How the FIP ranking works across Premier Padel and CUPRA FIP Tour

Premier Padel sits at the top of padel’s pyramid, the CUPRA FIP Tour feeds the system underneath it, and the unified FIP ranking pulls both into one weekly picture for men and women. Points from a smaller FIP event can push a pair into bigger draws, better seeding, and the chance to test itself against the sport’s biggest names.

The ranking is one table, but it rewards two circuits

FIP’s 2024 ranking system uses each player’s 22 best results from Premier Padel and the CUPRA FIP Tour. A result does not live in a separate universe just because it came on the feeder tour. It still counts toward the same official international ranking that shapes the week-to-week order of the sport.

The other piece is timing. FIP kept 2023 ranking points on the board and then reduced them weekly over 50 weeks, from January 15, 2024 through December 22, 2024. In practice, that meant players were not thrown into a reset overnight. They carried their old points while the new system phased in, which gave the ranking a bridge instead of a cliff.

FIP, Premier Padel and the CUPRA FIP Tour issued the announcement jointly, with the men’s Professional Padel Association and the women’s International Padel Players Association agreeing to the structure. The ranking is the mechanism that decides who gets seen, who gets protected, and who has to grind through qualifying.

How the ladder actually works

The CUPRA FIP Tour is the competitive pathway below Premier Padel, giving players a place to bank ranking points, build form and move into stronger events. Premier Padel is the summit, where the biggest draws, biggest audiences and toughest fields live.

FIP’s history lists the sport’s first international professional circuit as the Padel Pro Tour in 2005, with World Padel Tour replacing it in 2013. FIP then launched its own international circuit in 2019, renamed it the CUPRA FIP Tour in 2020, and now uses that tour as part of a single ranking system rather than a parallel track.

Points come from both circuits, with the top 22 results doing the heavy lifting. A player who shows up week after week on the CUPRA FIP Tour can still climb, while a pair that spikes only in marquee Premier Padel events has less room for error.

Premier Padel is the summit, and its scale changed the sport

Premier Padel launched in 2022 as the sport’s elite stage. By FIP’s count, more than 500 players from around the world competed in its tournaments, and the first season ran on five continents. It featured over 26 men’s and women’s tournaments across 14 countries, was broadcast across more than 180 territories and 6 continents, and reached a household audience above 150 million.

In August 2023, Qatar Sports Investments’ acquisition of World Padel Tour was announced with the goal of creating a single global professional tour governed by FIP. By that point, Premier Padel had already pulled in more than 110 top female players in March 2023 through the International Padel Players Association, a sign that the elite field was consolidating before the paperwork fully caught up.

Now, if a player rises through CUPRA FIP Tour events and gets into Premier Padel, the same ranking system follows the jump.

Why the unified ranking changes what fans should watch

A pair that is winning lower-tier events is not just “good for the circuit below.” Those points can become a passport into tougher draws, and the 22-best-results format rewards sustained production instead of one hot month. In padel, chemistry, court geometry and matchup quality can make a young pair look ordinary one week and dangerous the next.

It also gives context to established stars who choose where to play. On a fragmented calendar, skipping one side of the sport could distort the picture. Under one ranking, absences and bad runs cost something everywhere.

In March 2025, Premier Padel said its Ranking Committee meetings with FIP, the PPA and the IPPA produced adjustments that kept the women’s draw sizes unchanged, raised women’s P2 prize money, and restored men’s P1 and P2 draw sizes to their 2024 levels after player criticism. The IPPA also agreed to cover qualification hotel costs for lower-ranked women players.

The numbers show how fast the sport is expanding

FIP’s World Padel Report 2025 put padel at more than 35 million active players worldwide, with more than 24,600 clubs and 77,300 courts across 150 nations and 20 dependent territories. It also put FIP-organized tournaments at 290 in 2025, up from 182 in 2024, with more than 11,000 athletes taking part.

FIP said its social media following rose from 210,000 in 2023 to 850,000 in 2025, and by November 2025 it had reached 100 member national federations.

Why the bigger picture matters

In November 2025, FIP said padel had been officially recognised by the Olympic Council of Asia for inclusion in the Asian Games. That followed padel’s inclusion in the European Games in 2023 and the South American Games in 2022.

FIP’s federation history starts in Madrid on July 12, 1991, with the first World Padel Championship held in Spain in 1992. From that base, padel has moved from a patchwork of circuits into a formal global pyramid: junior and senior team competitions at one end, the CUPRA FIP Tour as the proving ground, Premier Padel at the top, and one ranking tying the whole thing together.