The Padel Crash That's Coming
A Baltic club asked me for two coaches. Urgently. Good money.
On paper, good news.
Before moving our people, I studied their market. We always do.
I didn't find a growing market. I found one already eating itself.
Eleven venues inside a twenty-minute drive
What stopped me wasn't any single club. It was the map.
Klaipėda is Lithuania's third city — a Baltic port of roughly 161,000 people, perhaps 250,000 counting the commuter belt and the coastal strip. Padel arrived barely five years ago. By every measure this should still be an emerging market: early adopters, thin coaching depth, most of the population never having held a racket.
Instead, packed into a radius you can drive across in twenty minutes, sit around a dozen padel venues and roughly 55 courts. Two operators alone hold 22 of them.
Sit with what that means on a wet Tuesday in February.
Every one of those businesses is competing for the attention of the same limited pool of players. Not for new players — nothing in that city is manufacturing players at the rate the courts were built. For the existing ones. A few thousand people, fought over by a dozen operators, each carrying fixed costs, heating bills and, in several cases, debt.
That fight has a name in every other industry. And it is already visible.
The numbers behind the map
City Courts (approx.) Population (approx.) People per court Klaipėda ~50 161,000 ~3,200 Vilnius (capital) ~74 600,000 ~8,100 Kaunas ~26 300,000 ~11,500
Source: national Lithuanian court directory, same counting criteria applied to all three cities.
Klaipėda carries two and a half to three and a half times the court density per capita of its country's two largest cities. With 5.5% of Lithuania's population, it holds close to 30% of the national court stock.
Three signals confirm the war is already on:
Dismantled courts for sale. The national classifieds portal carries lots of stripped-out, warehoused courts listed from Klaipėda. Nobody dismantles a facility that's making money.
Loss-making operators still building. One local company posted over €420,000 in revenue last financial year and closed €186,000 down. Its plan: add two or three more courts, because "the region still lacks these services."
Players ranking clubs by price. Reviews compare venues by rate — this one "the most expensive in the city", that one "the cheapest". When customers sort your market by price rather than product, commoditisation has already happened.
And while all this happens, the local press still runs headlines saying the region needs more courts.
This isn't a Lithuanian anomaly
We've seen this before, with names, dates and invoices attached.
Between 2019 and 2022 Sweden went from a few hundred courts to more than 4,200 in thirty-six months. Uppsala alone went from 14 to nearly 100 in a single year.
By the end of 2024: over a hundred facilities closed or repurposed, around ninety padel companies filing for insolvency, and the country's largest operator shutting 50 of its 63 clubs. Buildings converted into warehouses and discount supermarkets. Industry estimates put the capital destroyed at close to €500 million.
And here is the line that changes everything:
Demand didn't collapse. Supply did.
In early 2024, more than 600,000 Swedes were still playing padel — a per-capita participation rate higher than any European country except Spain. People didn't stop playing. Clubs stopped being viable.
A participation boom had been mistaken for a real-estate thesis. Cheap industrial floorspace, glass and nets, debt financing, and an assumption that a pandemic-era spike was structural. When electricity in southern Sweden ran at nearly five times pre-2020 levels, lighting and heating enormous sheds at falling occupancy stopped making arithmetic sense.
The parallel with Klaipėda is uncomfortably exact. And Lithuania isn't the only market on the list: the UK is projected to move from roughly 1,000 courts in mid-2025 to 1,300–1,400 by the end of 2026, backed by capital with a very similar profile to the money that evaporated in Scandinavia.
The mistake repeats because putting up courts is easy and running a club is hard — and the market rewards the second, not the first.
Five numbers to run before you sign
Real catchment density. Total courts within a 20-minute drive, divided by population. Below 5,000 people per court in a young market, your project needs a very strong justification.
Break-even occupancy, not optimistic occupancy. What share of hours must you sell to cover costs — and what actually sells across the 40 weekly hours that aren't prime time?
Energy cost per court per month, worst case. Not current case. That's where Sweden broke.
Share of revenue that isn't court rental. Academy, coaching, competition, events, retail. Under 30–35% and you don't own a club — you own a property rental with a net in it.
Who manufactures new players in your market? If the answer is "the other clubs", you're competing for a pie you aren't helping to grow.
What survived
Not everything died in Sweden. The operator that closed 50 clubs kept 13. The difference wasn't location, court count, or the quality of the glass.
The survivors stopped selling bookings and started building community: coaching programmes, junior academies, internal leagues, competition, social events. Places where a player belonged to something rather than occupying a 90-minute slot.
Empty sheds with glass and nets failed. Clubs with an academy survived.
A court is a depreciating asset. An academy is a compounding one. Anyone with financing can copy the court. The methodology, the trained coaches, the player progression, the community that comes back every Tuesday — that isn't available in a catalogue.
Our advice, unvarnished
Don't get carried along by the enthusiasm of the trend. Padel being fun and everyone talking about it is not a business plan — it is precisely the psychological condition that produced the Swedish collapse.
Run the numbers. Run them again on the bad scenario. Take advice from people who have directed clubs, not only from people who sell courts. And build the academy from day one, not once occupancy starts sliding.
The padel wave will keep rolling. What won't keep rolling is the impunity of operating badly inside it.
Beyond Padel directs and advises padel clubs across Spain, the Middle East and Europe. We work in four phases — viability, pre-opening, operations and digital layer — and the first conversation is always the same one: the numbers before the bricks. If you're weighing up a project, let's talk before you sign.