May 6, 2026
For decades, the 18-hole round has been the unofficial second office of UK financial advisers. Half a day on the course, a clubhouse lunch, a handshake on the 19th, and a relationship that quietly compounds for years. It still works. But there's a new option creeping into a lot of advisers' diaries, and it's happening on a glass-walled court about the size of a tennis service box.
Padel - the racket sport that's a bit like tennis crossed with squash - has gone from niche to everywhere in Britain at a pace nobody really saw coming. If you're a financial adviser still planning all your client entertainment around tee times, it's worth a look. Not to replace the golf day, but to sit alongside it.
The growth is genuinely a bit mad. According to the LTA, 860,000 adults and juniors in Great Britain played padel at least once in 2025 - more than double the 400,000 from 2024, and up from just 15,000 players back in 2019. The courts have followed: 1,553 courts across 559 venues by the end of 2025, up from 69 when the LTA took over the sport in 2020.
Awareness has grown even faster than the player base. Padel is now recognised by 57% of British adults - around 31 million people - and over 10 million Britons say they want to give it a go. That's about 25 times the current player base just sitting there waiting for courts to free up. Supply is the bottleneck, and the LTA reckons we'll be at 1,300+ courts by the end of 2026.
For what it's worth, golf isn't shrinking either - the World Handicap System logged over 5.75 million scores in the first half of 2025, a 29% jump year-on-year. So this isn't a "golf is dying" piece. It's more that there's a second sport growing fast next to it, with a totally different format that suits some bits of client work better than golf does.
A typical 18-hole round, with travel and lunch tacked on, eats most of a working day. A padel match is 60 to 90 minutes, and most clubs book courts in 90-minute slots. You can host a client at 7am before the office opens, or at 6pm before dinner, and barely dent your diary.
For advisers juggling client meetings, paraplanning sign-offs and compliance deadlines, that's a big deal. You can run two or three padel mornings in the time one golf day eats up.
Golf is brutal on people who've never played. Hand a 7-iron to someone who's never held one and within four holes they're embarrassed, frustrated and checking their watch. Padel is different. The walls do half the work, the court's small enough that rallies happen quickly, and a complete beginner can hold their own in a doubles match within half an hour.
That matters when you're hosting clients. You're not just hosting golfers - you're hosting their spouse, their adult kids who'll inherit the wealth you manage, their business partner who's never picked up a racket. Padel includes everyone. Golf, often, doesn't.
Padel is always doubles. Two of you, two of them. You're never more than a few metres from your client. Between points, between games, while waiting for the ball - you talk. The format basically engineers conversation, in a way that solo golf, where everyone scatters across a fairway, just doesn't.
If you're trying to deepen a client relationship - or quietly meet their accountant, their solicitor, or their adult son - the doubles dynamic feels closer to a working lunch than a sporting day out.
Off-peak court bookings across the UK average around £27 per hour for a doubles game - roughly £7 per person - according to LTA research and confirmed by listings on the UK padel club directory at Padeli. Even peak-time premium clubs in London rarely go above £15-£20 per head per session. A green fee at a decent UK course, plus catering, easily hits £150 to £300 per head.
For a financial adviser putting together a client entertainment budget that needs to stand up to Consumer Duty scrutiny, that's a meaningful gap. You can host more clients more often without the firm's hospitality policy starting to twitch.
Golf has a known demographic challenge in the UK - the median male golf club member is 58, female members 65, and only 1% of golf club members are women aged 20 to 50. Padel skews younger, more diverse, and a lot more female. Which matters, because the next generation of wealth holders, the spouses you need to bring into the inheritance conversation, and the high-earning thirty- and forty-somethings building their first proper portfolios are the people already filling padel courts.
If your prospecting strategy involves the cohort that'll inherit the £5.5 trillion expected to move between UK generations over the next two decades, padel reaches them where they already are.
The play isn't to ditch golf - it's to add padel as another tool. A few formats we're seeing:
The venue matters more than people think - quality of the courts, easy access for clients coming from different parts of town, and a half-decent clubhouse all decide whether a session feels like a serious client touchpoint or just a knockabout. Padeli's directory is a sensible place to start shortlisting venues, with UK clubs listed alongside international ones for any clients who travel.
If you've been hosting the same eight clients on the same golf day for fifteen years, you don't need to change anything. Those relationships are working. But if you're trying to:
Padel is a genuinely useful addition to the toolkit - low cost, time-efficient, and open to a much wider range of clients than golf alone. The infrastructure is there now, the demographic match is right, and the early movers are already running their second or third tournament.
Worst case, you spend an hour on a court, hit a few balls, and have a laugh with someone who pays you for advice. Best case, you've added a useful new channel to your client retention work, at a fraction of the cost of golf.
The 19th hole isn't going anywhere. But there's a glass court down the road from your office that's worth a look.
If client servicing, paraplanning capacity or compliance admin is what's actually stopping you from spending more time with clients - on the course, the court, or anywhere else - that's the bit we sort. Book a call and we'll show you how outsourced back-office support frees up your week.
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