Padel is booming, especially in North Rhine-Westphalia. This is a blessing for tennis clubs. In the commercial sector, however, tennis has to take a back seat.
Sometimes you have to take things into your own hands – like Alex Kautz. The Cologne native has been a passionate tennis player for 42 years. However, Achilles tendon problems are increasingly limiting him on the big tennis court. But Kautz has found an alternative: padel. “I played padel for the first time in Mallorca twelve years ago. I picked up the racket and immediately said it’s a great sport,” he said in an interview with WDR.
The problem: Padel courts in Cologne were difficult to get. So Kautz teamed up with two partners and opened his own padel hall “Cube Padel” in an old industrial hall in Cologne-Mülheim in the summer of 2025. “Now we can play regularly.”
NRW is the state with the most padel courts
Kautz is right on trend, and his hall is now fully booked weeks in advance during peak times. The sport booming. According to the “Padelfinder” portal, the number of padel courts has increased from around 70 courts (as of 2020) to over 1,200 courts (as of the end of 2025) in just a few years, and the trend continues to rise. And nowhere in Germany are there more padel courts than in North Rhine-Westphalia with the Cologne and Düsseldorf metropolitan areas. Depending on the data, there are currently between 250 and 500 padel courts in North Rhine-Westphalia. However, it is clear from all the statistics that NRW is the federal state with the most systems and the strongest growth.
Padel originally comes from Spain and is a kind of mixture of tennis and squash. The game is always played in doubles with a tennis ball on a 10×20 meter field surrounded by glass walls. The ball can also be played over the glass walls, but it must first hit the floor beforehand. “It’s easy to learn, it’s a lot of fun, you always do it with four people. There’s a very sociable factor to it,” explains Carmen Ruler, padel manager at TG Nord, the largest tennis club in Düsseldorf.
Padel is no longer just played on private, commercial facilities. Many tennis clubs have now expanded their portfolio to include padel. At TG Nord they recognized the opportunity early and founded a padel department in 2020. “At that time we had around 500 members in the tennis division, but the number stagnated,” explains Ruler. However, the chairman of TG Nord, Erik Graw, did not want his club to become outdated and wanted to do something different. Then padel came into play. “I was one of the first padel members back then and it has grown rapidly since then,” says Ruler. Today, 285 people play padel out of around 1,200 club members in the TG Nord.
Padel as an opportunity for tennis clubs
Utz Uecker, President of the Middle Rhine Tennis Association (TVM), also sees padel as an “opportunity that we can give the tennis clubs even more members.” The TVM has now even been commissioned by the German Tennis Association (DTB) to train padel coaches.
But is padel also a competitor to tennis? Is there even a risk of displacement? “I see it as a symbiosis,” counters Uecker. Ruler also says: “Tennis and padel go hand in hand. I wouldn’t say that padel will displace tennis. In Spain, for example, padel is very pronounced and is roughly on a par with tennis and it’s not the case that fewer people play tennis because more people play padel. It’s not necessarily the same target group.”
Repression is taking place on a commercial level
While tennis and padel coexist at club level and tennis clubs still benefit from the padel hype, things sometimes look different in the commercial sector. In Kleve, for example, the “Rainbow” tennis hall was closed in 2024. Padel is now played there instead. In Düren, too, a tennis hall is currently disappearing in favor of a new padel hall.
This is a development that TVM President Uecker views with concern: “We as a tennis association naturally hope that as few commercial tennis halls as possible will be converted and many more new ones will be built,” he says. In this regard, the association also spoke to commercial tennis hall operators, “and advocated building something new rather than removing our tennis courts.” However, the association cannot do much about it.
Kautz: “Nobody is concerned with building new tennis courts”
Kautz, who, in addition to his padel hall, also runs a sports center including a tennis hall, makes it clear: “Nobody who thinks economically is currently working on building new tennis courts. But I know a lot of people who are working on building new padel courts.”
A padel court is 20 meters long, ten meters wide and is surrounded by glass walls.
The reason for this is the space and cost efficiency. “You have two padel courts on the same area as a tennis court. So you get a higher hourly rate for half the space you need. You have a significantly lower maintenance requirement than with a clay court, for example. On a padel court you have to have the carpet replaced every five years and the glass cleaned once a month. Every now and then a net breaks, that’s it. That’s a manageable amount. Tennis is a bit more complex.”
That’s why tennis is being increasingly pushed out, especially in the commercial indoor sector, says Kautz. “Tennis won’t disappear completely, it’s far too beautiful a sport for that. But it will have to give up.”
Why the padel trend is here to stay
And padel? Is sport here to stay? “I’m very sure of that when you see what’s happening in Germany right now,” says Kautz. In contrast to tennis, there aren’t even any prominent drivers in padel. “Padel generates its reach simply because it’s a great sport. Not because you have any heroes. They’re still coming. And that’s why I’m sure that the trend won’t go away so quickly.”
Ruler from TG Nord also believes that padel will stay. “But I think it’s also up to us to run padel courts and to the association to approach young people. The be-all and end-all of the whole thing is children and young people. And you have to invest a lot in that.”
“I hope that it’s not just a flash in the pan, that it lasts a long time and develops in parallel,” thinks TVM President Uecker. “I am confident that it is good for society as a whole to do sport. It doesn’t matter whether they play tennis or padel, they should exercise.”
Our sources:
- Conversation with Alex Kautz, operator of “Cube Padel”
- Conversation with Carmen Ruler, padel sports officer at TG Nord
- Conversation with Utz Uecker, President of the Middle Rhine Tennis Association
- Portal “Padelfinder”
Broadcast: WDR.de “What the padel hype means for tennis”, April 22, 202610 O `clock
