Ratings, Ratings, Ratings: Our Learnings from the Padel World Summit 2026
After three days at the Padel World Summit in Barcelona, one topic dominated almost every meaningful conversation we had, and every conversation we overheard.
Player ratings.
Whether we were speaking to clubs, federations, booking platforms, tournament providers or technology companies, the same frustrations surfaced again and again.
Players don’t know their true level. Clubs struggle to create balanced matches. Competitions are often filled with players entering at the wrong standard. And perhaps most importantly, players are being forced to maintain different ratings across different platforms.
The industry knows there is a problem. What surprised us was how much agreement there was about the cause.
Padel Has a Fragmentation Problem
Today, a player can have one rating on a booking platform, another in a local league, another in a tournament system and no rating at all when they walk into a new club. The result is confusion. Players don’t know which rating to trust.
Clubs spend countless hours manually organising matches and adjusting competitions.
Platforms build rating systems that work inside their own ecosystem but stop being useful the moment a player leaves it.
Everyone is trying to solve the same problem independently. And that’s the problem. The sport doesn’t need dozens of disconnected ratings. It needs one rating that travels with the player. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this discussion was the fact ratings we brought up on both stages during the Padel World Summit, not only by ourselves on the Innovation Stage, but also on the Main Stage during a conversation regarding clubs and how they can best support players, drive engagement and ensure fair matches.
The Industry Doesn’t Need Another Rating System
This was perhaps the biggest learning from the Padel World Summit. Nobody we spoke to was asking for another closed rating system. What clubs, operators and technology providers want is a rating they can trust. A rating that works across platforms. A rating that helps players find better matches wherever they choose to play.
The future is not a world where every platform owns its own rating.
The future is a world where ratings become infrastructure.
Just as players expect their handicap to follow them in golf, or their ranking to be recognised wherever they compete, padel players increasingly expect their level to move with them. The industry doesn’t need more walls. It needs more bridges.
Why This Matters
At first glance, ratings can seem like a niche problem. In reality, they sit at the centre of almost everything that matters. Accurate ratings improve matchmaking. Better matchmaking creates more enjoyable games. More enjoyable games increase participation. Higher participation improves retention. And better retention helps clubs, federations and platforms grow.
When ratings are wrong, everyone feels it. When ratings are right, everybody benefits.
Why We’re Confident
For us, the conversations in Barcelona reinforced something we’ve believed for a long time, this challenge is solvable.
The PadelLevels team is building on more than a decade of experience operating SquashLevels, one of the world’s largest and most established rating systems in squash.
We’ve already seen what happens when an entire sport begins to rally around a trusted, independent rating. Players play more. Communities become more connected. Competition becomes fairer. And the sport becomes easier to navigate. The same opportunity now exists in padel.
What’s Next?
The encouraging news is that the industry appears more aligned than ever before. Across dozens of meetings, we found widespread agreement that fragmented ratings are holding the sport back and that portable, trusted ratings will play a major role in padel’s future.
The challenge now isn’t identifying the problem. The challenge is solving it together. If there was one message we took away from the Padel World Summit 2026, it was this:
Padel has a ratings fragmentation problem.
And solving that fragmentation may be one of the most important opportunities the sport has over the next few years.