When Primedia Sport set out two years ago to identify which international sporting property to build a business around, padel was not an obvious front-runner in a market long dominated by rugby, cricket and football. Yet on 26 July, South Africa will host its first-ever Premier Padel tournament, the Pretoria P1, at the SunBet Arena — a deal that its architects describe less as a sports booking and more as an infrastructure play on one of the fastest-growing racket sports in the world.
Tobie Badenhorst, Vice President of Primedia Sport and promoter of the tournament, says the decision followed a deliberate review of global sporting codes rather than a bet on novelty. “We reviewed all kinds of sports properties and assets in terms of what’s a good sporting code to begin with,” he says. “Fundamentally, padel was reviewed and selected as part of this review process, just given the growth of the sport.”
The numbers behind that growth are striking. Citing data from Playtomic, which holds a 97% market share among booking platforms in South Africa, Badenhorst says the country now has more than 500,000 registered padel players, over 1,500 courts and more than 450 clubs, with 80,000 monthly active users on the platform. On a global scale, South Africa ranks in the top five markets both for court bookings per month and for viewership of Premier Padel content on Red Bull TV, the tour’s global streaming partner.
“Both participation and spectator numbers — South Africa is ranked globally in the top five,” Badenhorst says. “All the more reason for us to finally take the sport more seriously.”
That data underpinned a three-year licensing and promoter agreement between Primedia Sport and Premier Padel, running from 2026 to 2028, positioning Primedia as the exclusive local operator of one of the sport’s flagship international tour stops.
The commercial logic, however, is more nuanced than raw participation growth suggests. Badenhorst points to court occupancy as the real test of viability. South African courts currently average 3.5 hours of use per day, broadly in line with global norms, but well below the roughly eight hours a day recorded in the United Kingdom, which Playtomic data classifies as a “boom market” approaching saturation. Markets that overbuilt too quickly, he warns, offer a cautionary tale.
“What’s happened in Sweden, Chile as an example, is every Tom, Dick and Harry started building padel courts,” Badenhorst says. “There was a complete saturation of the amount of courts relative to the amount of players, and a lot of them had to close down.”
South Africa’s major metros, he believes, are approaching that ceiling. The next phase of growth, he argues, is emerging in smaller towns rather than Johannesburg, Cape Town or Pretoria. Ticketmaster data for the Pretoria P1 — Primedia’s official ticketing partner — shows purchases originating from small towns across the country, as well as from Kenya, Botswana, Namibia and Mozambique, evidence Badenhorst reads as proof of the sport’s reach beyond its urban base.
The structural challenge, he says, is converting real estate into recurring revenue. Padel’s low barrier to entry has made it an attractive proposition for property developers repurposing unused parking lots and open land, but Badenhorst cautions that facilities cannot rely on real estate economics alone. Player loyalty, he notes, is thin: data shows regular players rotating between as many as eight different clubs a month. “There’s not a lot of stickiness from players staying with a particular club or court,” he says, arguing that operators need a genuine membership proposition rather than a pay-per-booking model to build sustainable businesses.
For Premier Padel as a global rights holder, South Africa’s appeal lies partly in geography. The Pretoria event becomes only the second tournament on the African continent, after the New Giza P2 in Egypt, and the first anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. Badenhorst likens the calculation to Formula One’s expansion logic: a global tour needs an African presence to credibly call itself global, and with talk of padel’s inclusion in the 2032 Olympic Games, unlocking a ranking-points pathway for African players carries strategic weight beyond a single week of matches.
On direct economic impact, Badenhorst says Primedia will commission a formal study once the tournament concludes, but early indicators point to a meaningful visitor footprint: more than 300 players, coaches and officials are travelling to South Africa, many for their first visit to the continent, alongside family members and support staff generating incremental demand for accommodation, logistics and tourism services including safari add-ons. Broadcast reach adds a further commercial layer, with the tournament airing on ESPN Africa via DStv and StarTimes, streaming on Disney+, and carried globally on Red Bull TV during the finals weekend.
Ticket pricing has been set deliberately low to build attendance rather than maximise short-term yield, ranging from R250 to R650 for early matches and R650 to R1,250 for the finals weekend, with the top-tier tickets already sold out. Badenhorst frames the approach as a long-term audience-building exercise rather than a one-off event, betting that a low-cost entry point, together with a sport still building its competitive history in South Africa relative to established padel nations such as Spain, Argentina and Mexico, gives Primedia room to shape the market from an early stage rather than compete for share in a mature one.