When a sport outgrows every venue it's ever used and takes over three halls at the National Exhibition Centre, that's not a trend — that's a market signal.
Pickleball England has confirmed that the 2026 English OPEN will be held at Birmingham's NEC: the UK's largest event space, with 60 courts laid across three interconnected halls and a target of more than 3,000 player registrations and 6,000 event registrations. It is, by any measure, the biggest indoor pickleball tournament on earth.
For UK club operators in padel, tennis, squash, and leisure, the question is no longer whether pickleball is real. The question is whether your venue is positioned to benefit from it.
The Growth Numbers Are Difficult to Ignore
Pickleball England's most recent annual data shows a 79% increase in registered members year-on-year, with more than 45,000 players now active at nearly 1,000 venues across the UK. Since the last AGM, 396 new clubs were registered — a 98.75% club growth rate in a single cycle.
To put that in context: padel, which is widely considered the UK's fastest-growing racket sport, took the better part of a decade to reach those club numbers. Pickleball is doing it in months.
The infrastructure is following. In 2025, there were seven dedicated pickleball-only facilities in the UK. By the end of 2026, that number is expected to exceed fourteen. Purpose-built venues like Courtside Pickleball in Stourbridge — which hosts the Young Persons' Championship — are arriving alongside multi-sport operators converting underused court space to pickleball.
The World Pickleball Championship is coming to Leeds in June, hosted at the John Charles Centre for Sport. The sport is attracting international attention on British soil.
What This Means for Existing Club Operators
The Window for Early Movers Is Still Open
Pickleball courts are cheap to install relative to padel. A pair of badminton courts can be converted with portable nets, court tape, and an afternoon's work. For venues sitting on underused gym space or indoor courts during off-peak hours, pickleball is one of the lowest-cost demand drivers available right now.
The demographic is also worth noting. Pickleball skews slightly older than padel — think 35–65 rather than 25–45 — and that group has time, disposable income, and a strong appetite for social sport. These are exactly the members who join clubs for the community, not just the workout. They renew. They refer. They show up on Tuesday mornings when the courts are empty.
Courts Alone Won't Build a Community
Here is where most operators make the mistake: they install courts, post a few organic social media updates, and wait for bookings to arrive. They don't.
The clubs gaining traction with pickleball are treating it the same way successful padel operators treat new launches — with paid social, local targeting, and a proper follow-up sequence for every enquiry. A Meta Ads campaign targeted to a 10-mile radius of your venue, aimed at 35–60 year olds with an interest in sport and social activities, can generate a meaningful pipeline of trial bookings within a fortnight.
Once those players are through the door, conversion to membership depends on speed. A player who enquires on a Thursday and doesn't hear from you until Monday has already booked with a competitor. Automated lead follow-up — whether that's a WhatsApp message, an email sequence, or a same-day call — is the difference between a full court and an empty one.
Scheduling and Booking Complexity Grows Fast
As soon as you're running beginner sessions, open play, coaching, club nights, and competitive ladders across the same courts, manual scheduling breaks down. Pickleball's format — shorter games, higher player throughput, mixed-ability open play — creates more booking complexity than a traditional racket sport session. Operators who start with a spreadsheet tend to abandon it quickly.
Platforms like Playtomic already list pickleball venues. If your courts aren't bookable online, you're invisible to a significant portion of the market.
Practical Steps for Club Operators Right Now
You don't need to commit to a full pickleball programme overnight. A few concrete starting points:
- Audit your underused court hours. Which sessions are regularly under-capacity? Start there.
- Run a single open-play pickleball evening and promote it with a small paid social budget. Use the demand to justify further investment.
- Capture every enquiry properly. Name, email, phone, and source. If you're not following up within the hour, you're losing people.
- Connect your booking data to your CRM. Understanding which players book once and disappear versus those who become regulars is the foundation of any retention strategy.
Ace Rally Media works with racket sport and leisure clubs across the UK on exactly this: building the paid acquisition and CRM infrastructure that turns sport trends into reliable membership revenue. If you're exploring pickleball as a revenue stream and want to understand what a launch campaign would look like for your venue, get in touch with our team.
The NEC Isn't the Ceiling — It's the Starting Gun
The fact that the English OPEN needed the NEC in 2026 tells you something important: the demand is already there, well ahead of the supply. Most UK venues are still ignoring pickleball entirely.
That gap won't last. The clubs that move now — even modestly — will be the ones with established communities, search rankings, and word-of-mouth when the rest of the market catches up.
The sport arrived. The question is whether your club is going to be part of it.