We're mixing it up this week. Instead of one story, the Deep Dive puts two takes on the same question side by side. In one corner, Bloomberg asking whether Britain's padel boom is a bubble. In the other, investor Ira Miller arguing the real test was never growth at all, it's staying power. Read both, then let us settle it.

Take one: the bubble. Bloomberg's Oct 9 feature asks it straight up: "Will Padel's $300 Million UK Bubble Burst in Race to Build Courts?" The setup: investors have poured up to $300 million into UK padel companies, "but cracks are starting to show." The build-out is real. The LTA counts 1,825 courts across 551 venues by mid-2026, with 860,000 players in 2025 and more than a million this year.

Now: the cracks. Per The Padel Paper, Social Sports Society's three-court Wembley flagship closed after landlord Quintain Living revoked the lease over unpaid rent, and the operator has filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators, with its director pointing to a dispute with financing partner Mindspring Padel. And if you want the cautionary tale, look north: Padel Underground notes Sweden went from roughly 300 courts to about 3,500 in around four years, then watched roughly 90 padel businesses go bankrupt.

Take two: staying power. Miller, of First Inning Holdings, isn't impressed by court counts, and he says so. In his Oct 7 LinkedIn op-ed, court count is a supply number. The tests that matter are utilization, retention, programming, revenue beyond court rental, gender mix and whether people come back next week. "Courts are the visible asset," he writes. "Habit is the invisible one." His investor's line: "Growth is increasingly visible; durability is not."

He sees the smart operators already competing for "share of time": Rocket Padel, Padel Social Club with 17 new London courts, and Padel Haus here at home, with six clubs mixing in wellness, coworking and cafés, plus a women's clinic at DUMBO. That last part matters. Per FIP, nearly half of padel's roughly 38 million players worldwide are women.

The Primetime Take: Make no mistake: both of these pieces are right, and that's the point. Bloomberg is describing what happens when the money moves faster than the members. Miller is describing the only cure we know of. Britain isn't proof that padel is a fad; it's proof that glass on its own is a commodity. A court that sits empty on a Tuesday night is a liability with LED lights.

The UK is the risk. Habit is the answer. And the U.S. should be taking notes right now, not after the first wave of "For Lease" signs. We're at about 1,110 courts across 38 states, per the 2026 US Padel Report, a fraction of the UK's density, which means we still get to choose how this goes. The operators we'll bet on are the ones who show up in this issue: the school program filling court time on a weekday afternoon, the booking app buying gym software, the "slowly" emerging empires stacking clubs one market at a time. Build the league night before you build the eighth court. Count the regulars, not the slabs.

To read the whole article from Bloomberg, click here.

To read Ira Miller's full op-ed on LinkedIn, click here.

USA Padel handed out its first-ever awards this month, and one of the 2026 Service Awards went to the guy who was holding a racket before most of us knew the word. Mike May led the American Paddle Association (later the USPA, now USA Padel) from 1998 to 2018. He was recruited to the first U.S. men's team in 1993 and served as captain, then played 13 Padel World Championships for the U.S. between 1994 and 2018. Per USA Padel, he's also the first certified padel pro in U.S. history, and he oversaw the country's first courts as Director of Racquet Sports at the Houstonian in Houston. Today he runs iPadel Houston with his wife, top-ranked player Belén Salcedo, with one mission: keep padel open to the public, not just private-club members. And it's his second trophy of the year, after the RSPA Texas Division's Service Industry Excellence Award earlier in 2026.

USA Padel President Bill Ullman said it best: "For twenty years he led this association when padel in America was a handful of courts and a lot of belief… This award is long overdue."

The Primetime Take: Make no mistake: every boom has a before, and Mike May is the before. While this week's Deep Dive asks whether the money will stick around, here's a man who stuck around for twenty years, long before investors started pouring money into this sport. Peers credit him with helping make Texas a padel stronghold, and his iPadel mission is the exact "habit, not hype" play we preach. CEO Scott Colebourne summed it up: "Mike is the reason so many of us have a padel career at all." Long overdue is right.

