Tennis Star Frances Tiafoe Bets On Pro Padel With Investment In New York Team

A new funding round values the franchise at more than $10 million as the racket sport takes on pickleball in the U.S. with a faster-paced game and a growing fan base in Europe.

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rances Tiafoe is ranked No. 17 in the world in men’s tennis and has twice reached the semifinals at the U.S. Open, so it might be hard to imagine the 27-year-old American ever struggling with a racket—let alone this year. But that is exactly what happened when Tiafoe tried padel for the first time this spring, while he was in Spain for the Madrid Open and as he continued to play every day for weeks, sometimes against the sport’s pros.

“It’s actually pretty tough to be good at, even for former tennis players or current tennis players,” Tiafoe recalls. “I was horrendous compared to them.”

Yet the steep learning curve didn’t diminish his enthusiasm for the sport, a hybrid between tennis and squash that is played in a glass-encased court and is growing quickly in Europe. And while padel (traditionally pronounced pah-DEL’ but often said like “paddle” in English-speaking countries) currently has only about 100,000 recreational players in the United States, Tiafoe believes the sport’s combination of athleticism and strategy has it ready to go pro.

On Tuesday, the New York Atlantics of the two-year-old Pro Padel League announced the addition of Tiafoe as a strategic advisor and an investor, with a roughly 3.3% stake in the franchise. Tiafoe—who wrote a check and was not simply gifted the equity, as is sometimes the case with athlete partnerships—leads a broader funding round exceeding $2 million that also includes investments from goalkeeper Maarten Paes of Major League Soccer’s FC Dallas and former professional tennis player Gordon Uehling. The deal values the Atlantics at more than $10 million, up from the $200,000 fee that franchises had to pay to join the league in 2023.

“New York is obviously the biggest market in sports for anything,” Tiafoe says. “So it was a no-brainer.”

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The Pro Padel League launched with seven teams across the U.S., Canada and Mexico and expanded to ten—including the Atlantics—last year. This season’s schedule includes five tournaments, running from June through the championship in New York in October, and employs a franchise format, with rosters of four men and four women per team—a contrast from the league’s European counterpart, Premier Padel, which organizes individual-style competitions akin to most of the tournaments on tennis’ ATP and WTA Tours.

To this point, the Pro Padel League has not disclosed its revenue, but it has long-term sponsorship arrangements with Adidas and equipment manufacturer Bullpadel, as well as event-specific sponsors that include Ford and HotelPlanner. The PPL also has 13 media rights deals across 100 countries and six continents, in addition to airing its events globally on YouTube, and the league receives a fee from some of those broadcast arrangements, as opposed to just coverage of production costs.

While it isn’t yet profitable, the PPL has piqued the interest of venture capitalists, with Left Lane Capital and Gary Vaynerchuk among the investors participating in the league’s $10 million seed funding round announced in March.

“When we started the PPL, pretty much everyone would ask us, ‘Are you talking about pickleball?’” says Mike Dorfman, the league’s CEO. “And we don’t get that question anymore.”

That confusion is understandable given how pickleball has driven a racket sports boom in the U.S. An estimated 19.8 million Americans played that sport in 2024, soaring 311% from three years earlier, according to marketing agency Two Circles. And at the professional level, Major League Pickleball recently added the Palm Beach Royals as an expansion team for the 2026 season for a $16 million fee while the Los Angeles Mad Drops this month sold a majority stake at a $13 million valuation.

But pickleball uses a slower ball—which has made it popular among American seniors—and doesn’t feature the off-the-walls play of padel, among other differences in their rules and equipment. “I think pickleball is a joke,” Tiafoe says, adding: “The level of difficulty is about zero. That’s why everyone wants to go and play.”

With its faster pace, padel has been winning over fans overseas. The sport now has more than 30 million players worldwide, up from just eight million in 2018, according to Two Circles, and more than 14,500 people attended the semifinals of a professional tournament in Barcelona in December. Then, in May, an event in Argentina set a single-day attendance record for padel with more than 16,000 fans.

The U.S. added 352 padel courts in 2024—more than doubling the 227 that existed at the end of 2023—and a report from court-booking app Playtomic notes padel is “growing steadily” in the U.S. with “major expansion expected around 2027.” Also fueling the optimism is the appreciation of sports team values more broadly, with prices in the four major North American pro leagues climbing more than 1,700% over the past 27 years.

Still, the sports world is littered with upstart leagues that have failed spectacularly. The USFL famously tried to peel off professional football fans in the 1980s with a spring schedule, new rules, rising stars and wealthy owners, including Donald Trump. After an attempted switch to a fall schedule and a Trump-led lawsuit against the NFL, the league ceased operations in 1986. The track record is even worse in more niche sports. Roller Hockey International, for example, launched in 1993 and folded five years later after expanding too rapidly, cannibalizing its national sponsorships and losing its ESPN TV deal. Meanwhile, two high-profile American women’s soccer leagues collapsed before the NWSL finally took hold.

If the PPL is going to succeed in the competitive U.S. market, the league will need to establish a culture around the sport, says Dani Dios, a director in the padel group at talent agency WME Sports. “I believe the PPL is more of a long-term shot because it requires the fans to know who the pro players are and where they’re from,” he adds. “Until the fans aren’t asking the questions at the pro level, you will always have limited fan reach.”

That is an area where Tiafoe can add value, as the first active member of the ATP Tour to partner with a PPL team. And while he has roughly one million followers across Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), FC Dallas’ Paes brings an even larger fan base, with more than double that audience on Instagram alone.

“I think there’s a big value-add in growing the sport here in the U.S. and getting eyeballs on it,” the 27-year-old Dutch goalkeeper tells Forbes.

The Atlantics, of course, will also benefit from the financial contribution from Tiafoe and Paes, with plans to use the cash to fund player salaries, operational expenses and marketing activities in the New York area.

Tiafoe knows that it could take time for him to see a significant return on his investment—probably longer than the three to five years he might expect for an exit on a tech startup—and he is in no rush to cash in, thanks in part to an estimated $15.2 million in income over the past 12 months, the ninth-best mark in professional tennis.

Even with that financial success, and regardless of what his stake eventually yields, the prospect of owning a sports franchise is thrilling for Tiafoe, who spent much of his childhood living in a spare office at a nonprofit tennis center in College Park, Maryland, where his father worked as a custodian.

“Man, what a dream,” he says. “It’s truly humbling.”

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