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.<\/p>\n
F<\/p>\n
rances Tiafoe is ranked No. 17 in the world in men\u2019s 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\u2014let 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\u2019s pros.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s actually pretty tough to be good at, even for former tennis players or current tennis players,\u201d Tiafoe recalls. \u201cI was horrendous compared to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet the steep learning curve didn\u2019t 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\u2019 but often said like \u201cpaddle\u201d in English-speaking countries) currently has only about 100,000 recreational players in the United States, Tiafoe believes the sport\u2019s combination of athleticism and strategy has it ready to go pro.<\/p>\n
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\u2014who wrote a check and was not simply gifted the equity, as is sometimes the case with athlete partnerships\u2014leads a broader funding round exceeding $2 million that also includes investments from goalkeeper Maarten Paes of Major League Soccer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNew York is obviously the biggest market in sports for anything,\u201d Tiafoe says. \u201cSo it was a no-brainer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Illustration by Alice Lagarde for Forbes; Photos by Daniel Kopatsch\/Getty Images; Daniel Kopatsch\/Getty Images; Minas Panagiotakis\/Stringer\/Getty Images; Shi Tang\/Getty Images; Dan Istitene\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
World\u2019s Highest-Paid Tennis Players 2025 The Pro Padel League launched with seven teams across the U.S., Canada and Mexico and expanded to ten\u2014including the Atlantics\u2014last year. This season\u2019s 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\u2014a contrast from the league\u2019s European counterpart, Premier Padel, which organizes individual-style competitions akin to most of the tournaments on tennis\u2019 ATP and WTA Tours.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n While it isn\u2019t 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\u2019s $10 million seed funding round announced in March.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we started the PPL, pretty much everyone would ask us, \u2018Are you talking about pickleball?\u2019\u201d says Mike Dorfman, the league\u2019s CEO. \u201cAnd we don\u2019t get that question anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But pickleball uses a slower ball\u2014which has made it popular among American seniors\u2014and doesn\u2019t feature the off-the-walls play of padel, among other differences in their rules and equipment. \u201cI think pickleball is a joke,\u201d Tiafoe says, adding: \u201cThe level of difficulty is about zero. That\u2019s why everyone wants to go and play.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The U.S. added 352 padel courts in 2024\u2014more than doubling the 227 that existed at the end of 2023\u2014and a report from court-booking app Playtomic notes padel is \u201cgrowing steadily\u201d in the U.S. with \u201cmajor expansion expected around 2027.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> after expanding too rapidly, cannibalizing its national sponsorships and losing its ESPN TV deal. Meanwhile, two high-profile American women\u2019s soccer leagues collapsed before the NWSL finally took hold<\/a>.<\/p>\n Off The Wall: The New York Atlantics and other teams in the Pro Padel League play a hybrid of tennis and squash, with players allowed to hit the ball off the glass encasing the court.<\/p>\n New York Atlantics<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI 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\u2019re from,\u201d he adds. \u201cUntil the fans aren\u2019t asking the questions at the pro level, you will always have limited fan reach.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019 Paes brings an even larger fan base, with more than double that audience on Instagram alone.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s a big value-add in growing the sport here in the U.S. and getting eyeballs on it,\u201d the 27-year-old Dutch goalkeeper tells Forbes.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Tiafoe knows that it could take time for him to see a significant return on his investment\u2014probably longer than the three to five years he might expect for an exit on a tech startup\u2014and 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMan, what a dream,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s truly humbling.\u201d<\/p>\n \nMore From ForbesForbesThe World\u2019s Highest-Paid Tennis Players 2025By Brett Knight<\/a>ForbesHow An Upstart Apparel Brand Lured Jack Draper Away From Tennis Juggernaut NikeBy Matt Craig<\/a>ForbesTennis Legend Roger Federer Is Now A BillionaireBy Justin Birnbaum<\/a>ForbesWhy The ATP Tour Is Taking A Sponsorship Away From Tennis TournamentsBy Matt Craig<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new funding round values the franchise at more than $10 million as the racket sport takes on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98140,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,16006,57064,57066,57063,3234,57065,15967,26018,57062,82,593],"class_list":["post-98139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-frances-tiafoe","tag-frances-tiafoe-earnings","tag-frances-tiafoe-how-rich","tag-frances-tiafoe-investment","tag-funding","tag-new-york-atlantics","tag-padel","tag-pickleball","tag-pro-padel-league","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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