To read the whole release from USA Padel, click here.

USA Padel, Conquer Padel and Desert Garden Montessori launched an after-school padel program this fall at Conquer's Tempe club, billed as one of the first school padel programs in the U.S. Wilson is the official racket sponsor and is outfitting the kids. Conquer runs indoor padel and fitness clubs in Tempe and Lehi, Utah, plus a growing franchise network, and Desert Garden has been teaching Phoenix-area kids, from infants through 12th graders, since 1996. It starts on a two-court schedule, and students who want to compete get a path into two USA Padel-sanctioned regional tournaments per season. Interest is already spilling into summer camps, staff team-building and family nights.

Conquer CEO Enrique Gracia says padel "aligns naturally with the Montessori approach to learning," and Colebourne called early coaching plus a route into tournament play "how we build the next generation." Desert Garden owner Shetal Walters pointed to resilience, collaboration and joyful movement, which is about as good a description of a Saturday doubles match as we've heard.

The Primetime Take: Last week Wilson and Bela gave college kids a league. This week Wilson is putting rackets in the hands of grade-schoolers. That's not a coincidence; that's a brand building a pipeline from the bottom up. Two courts is small, and that's fine. Courts are the easy part. A kid who learns the game at nine and has a tournament to chase at twelve is the definition of the habit Ira Miller says actually keeps clubs alive. School partnerships also fill court time when adults are at work. We'd love to see every franchise owner in America steal this playbook.

To read the whole release from Padel 22, click here.

Playtomic has acquired TIMP, a Valencia-based gym and wellness management platform founded in 2014 and used by more than 3,500 centers in Spain and Italy. Terms weren't disclosed. TIMP keeps its brand and team, and the two platforms will integrate for clubs that pair padel with gyms and wellness. Playtomic says it operates in 66+ countries, and it's already the top booking system in U.S. padel: Padelkin counts 74 of the 187 U.S. clubs that list a booking platform on Playtomic.

The Primetime Take: This is Miller's "share of time" argument with a purchase order attached. Clubs that only sell court hours are renting glass; clubs that sell the workout, the recovery session and the post-match coffee are selling a routine. Playtomic just bought the software for the second kind, and kept TIMP's brand and team so it doesn't break what 3,500 centers already rely on. The quiet tell: the booking app now has a reason to sell your club more than a calendar. It's a European deal for now, but with that kind of U.S. footprint, make no mistake: the gym-plus-padel model is headed for your local club's app.

To read the whole article from Padel Cluster, click here.

Padel Nation's Austin Edwards is back with Part Two of "The (Slowly) Emerging Empires of U.S. Padel," and by his count it's four operators, 13 locations, five states and 67 courts. Reserve Padel (26 courts) owns the see-and-be-seen lane in Miami and New York. Its Instagram hints at a next club abroad. Padel39 (18 courts), founded by Will Boyce, is Austin's homegrown power, with a North Austin club, an East Austin flagship and South Austin planned. For context, its January purchase of the former Dallas Padel Club is set to become a 10-court indoor/outdoor build. BRISAS (10 courts) stretches from Aspen to East Hampton to Long Island City, with plans in the Bahamas. Park Padel (13 courts) grew from a two-court Embarcadero pop-up into a Bay Area and West Sacramento operation. (Part One, back on Sep 14, covered Padel Haus, Bay Padel, Ballers and PATL.)

The Primetime Take: Pair this with the Deep Dive and you get the answer to the bubble question, American edition. None of these four are planting flags in 40 cities at once. They're stacking clubs market by market, one pop-up, one flagship at a time, and Edwards put "slowly" right in the headline for a reason. Slow is the point. Slow means you learned what your members want before you poured the next slab. We'll take a dozen operators who know their members' names over one who knows only their capital stack.

To read the whole article from Padel Nation, click here.