.

How padel reached Britain

Britain came late to the party, and then made up for lost time. A small British Padel Association was formed back in 1992 by expatriates who had discovered the game abroad, but for years padel remained a curiosity here. The real turning point came when the Lawn Tennis Association took padel under its wing at the end of the 2010s, and the numbers since then are genuinely startling.

At the end of 2019 there were roughly 15,000 padel players in Britain. By the end of 2023 that had reached 129,000, by the end of 2024 it had passed 400,000, and by the end of 2025 around 860,000 adults and juniors had played at least once in the previous year. Court numbers have climbed to well over a thousand, spread across hundreds of venues, with more opening constantly. Awareness of the sport now reaches well over half the population. It is little wonder padel is so often called the fastest growing sport in the country, a story we cover in more depth on our guide to the world's fastest growing sport.

Why the origin story still matters on court

Knowing when and where padel was invented is not just pub-quiz trivia; it explains the game you play. The walls that Corcuera built to keep the ball in his garden are exactly what makes padel so friendly to newcomers today: rallies last longer, mishits stay alive off the glass, and you do not need the raw power or years of practice that tennis demands to enjoy yourself from your very first session. The sport was born from improvisation and a bit of fun, and more than fifty years later that is still how it feels.

If the history has left you itching to try it, getting started has never been cheaper, with off-peak courts often costing only a few pounds a person. All you really need is a partner, a pair of trainers and a racket you can grow into. Corcuera would probably be amazed at how far his walled-in experiment has travelled; the rest of us just get to enjoy it.

New to the game and not sure what to pick up first? Have a browse of our beginner padel rackets to find a forgiving racket for those early sessions.