Padel’s Stars Don’t Get Paid to Win

Here’s a fact that should stop you: a player ranked inside the top 50 in the world can lose money playing professional padel.

A player ranked around 16th earned roughly €76,000 across the whole of 2024, and out of that comes travel, coaching, physio and the rest. Drop much below the very top pairs and plenty of players on tour are breaking even at best. Winning matches at the highest level of the fastest-growing sport in the world does not, by itself, pay the bills.

So how do the stars actually get rich? Not by winning. Off the court. Something like 70% of a top player’s income comes from sponsorship and appearances, not prize money.

And look who has arrived to write those cheques. Arturo Coello signed with Rolex, the first deal the watchmaker has ever done in padel. His partner Agustín Tapia signed with Audemars Piguet, who also became Premier Padel’s official timekeeper. Juan Lebrón and Alejandro Galán are Red Bull athletes. These are the watch-and-drinks names that, until about five minutes ago, only spoke to golf, tennis and Formula 1.

They’re not paying for padel’s prize money. They’re paying for padel’s audience, and specifically for the kind of people filling the clubs. Audemars Piguet sells watches from $20,000 to well past $400,000, and it didn’t wander into the sport by accident. It chose padel deliberately, because it likes who’s walking through the doors.

That’s the whole game in a sentence. The value isn’t in the trophy. It’s in the audience the trophy attracts.

You see it most starkly in the women’s game. Nine of the fifteen highest-paid female athletes on the planet are tennis players, and they sit at the top of that list on the back of endorsements, not prize money. Naomi Osaka has earned under a million in a season’s winnings against something like fifteen million in sponsorship. Her real income has almost nothing to do with what she collects at a trophy ceremony.

It’s the logic Tiley keeps returning to when he talks about the women’s game. Reward, he argues, should track “the value that you provide,” not the hours you spend on court. The prize cheque measures the wrong thing. The audience measures the right one.

Padel’s stars, men and women, are already living that truth. The real money shows up on their wrists and their shirts, not their prize cheques.

None of this means prize money doesn’t matter. It’s grown over 300% since 2022, which is genuinely good, and it needs to keep climbing, because a sport where a top-50 player runs at a loss is not a stable profession yet. It’s a sponsorship lottery for a handful of bankable faces with a hollow base beneath them. If padel wants depth, the winnings have to reach further down the rankings, not just pile up at the very top.

But the headline lesson is the one that should reshape how anyone thinks about earning a living in this sport. The money follows attention and value, not results. The players who understand that are building brands, not just chasing rankings.

And if that’s true at the very top of the world game, it’s true for the rest of us too, all the way down to a coach in Buckinghamshire.