Miami wasn’t the city where padel was invented, but it’s the entry point of the sport in American soil. Courts are starting to pop up in warehouses, parks, and old parking lots, thanks to the Spanish and Latin American inhabitants in the area.
Miami, padel U.S. launchpad
Padel mechanics help to make the sport more popular than similar racket games like tennis: the court is smaller, rallies are more lively, as the walls stay in play, and doubles is the default match, so newcomers get pulled into a group quickly and add social experience. Furthermore, Miami adds the missing ingredients: density, disposable income, and an audience familiar with the sport, coming from Spain and Latin America, where it was already popular. The cultural alignment matters in this case. In Miami, players commonly slip into Spanglish between points, and clubs sell the experience as much as the scoreline: coffee bars, lounges, music, and photo-ready backdrops.
The city’s headline venues made padel feel “bigger” than a niche racket pastime. Reserve, Wayne Boich’s luxury brand, opened a highly visible site at the Miami Seaplane Base, and the club’s own description emphasizes viewing areas and a lifestyle-first setup around its courts.
Then came the showpiece events. The Reserve Cup debuted in Miami in 2024 with NBA star Jimmy Butler tied to the project, giving the sport a pop-culture bridge for Americans who had never watched a Premier Padel match. Forbes’ coverage of Butler around that inaugural tournament signaled what Miami understands instinctively: if you want a sport to travel, you package it as entertainment, and not just recreation.
Miami’s boom is also happening at the institutional level. The USTA National Campus in Orlando lists four padel courts on-site, placing the game in the same ecosystem as tennis development and coaching education. And the national Padel Association, in its 2024 annual report, shows how quickly the organized scene is forming. Individual membership rose from 163 in 2020 to 1.917 in 2024, while it cites an estimated 100.000 U.S. players.
The boom spreads nationwide
Once Miami proved padel could be both a business and a vibe, the “effect call” kicked in. A data-driven snapshot put the U.S. at 688 courts across 31 states by Q2 2025, with the player base surpassing 112.000 and more than half of all courts installed since January 2024. In Sports Business Journal’s reporting, the takeaway is blunt: demand is growing faster than supply, and that scarcity is fueling investment and expansion plans. It’s also changing how people buy equipment, as new players want to gear up fast, so many prefer to buy padel rackets in Racketfits and other online stores instead of relying on limited pro-shop stock.
Money is now chasing infrastructure. Sports Business Journal reported that Pro Padel League raised $10 million to scale up events and operations, a sign that investors are treating padel less like a quirky add-on and more like an ecosystem with franchises, sponsorships, and media potential. The same outlet also notes that, unlike pickleball, padel tends to skew more upscale, so growth may look slower in raw participation, but richer in per-player revenue.
Real estate developers are absorbing the lesson that Miami taught first: courts can sell a lifestyle. Axios reported that Ultra Padel planned a Midtown Miami project with 11 outdoor courts, kids’ courts, dining, and community programming, tied to a broader neighborhood development. Even when other cities don’t go that big, the model travels: convert underused industrial space, add hospitality touches, and build leagues and clinics so court time becomes a habit.
That habit-forming loop is what turns a local craze into national adoption. Miami’s clubs may be the flashiest billboard, but the sport’s next growth phase depends on making padel easier to try in ordinary places: public parks, suburban racquet centers, colleges, and multi-sport facilities. Globally, Playtomic and PwC project that the number of padel courts will keep climbing through 2026, and the U.S. is positioning itself to catch that wave. If the country’s padel map keeps filling in, it will be because Miami demonstrated the blueprint: make it social, make it watchable, and make the court feel like a place you want to return to tomorrow.