Why Community Always Comes Before Courts

Our CXO, Vincent, recently sat down with leading booking platform MATCHi to discuss our journey to date and the importance of building lasting padel communities. Read the interview below.

There's a particular kind of conviction that comes from loving a sport long before anyone around you has heard of it.

For Vincent Hivert, co-founder and CXO of Game4Padel, that conviction took root in France more than twenty years ago, when he first stepped onto a padel court and immediately understood what made the game stick. The rallies last longer. The walls keep the ball in play. Complete beginners can share a court with seasoned players and everyone leaves smiling.

What was less obvious was whether the UK would ever catch on. But when the Game4Padel team looked at the question honestly, the answer kept coming back to the same thing.

Padel, almost by design, is neither intimidating nor elitist. In a country where the pub after the match is as important as the match itself, a sport built entirely around shared experience wasn't a hard sell. It just needed someone willing to build the infrastructure before the demand was obvious.

That bet has paid off. Game4Padel now operates multiple venues across the UK and has recently launched a franchise model to bring other operators into the fold. But turning that early conviction into a functioning chain at scale taught the team lessons that no amount of optimism could have prepared them for.

Community isn't a strategy, it's the whole point

The central insight running through seven years of Game4Padel's operation is deceptively simple: if players don't feel connected, they stop coming.

Not immediately, and not loudly. They just gradually play less, drift away, and the sport loses them without ever knowing quite when it happened.

"We've focused heavily on community from day one," Vincent says. "Coaching at all levels, social sessions, leagues, box ladders, women's padel, juniors and just as importantly, helping people find other players." That extends to every touchpoint a player has with the venue, right down to how easy it is to book a court. "If booking isn't easy, people just don't play as much. Removing friction early on made a huge difference as we grew."

The real test of whether any of that is working, Vincent argues, isn't how busy the courts look on a Friday evening. Peak time, he says, looks after itself. The true measure shows up on Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, in the quieter slots that only fill when players feel genuinely confident they'll have a good experience.

That confidence isn't built through pricing strategies or promotional offers. It's built through everything that came before.

Building that kind of community across a single venue is one thing. Doing it across an entire chain is where the real complexity begins.

Systematising everything except culture

Scaling from one venue to many introduces a different category of problem entirely. The challenge isn't replication; it's knowing what to replicate and what to leave alone.

The temptation to impose uniformity in the name of efficiency is constant, but it can quietly erode the local character that makes individual venues work. "The challenge is building systems that scale while still leaving enough flexibility for each venue to feel local and relevant."

What makes this harder is that the consequences of getting it wrong are slow to appear. A venue that loses its local feel doesn't collapse. It just gradually becomes less sticky, less alive, and harder to diagnose. By the time the numbers reflect it, the cultural damage is already done.

When asked which single metric he'd track across the entire business if he could only choose one, Vincent's answer is immediate.

"Off-peak occupancy and engagement."

Not revenue. Not total membership. Not how busy the courts look on a Friday evening. 

It's a deliberately contrarian answer, and that's exactly what makes it worth paying attention to. Anyone can fill a court at 6pm on a Thursday. What happens at 10am on a Tuesday is where the real story is.

Britain proved the thesis, and now the next generation can build on it

All of that complexity — the hard calls, the local flexibility, the relentless focus on off-peak hours — only makes sense if the players are genuinely committed to the sport.

And as it turns out, they are. What the team didn't fully anticipate was just how devoted British players would prove to be. Not in a fashionable, trend-chasing way, but in the stubborn, stoic way that anyone who has watched a British amateur footballer play through horizontal rain will immediately recognise.

"We had a really tough winter this year, and occupancy on uncovered courts stayed strong," Vincent says. "That level of commitment is something you don't fully appreciate until you've been operating venues for a while."

It quietly vindicates the original thesis: the cultural fit was always real, it just needed the right infrastructure around it. Which is ultimately what Game4Padel has spent seven years building, and what Vincent wants to pass on to the next generation of operators entering the market. "If you love the game, go for it. Because no one told us that seven years ago."

The opportunity, he insists, is very real. But the framing matters. 

Padel in the UK will grow, but whether it grows well is another question

As for where the UK padel market goes from here, Vincent expects prices to stabilise as supply increases, healthy for the sport overall even if it puts pressure on some operators. He hopes more children will start with padel as their first racket sport.

But his main concern isn't whether padel will grow. It's whether it will grow well.

Seven years in, and that's still the job.