Celebrity backers and deep-pocketed investors are betting millions on padel (pronounced “paddle”), a racquet sport that has surged abroad and is now growing in the US.

The US-based Pro Padel League raised $15 million in Series A funding in March, led by Charlotte Hornets co-chair Rick Schnall, with participation from Left Lane Capital, on top of $10 million in seed funding a year earlier.

Reggaeton icon Daddy Yankee owns the league’s Florida Goats, tennis pro Frances Tiafoe and polo star Nacho Figueras have backed the New York Atlantics, and former NBA pro Carmelo Anthony’s Melo7 Tech Partners is among the league’s investors. 

Padel fans include celebs like Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams, David Beckham, and Cristiano Ronaldo, while streetwear founder Ronnie Fieg of Kith has become one of the sport’s most visible fans.

For those new to the sport, padel is closer to a mix of tennis and squash than to pickleball. “It’s played with a ball that is very similar to a tennis ball,” Pro Padel League CEO Michael Dorfman said to Yahoo Finance. Glass walls surround the court, producing “incredibly fast-paced, long rallies with the speed of tennis” in a tight, pickleball-sized court.

Now, Swiss watchmaker Frédérique Constant is the latest to buy in, looking to capitalize on the sport’s popularity. The brand, owned by Citizen since 2016, signed on as the official timekeeper of the Pro Padel League and will launch a co-branded padel watch.

The deal is Frédérique Constant’s first sports sponsorship, and it lands as the league is scaling fast. Public padel courts in the US  jumped from about 227 to nearly 1,000 in three years, and Dorfman expects “many more thousands” ahead.

Dorfman sees padel as “a new type of golf for a lot of young professionals,” a social, doubles-only workout that fits health-and-wellness trends. Court time in New York City can run “a few hundred dollars an hour.”

That affluent, young demographic is what drew Frédérique Constant, whose watches range from around $2,000 to upwards of $40,000.

“It’s one of the fastest-growing sports we see in this country,” said Jeffrey Cohen, president of Citizen Watch America, which owns the brand. “It’s about precision and all the things that go along with it” — a good fit, he said, for the match timekeeper role and the coming PPL watch.

Cohen said his target is younger buyers and millennials, and specifically the 25-to-35 bracket that makes up much of the league’s player base. “We want people to grow up in our brand,” he said. “Padel is the future.”

The viewership also skews wealthy. After the league’s first CNBC broadcast of its championship matches, Dorfman said the audience indexed as “the most affluent audience in sports,” ahead of Wimbledon, the US Open tennis tournament, and Formula One.

Cohen said the payoff, or ROI, shouldn’t be measured by traditional measures like reach and conversion to sale: “It’s about selling something that’s authentic and something that’s real.”

To be clear, it’s the authenticity and connection to a fast-growing sport that may boost sales for Constant, but it doesn’t hurt that padel’s popularity seems organic at the moment. 

But even PPL sees barriers remaining that could threaten the sport’s growth. A tournament-grade court can cost around $50,000 to install, and permitting and upkeep costs mean the sport skews toward high earners for now, something Dorfman said the league wants to broaden as it scales.

But the league is confident it can move forward, with partners such as padel clubs, court builders, apparel makers, racket suppliers, and even watchmakers like Constant benefiting. 

“We are in the early innings of a massive developing industry,” he said, “of which there are going to be many, many winners.”

Pras Subramanian is the lead autos and wealth reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram.

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