Novak Djokovic has warned that club tennis is “endangered” amid the growing popularity of alternatives such as padel and pickleball.
The seven-time Wimbledon champion said “we are still doing a very poor job” of maintaining tennis at “the base level” and that its future was under threat.
“Tennis is a very global sport and it’s loved by millions of children that pick up a racket and want to play, but we don’t make it accessible. We don’t make it so affordable,” the world No 2 said on Saturday after his Centre Court win against Australia’s Alexei Popyrin.
Djokovic called for the creation of a foundation to protect tennis at the club level as it faces competition from other pursuits. Padel, a hybrid of squash and tennis, is one of the fastest-growing sports in the UK, with more than 500 dedicated courts and 200,000 active players, including celebrities such as Stormzy, David Beckham, Jürgen Klopp and even the two-time Wimbledon champion Andy Murray.
Created in Mexico in the 1960s, it is played like tennis but on a court a third of the size and with back walls to bounce the ball off. It has 30 million players and 63,000 courts worldwide, according to a 2024 report by the International Padel Federation.
In the US, pickleball – a cross between tennis, badminton and ping pong – is the fastest-growing sport, with an estimated 13.6 million players, including celebrity fans such as Larry David, the Kardashians and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Djokovic said: “Now we have the padel … that is growing and emerging. People kind of have fun with it and say: ‘Yeah, but tennis is tennis.’ Tennis is the king or queen of all the racket sports, that’s true. But on a club level, tennis is endangered.
“If we don’t do something about it, as I said, globally or collectively, padel, pickleball in [the] States, they’re going to convert all the tennis clubs into padel and pickleball because it’s just more economical.
“You have one tennis court. You can build three padel courts on one tennis court. You do the simple math. It’s just much more financially viable for an owner of a club to have those courts.”
It costs up to £80 an hour to rent a padel court in London, and more courts are being built across the country.
In April, plans were announced to build a £2.5m complex, billed as the “largest padel facility in the north”, consisting of 11 courts, a clubhouse and a gym, near the Trafford Centre in Greater Manchester.
In May, Mole Valley district council in Surrey granted permission for six courts to be built in Leatherhead that would be used at national and international levels, according to the BBC.
Djokovic said the future of grassroots tennis was under increased threat in countries such as his native Serbia, which did not have “a strong federation … or history or big budgets”.