What is Padel?
Padel is a doubles game ONLY, in which the objective is to force to opponent into a mistake with them not being able to return the ball before it bounces twice.
Padel is is played on an enclosed court about a third of the size of a tennis court.
The rules are the same as tennis, played with similar balls, although serving is under-hand and the walls are used as part of the game.
Serving is under arm as well, the serve is just to start the point off, not really to try and win the point from it.
As long as the ball bounces on the other side of the net in the court, it is good.
One crazy thing about padel is that you can also play the ball from outside the court back in to the court. It is worth checking some videos out of this.
Crazy shots from outside the court.
What is paddle?
This sport is different to padel in many ways.
Paddle is a game adapted from tennis, it can be played singles and doubles, more frequently in doubles, with a small court and a smaller target space for the ball to bounce first.
Similar to padel, the objective is to force to opponent into a mistake with them not being able to return the ball that they hit to before it bounces twice.
A smaller target area, from the image on the left the ball has to bounce first in the target blue area.
Without a doubt, padel is MORE popular than paddle. With over 20 milion players worldwide compared to paddle’s measly 25,000.
There are also 10’s of thousands of padel courts worldwide, however only hundreds of paddle courts.
But why?
Padel is more social, and the use of the whole court and the walls makes it more fun than paddle. Due to the high amount of players, the tournaments in Spain are very entertaining, with incredible players doing outrageous shots.
Padel is also the worlds fastest growing sport.
Paddle has grown, but not at the rate of padel, it has mostly grown locally, in America. Padel exploded.
Paddle, was rebranded as pop tennis in 2015, to help it grow and stop the confusion…
In terms of popularity between padel vs paddle, padel is the winner.
In 2020, over 900,000 padel rackets were sold, compared to 15,000 paddle rackets.
I get about 10-15 messages a day from people asking me for advice on what padel racket to choose, I have noticed this increase every month, so the growth is crazy for the sport of padel!
This links in with popularity, and padel once again winning the padel vs paddle battle, padel is played worldwide across 5 continents.
Paddle tennis however, is only mostly played across America, in Florida and New York.
Padel is mostly played in Spain, with nearly 25% of all worldwide players coming from there. It is also largely popular in South America, it has not taken off in the UK as of yet.
Some more stats about padel vs paddle below!
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