The padel app turning matches into meet-cutes

Padel has taken the sports world by storm. In a smaller but growing circle, it’s also become a way to date.

Much of that runs through Playtomic, a booking app for racquet sports where players join “open matches” with strangers, chat through the app, and meet people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. For some, those connections carry off the court.

“People are meeting each other on the court . . . [and then] grabbing a beer or coffee from the grounds,” says Pro Padel League CEO Michael Dorfman.

That kind of interaction is exactly what the app Playtomic is designed to facilitate, and increasingly, to scale.

In 2017, co-founder Pablo Carro set out to solve a basic problem: booking a court. “ We didn’t find any user-friendly app[s] that was convenient for making a reservation for court bookings,” he says. “It all started with that very basic necessity because we were not able to find a court or someone to play with.”

At the time, padel itself was still emerging globally, having originated in the late 1960s in Acapulco, Mexico, and later gaining traction in Spain. But that timing turned out to be an advantage. Instead of retrofitting old systems, Playtomic grew alongside a new sport.

“ The thing is that padel is a new sport,” says Carro. “So it’s a new club, it’s a new business, and every single new business [is] considering the tech side.”

Rather than digitizing a legacy ecosystem like tennis, the company positioned itself as infrastructure for a category being built in real time. It developed a two-sided marketplace connecting clubs and players, handling everything from bookings and payments to matchmaking.

That last piece, matchmaking, is what sets it apart.

“ Open matches are the perfect example of how socially adapted and how community driven we are,” says Carro.

Users are assigned a “Playtomic rating,” starting with a questionnaire that places them between Level 0 and 7. That baseline evolves based on match performance, helping pair players of similar skill. Around that system, the app layers in social features: profiles, chat, match uploads, even photo sharing.

The result is less a scheduling tool than a lightweight social network organized around play.

It’s also one that reflects how people actually use the sport. Padel’s structure naturally lends itself to interaction. “Because of the dynamic of play . . . the velocity . . . there are four people in a kind of small place, [and] it’s easy to learn, the real driving force of the sport was the social aspect,” says Carro.

And while Playtomic didn’t create that dynamic, the company did turn it into a product. Today, Playtomic operates across 66 countries, partnering with more than 6,700 clubs and serving 4 million registered users. Its 2025 Global Padel report found that 3,282 new clubs opened worldwide in 2024, averaging nearly nine per day.

That growth has given Playtomic a front-row seat to how communities form around the sport.

“ The most surprising thing is the fact that countries that we did not expect that social appetite were behaving extremely social like the UK,” says Carro. “If you think about [the] south of Europe, you will tend to think that people are friendly, social, [and] community driven. But if you think about the UK . . . We didn’t expect [that] level of social appetite.” (To his point: More than 20% of bookings in the UK are open matches.)

User behavior also evolves over time. Early on, players tend to book classes or structured events. As they improve, they shift toward open matches, using the app less as a scheduler and more as a network. That progression helps explain why the platform has become central to how people experience padel, including off the court.

Daniel Dios, padel director at WME, met his wife while playing in Sweden. “We started playing little by little,” he says. “Then, we got to know each other.”

Even more infrequent players describe the same pull. “I don’t have much time to play. But, I like to play when I’m here in Miami or [on] vacation. I like to play a little bit with friends. It’s a fun game,” says Brazilian tennis star João Fonseca.

As Playtomic expands, it is now trying to replicate those dynamics in newer markets, particularly the U.S. “The sport has been growing between 20% to 25% annually, which means that its numbers multiply by two every four or five years,” says Dios. “So we are seeing this evolution of the sport, especially now of course in the U.S. being adopted so quickly.”

In 2025, more than 10,000 open matches were played in the U.S., according to the company.

That growth is starting to attract brands as well. Through WME, companies are beginning to treat padel clubs as a new kind of consumer touchpoint. “ This is ultimately the place . . . where consumers connect and where brands want to be present,” Dios says.

Carro has relocated to Miami to watch the shift up close.

“It is close to becom[ing] the most important city in the world,” he says. “Every single headquarter is moving here. Every single tech entrepreneur is moving here. Miami is extremely vibrant these days . . . I started to see a clear trend, and every single club has more American people playing every day.”