Padel 101: the enclosed court, explained

Padel is what happens when tennis gets shorter, closer, and harder to leave. It was invented in 1968 in Acapulco, Mexico, when Enrique Corcuera modified his squash court and built something new: a small enclosed court where the walls are not out of bounds but part of the game. Nearly sixty years later it has crossed the Atlantic and settled deep into European life, from Madrid suburbs to Antwerp industrial parks.

If you have held a tennis racquet, most of padel will feel familiar. The scoring is the same: 15, 30, 40, game, best of three sets. The net is in the same place. The rest is different in ways that matter.

The court

A padel court measures 20 metres long by 10 metres wide. It is fully enclosed. The back walls stand 4 metres high: solid for the first 3 metres, usually glass, with a metre of metal mesh above. The side walls step down from 3 metres to 2 metres of solid material, topped with mesh. The net runs 88 centimetres high at the centre, rising to a maximum of 92 at the posts.

That glass is not decoration. It is the single design decision the whole sport hangs on.

Why the walls change everything

In tennis, a ball past you is a lost point. In padel, it is often just the beginning. The ball must bounce on the ground first, but after that it can hit the back glass or the cage and stay live. A shot that would be a clean winner on a tennis court comes off the glass at readable pace, and you get a second chance at it. You can even play the ball off your own back wall to send it over the net.

Two things follow from this. First, points last longer. The court forgives you, so rallies build instead of ending. Second, power matters less than placement. A hard flat drive feeds your opponent a comfortable rebound. A soft ball that dies near the glass does not. Padel rewards the patient player over the strong one, which is why a fit twenty-five-year-old can lose comfortably to a pair of calculating fifty-year-olds, and usually does.

The serve reinforces the same logic. It is underarm: you bounce the ball, strike it below waist height, and send it diagonally into the opposite service box. Nobody wins a padel point on serve speed. The game starts polite and gets tactical.

A game built for four

Padel is played as doubles, two versus two, and the standard court exists only in that format. This is not a limitation, it is the point. Ten by twenty metres with four people means you are never more than a few steps from the ball and never more than a few metres from your partner. You talk constantly: who takes the middle, who covers the lob, whose glass that was. Tennis can be solitary even in doubles. Padel structurally cannot. It is the rare sport where the social part is not what happens after, it is the mechanism itself.

The numbers

The growth is not a feeling, it is documented. The International Padel Federation's World Padel Report 2025 counts over 35 million active players worldwide and 77,300 courts across 150 nations, with 14,355 of those courts built in 2025 alone. Courts grew 15.2 percent in a year, clubs 16.1 percent, and registered federation members 42 percent. Within Europe, the momentum has moved north and west: Great Britain, France, and Germany recorded around 130 percent growth in 2024, while the mature markets of Spain and Italy settle into a steadier phase.

Your first session

Expect to rally within ten minutes. The racquet is solid, stringless, a perforated composite face over a foam core, shorter than a tennis racquet and easier to time. The ball looks like a tennis ball but is slightly smaller and holds less pressure, so it sits up and waits for you. The underarm serve removes the hardest skill in racquet sports before you start.

You will misjudge the glass. Everyone does. The ball comes off the back wall and you swing a beat early, or you turn to chase a lob that the wall was always going to return to you. Somewhere in the second game, it clicks: stop running, let the glass do the work. That moment, when the court shifts from obstacle to ally, is the hook. It is why first-timers book a second court before they have showered.

Bring flat-soled trainers, a willingness to lob, and one friend. The court will find you the other two.