What Sweden's Padel Boom-and-Correction Means for Stockholm's Next Multi-Sports Arena

Sweden built padel courts faster than almost any country on earth, and then watched more than 100 facilities close in under three years. The useful question for anyone deciding where Stockholm's next sports infrastructure capital should go is not whether padel was a mistake, but why a single-sport building is such a fragile asset in the first place.

The fastest build-out in Europe, bar one

The numbers are worth stating plainly. Sweden went from 14 padel courts in 2014 to 560 in 2019, and to roughly 3,500 by the end of 2021, according to Swedish Padel Federation data compiled by elitepadel.se¹.

By February 2024 the International Padel Federation counted over 4,200 courts and 1,050 facilities in Sweden, with around 600,000 amateur players and 5,300 licensed competitive players — the world's fourth-largest padel nation by courts and clubs². That works out at roughly one court per 2,500 inhabitants, second only to Andorra.

Capital followed the curve. Zlatan Ibrahimović, Peter Forsberg and Måns Zelmerlöw were among the names backing Stockholm padel centres in the boom years³. The appetite for racket sports in this country was real, and it still is.

What broke

SVT has reported that more than 100 padel facilities closed between 2022 and 2024⁴. Timbro's Smedjan counted around 3,500 courts remaining at the turn of 2022/2023, down from a peak above 4,200, with dozens of padel businesses folding through 2023 — several of them after municipal loan guarantees in places such as Hylte and Danderyd⁵.

Three pressures arrived at once:

• Energy. Electricity prices in southern Sweden rose to nearly five times pre-2020 levels, which is punishing for a large hall that must be heated and lit for a small number of players at a time⁶.
• Supply. Courts were added faster than the player base could fill them at peak-hour prices, and off-peak hours in a single-sport hall have no alternative use.
• Capital cost. Debt taken on in a cheap-money period had to be serviced in a different one.

Even a flagship venue was not immune. Globen Padel inside Stockholm's Avicii Arena, with 12 double and 2 single courts, closed⁷.

The correction is not yet over. The FIP's December 2025 World Padel Report states that Sweden "is not yet showing signs of recovery", even while global player numbers exceed 35 million and federation memberships worldwide grew 42 per cent year on year⁸.

The sport grew. The business model did not.

That gap between a healthy global sport and a struggling national market is the whole lesson.

Padel in Sweden did not lose its players. It lost its margin. A hall with one sport in it has one demand curve, one weather dependency, one age profile, one price point and one reason for anyone to walk through the door. When any one of those moves, there is nothing to absorb the shock.

A building that can only do one thing is a bet on one thing staying popular, affordable and in season — and no sport in history has managed all three indefinitely.

The industry's own answer has been consolidation. PDL Group and Padel United merged in 2022 to form the world's largest padel operator, spanning 118 facilities across five countries⁹. Scale helps. Diversification helps more.

Pooled demand, one roof

The Dome brings tennis, squash, padel, beach tennis, touchtennis, badminton, table tennis and fitness and well-being into a single building with professional coaches, alongside a 15,000-seat centre court for national and international sport, concerts and cultural events, year-round education, and an outdoor sports park with climbing walls, exercise machines, fields and a running track that is frozen for skiing in winter.

From an investment standpoint, the significance is not the length of that list. It is what the list does to the revenue profile:

• Multiple demand curves. Eight disciplines mean eight different age profiles, seasons, price sensitivities and competitive calendars sharing the same fixed cost base.
• Hours, not just courts. Schools and education fill mornings, clubs and coaching fill afternoons and evenings, events fill weekends. Padel halls struggled precisely because their off-peak hours had no second use.
• Event and cultural revenue. A centre court earns outside racket sport entirely.
• Energy as a design decision, not a surprise. Our ambition to be the first fully sustainable and smart arena in Scandinavia is a direct response to what happened to Swedish operators in 2022 and 2023. Energy performance is underwriting, not decoration.

The architecture is proven rather than experimental: the concept is based on the award-winning Bourbon Beans Dome in Miki City, Japan, by Endo Shuhei, who is part of our team.

Stockholm's shortage is structural, not cyclical

The padel boom was a demand spike. Stockholm's facility gap is something different and more durable.

The region has roughly 32,300 inhabitants per sports hall, against 12,700 in Gothenburg. That gap has been widening for more than twenty years, and the region is heading towards 2.7 million inhabitants by 2030. That is not a trend to be timed. It is a deficit to be closed.

The public case is equally stable. The WHO notes that physical activity can affect 13 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals; The Dome is designed for direct impact on 6 and supporting impact on 7, and is aligned with the four principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Those are the terms municipalities, federations and long-horizon capital actually share.

What we would say to an investor

Do not read the Swedish padel correction as a warning about racket sports. Read it as a warning about concentration.

The players are still here. The 600,000 amateurs did not disappear when their local hall closed; they are looking for somewhere to play, train and compete, and in Stockholm there is not enough somewhere to go around.