Racquet Sports Institute

23/06/2026

New from RacqI — Racquet Sports Intelligence - : Are racquet sports missing the Olympic Day participation engine? The analysis looks at why badminton is included in IOC 'Let's Move' activations while padel and pickleball remain outside — and what that means for operators, investors and federations. Read the 9-minute breakdown and implications for growth. https://wix.to/9eEVOiW

26/05/2026

25.7 million Americans play tennis, and 28.6% of them — the regular and avid players — form the highest engaged share of any racquet sport (Tennis Industry Association, 2026).
In the final piece of our six-part racquet sports series, we look at tennis as the largest and most real-estate-intensive of the five sports: why its 670 m² court footprint forces a renovation race, how Germany, the UK, and the US are each solving it differently, and what tennis can learn from padel, pickleball, squash, and badminton.
Read the full analysis: https://www.racquetsports.institute/post/tennis-the-real-estate-giant

22/05/2026

220 million players worldwide — the largest player base of any racquet sport, and the smallest commercial footprint.
Badminton is the cleanest proof of the idea running through this whole series: the sport is never the variable, the facility is. The same shuttle and the same court produced five completely different outcomes.
Asia built genuine mass participation through public halls and schools. France engineered a durable club base over three decades. The UK runs a wide but casual game through public halls. The US and Australia never built a base at all.
And Germany shows what happens when a racquet sport is run as a commercial product: tennis halls were converted into badminton centres, the sport boomed in the 1990s, then collapsed as the real estate turned — the exact fate German squash met in the same decades, often in the same buildings.
Two different sports, one facility model, one outcome.
Article 5 of 6 in our racquet sports facility-type series.
Read the full analysis: https://www.racquetsports.institute/post/badminton-five-outcomes

19/05/2026

Same court. Four outcomes.
Squash demonstrates more clearly than any racquet sport how facility-type architecture — not the sport itself — drives competitive outcomes. Egypt to global dominance; the US to a college pipeline; Europe and Australia/NZ both eroding on Type 1 commercial models — Australia from 1,300 courts to 580 in twenty years.
With Brisbane 2032 in the balance, the strategic case for squash is the one the World Squash Federation is conspicuously not making.
https://www.racquetsports.institute/post/squash-three-trajectories

15/05/2026

Same paddle, same court — three radically different business stories.
United States: 24.3 million players. 82,613 courts. The strategic problem: how does an indoor-premium operator at $120 to $150 monthly compete with a free public court three miles away?
Asia: 812 million people have tried pickleball. 282 million play monthly. The constraint is supply, not demand.
Europe: a $637 million market dominated by tennis-club conversions. Type 1 commercial essentially unborn.
Article 3 of 6 in our racquet sports facility-type series.
Full article — link in bio.
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15/05/2026

39 new pickleball courts every day.
That is the pace at which the United States added pickleball infrastructure in 2025 — 14,155 new courts in a single year, bringing the national inventory to 82,613.
This is the public-sector wave that every U.S. commercial pickleball operator must differentiate against. A free outdoor court three miles away will always be there.
The question is what indoor-premium operators like Picklr can deliver that the public court structurally cannot — guaranteed climate, structured programming, coaching pathways, community, hospitality.
Outside the United States, the story changes completely. Asia has 812 million people who have tried pickleball and 282 million who play monthly, against perhaps 5,000 to 8,000 dedicated courts in the entire region. Europe has a $637 million market dominated by tennis-club conversions, with no Type 1 commercial chain yet at scale.
Same paddle, same court, three radically different business stories.
Article 3 of 6 in our racquet sports facility-type series.
Read the full analysis:

Pickleball is the racquet sport where public-private tension is most visible globally. The US has built 82,613 mostly public courts colliding with a Picklr-style indoor commercial wave. Asia counts 812 million who have tried the sport against just 5,000–8,000 courts — the rare supply-constrained...

12/05/2026

Padel is the same sport everywhere. 20×10 metres, four players, glass walls.

The business is not the same. 🌍

Spain: 17,300 courts — mature, slowing.
Italy: 10,000+ — consolidating.
Sweden: 4,200 courts → €500M crash, 120 bankruptcies.
UK: from 15,000 players in 2019 to 860,000 in 2025.
USA, MENA, India, Indonesia: early-stage, accelerating.

Same court. Same demographic. Five radically different business logics.

One pattern that runs through every market: the headline player-per-court figures the industry quotes overstate real operational demand by a factor of three to five.

Article 2 of our six-part series mapping the global racquet sports investment landscape.

Read the full analysis 👉 https://www.racquetsports.institute/post/padel-a-hospitality-product-tested-in-three-geographies

10/05/2026

Brisbane 2032 is facing a shrink plan from the IOC — and squash could be pushed off the Olympic program again. This post breaks down why squash’s global growth, urban-sport fit and health benefits make it a strong case — and why the campaign to save it is falling short. Read the full analysis: https://wix.to/MMFnaGC

07/05/2026

Racquet sports are booming — but facilities are failing. Discover why most investors misread the market and how to build a resilient courts business that treats facilities as both leisure operations and real-estate assets. Read the full breakdown: https://wix.to/IehWrxF

Key takeaways: five sports, five tribes, 100–150 players per court reality, and the minimum scale you need to survive.

Racquet sports are booming — 35M padel players, 220M badminton, 106M tennis — yet the decade has delivered the worst wave of facility failures in 40 years: 120 padel bankruptcies in Sweden, 27% squash decline in England, vanishing Munich courts. The reason: every facility is two businesses at on...

09/04/2026

Most racquet-sports decisions — investments, facility builds, market entry — are still made on gut feeling. That’s risky as markets mature. Our latest blog explores why fragmented data and missing KPIs leave leaders flying blind, and what a structured knowledge infrastructure could change. Read more: https://wix.to/ffQUS9X

The racquet sports sector is making consequential decisions — facility builds, investments, market entry — on fragmented information and personal intuition. No standardized benchmarks, no comparable facility data, no structured KPIs exist. Sport-by-sport fragmentation and rapid growth have maske...