Britain’s booming number of padel players can grow tenfold because the country has the “perfect ingredients”, says the founder of Rocket Padel as the operator prepares to open a new club in Beckton, east London.
The new site, due to open in April, will be the Scandinavian brand’s seventh club worldwide and its fourth in England as demand to play the racket sport shows no sign of slowing.
Its Ilford branch is so popular it was fully booked on Christmas Day, while the number of players nationwide has mushroomed from 6,000 in 2019 to 129,000 at the last count.
“I think you can definitely see between five and 10x from now,” Rocket Padel founder Sebastian Gordon told City AM.
“It’s going to take some time, but we’ll get there. The UK has the perfect ingredients, with their racket heritage from tennis, squash and badminton, and a big and a mix of people.
“To some extent, we might not ever reach over saturation in London, especially on premium indoor [facilities]. London is a high population density city, so there’s a lot of growth to be made, but we are really focusing on where to do that growth and how to help build the sport.
“We’re taking it step by step. There’s no hurry. I think that the growth happening in the UK now is quite sound, especially in London.”
Beckton, on the site of a former community gymnastics centre, will be Rocket Padel’s most complete club yet and close to both City Airport and the University of East London.
Its five indoor and three outdoor courts will be complemented by a spa, featuring sauna, jacuzzi and cold plunge pool, cafe and co-working office space.
Rocket Padel Croydon set to follow Beckton
It joins a portfolio that includes a site at Battersea Power Station, Ilford and Bristol, in addition to the company’s three clubs in Denmark. A fifth UK club in Croydon is in the pipeline.
The new venues are part of a wave of high-end openings by the likes of Padel Social Club, which has sites in Earls Court and at the O2, and Padium in Canary Wharf.
“We’re looking mainly to cover most of London within the next two years,” Gordon added.
Rocket Padel’s expansion has seen its turnover grow 250 per cent year-on-year, while it also has designs on a flagship site on the Costa del Sol, a hotspot for the sport.
Spain remains Europe’s padel heartland, but the UK is on track to match Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy for players per capita.
The government’s pledge to remove red tape around planning and construction, meanwhile, has encouraged Rocket Padel that it can build more purpose-built clubs from scratch.
“Within one to three years we will focus a lot on greenfield projects, building our own clubs like we’ve done in Denmark,” said Gordon.
“That would be the next step in our development because we can create clubs that are space efficient, energy efficient, fully indoor, but we can build the amenities and the needs exactly according to our concept.”