Free on YouTube, and That’s the Plan

Premier Padel is free to watch on YouTube for the first three rounds

You can watch the best padel players on the planet right now, live, for nothing. Open Premier Padel’s YouTube and you can watch the first three rounds  of the London P1 for free - or whatever tournament is happening that week. Only from the quarter-finals do the matches move behind Red Bull TV and national broadcasters.

Most people read that as a sport that hasn’t worked out how to charge yet. It’s the opposite. It’s a deliberate funnel, and it might be the smartest thing padel is doing.

Give the sport away at the top. Pull millions of casual viewers in for free, let them fall for the game, build the habit. Then hold the sharp end, the finals and the drama, behind the platforms that pay. It’s the same logic Tiley used to turn the Australian Open into a three-week festival: make the show free and unmissable first, worry about the till later. You don’t charge admission while you’re still building the crowd.

To see why this matters, you have to know how close padel came to never having a crowd at all.

For a decade the World Padel Tour, launched in 2013 and owned by the Spanish brewer Damm, was the sport. Then in 2022 Qatar Sports Investments, the group behind Paris Saint-Germain, launched Premier Padel as a direct rival, backed by the sport’s own federation. What followed was roughly eighteen months of open warfare. Two tours, two rankings, players forced to pick sides, and nobody able to say with a straight face who the real world number one was.

It only ended in 2023, when QSI simply bought the World Padel Tour and folded it in. From 2024 there has been one tour, one ranking, one product. That matters more than it sounds, because you cannot run a coherent attention strategy across two circuits at war. Tiley never had to. He ran a single flagship and compounded its value year after year. Padel spent its first professional decade fighting itself, and has only just stopped.

Now, with one tour, it can finally play the long game. And look who it’s playing it with.

Red Bull signed a multi-year deal with Premier Padel that runs through 2027, covering streaming, production and sponsorship, the largest broadcast and production deal in the sport’s history. That is not a logo on a banner. Red Bull is one of the great attention machines in all of sport. It doesn’t sell energy drinks by talking about energy drinks; it sells spectacle, and the drink comes along for the ride. Padel has handed its shop window to the best in the business.

As a way to win eyeballs, it’s very hard to fault. Free at the top, premium at the peak, and the world’s sharpest content brand running the whole show.

But here’s the catch, and it’s the thing that nags at me. An audience you don’t own is an audience you’re renting. Right now the most valuable machinery in padel, the production, the broadcast, the reach, sits with Red Bull, not with the sport itself. Free-on-YouTube is the right way to grow. The trap is growing a vast audience and then watching someone else bank the value of it.

That’s a tension the sport will have to resolve as it matures. And it’s the same tension every one of us running a padel business faces at a smaller scale, whether we’ve noticed it yet or not.