A Complete History of Padel: The Story Behind One of the World’s Fastest-Growing Sports
In 1969, a Mexican businessman built walls around his garden because tennis balls kept landing in his neighbour's property. He didn't know he was inventing a sport. Fifty-five years later, twenty-five million people play it.
A Complete History of Padel tells the full story of how a garden game in Acapulco became the fastest-growing sport on the planet. It's a story that moves through the jet-set playgrounds of 1970s Marbella, the fiercely competitive clubs of Buenos Aires, the Spanish construction boom that built thousands of courts in a decade, and the global explosion that has seen padel take root everywhere from Stockholm to Dubai.
The cast includes a German prince who turned a Spanish fishing village into the most fashionable resort in Europe, a former beauty queen who wrote the sport's first rules as a birthday gift, a player who held the world number one ranking for sixteen consecutive years, and the investors whose money reshaped professional padel from the inside out. There are tour wars, speculative bubbles, Olympic politics, and a social media revolution that compressed decades of growth into a few extraordinary years.
No coaching diagrams. No jargon. Just the remarkable, untold story behind the sport that has millions of people hooked.
