Most sports are designed. Padel was improvised. It began not in a stadium or a federation boardroom but in a tight corner of a holiday home, where a wall that should have been a problem turned into the whole point of the game. More than fifty years later, that happy accident is one of the fastest growing sports in the world.
A garden in Acapulco, 1969
The story starts with Enrique Corcuera, a wealthy Mexican, at his home in the Las Brisas district of Acapulco. Corcuera wanted somewhere to play, but he did not have room for a full tennis court. So he worked with what he had: a modest rectangle of roughly 20 metres by 10, hemmed in by walls about 3 metres high, with a net strung across the middle.
Those walls changed everything. Rather than treat them as out of bounds, Corcuera let the ball rebound off them and stay in play, borrowing an idea familiar from squash and other walled games. The result was a sport that rewarded patience, angles and clever positioning over raw power. His wife, Viviana, an Argentine former beauty queen, is credited with helping shape the first set of rules. The game did not yet have a name in any formal sense, but the blueprint was set.
The Marbella connection
Padel might have stayed a private curiosity were it not for a well-connected guest. Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe, the Spanish aristocrat behind the glamorous Marbella Club, visited Corcuera in Acapulco in the early 1970s and was captivated. He took the idea home to the Costa del Sol and, in 1974, built the first courts in Europe at the Marbella Club.
This was the perfect launch pad. Marbella in the 1970s was a magnet for European high society, and padel spread quickly through that influential crowd. It carried a whiff of the exclusive from the very start, a social, doubles-friendly game played among friends rather than rivals.
Crossing the Atlantic to Argentina
The other great early adopter was Argentina, and again a single person made the difference. Julio Menditeguy, an Argentine connected to Alfonso's circle in Marbella, brought the game back across the Atlantic in the mid 1970s. It landed on extraordinarily fertile ground.
Argentina embraced padel like nowhere else. Courts went up in clubs across the country, the sport reached into towns and neighbourhoods rather than staying with the elite, and it quickly became part of everyday sporting life. To this day Argentina remains one of the sport's true heartlands, producing many of its greatest players.
Rules, federations and a world championship
With two powerhouse nations playing, padel needed structure. Argentina founded the world's first national association, the Asociacion Argentina de Padel, in 1988. Three years later, on 12 July 1991, the International Padel Federation (FIP) was founded in Madrid by the Argentine, Spanish and Uruguayan associations.
The first World Padel Championships followed in 1992, held in Spain. A further milestone came in 1997, when Spain and Argentina agreed in Barcelona to unify the rules and settle on a single spelling: padel, not the "paddle" that had been common in Argentina. By the close of the 1990s, around eleven national federations existed across Europe and the Americas.
The Spanish boom and the global explosion
Spain is where padel truly caught fire. Through the 2000s and 2010s it grew from a club pastime into something close to a national obsession, with thousands of courts, a packed professional tour and a deep amateur base. For many Spaniards, padel sits comfortably alongside football as a default way to spend an evening.
In the last decade that momentum has gone worldwide. Padel has surged across Italy, Sweden, the Middle East and, more recently, the United Kingdom, with new courts appearing faster than almost any other racket sport. The reasons are familiar to anyone who plays: it is easy to pick up, intensely social, and forgiving for beginners while still rewarding skill at the top.
From one man's walled garden in Acapulco to courts on every continent, padel's rise has been anything but planned. That, perhaps, is the most fitting thing about it.
