Peterborough council approves Powerleague pitch conversion for padel courts

Peterborough City Council signed off on Powerleague’s plan to turn two football pitches at its Whittlesey Road site in Stanground into four padel courts, moving the city another step toward a permanent padel footprint. The approved courts will sit on the pitches closest to Stanground Academy, with enclosure boards, a synthetic playing surface and lighting, and use will be capped at 8am to 10pm.

Powerleague’s case was built on declining football demand. The company said booking data from the past 12 months showed reduced interest in its five-a-side pitches, and argued the site can be operated on four pitches rather than six. That is the real planning tradeoff here: two football surfaces disappear, and the operator is betting the remaining inventory can handle the players who still want a small-sided game.

The growth argument was equally blunt. Powerleague said its estate of 27 courts across seven locations drew more than 32,000 unique players over the past year, and claimed the Peterborough scheme would generate £3m in social value. It also pointed to a local catchment of 241,000 residents within a 20-minute drive and estimated padel demand at 39,000. Those are big numbers, but they mostly measure appetite, not access. In practical terms, the city’s new padel supply is being created by taking space from another sport that still needs pitches, bookings and foot traffic to survive.

That matters in Peterborough because the city had no padel facilities before this run of proposals, while the sport has been expanding fast across Great Britain. More than 400,000 adults and juniors played padel at least once in 2024, up from 129,000 in 2023. The market is clearly there. The tougher question is who gets first call on land when a club with existing football users decides padel is the better bet.

The council has already seen this fight once. It refused Padel Peterborough’s lawful-development application on February 6, 2025 for a separate plan to convert four unused tennis courts at the same Powerleague site into five padel courts and three pickleball courts. That group later returned with a full planning application and won permission in July 2025, after Sport England backed the proposal on the grounds that outdoor sport provision would outweigh the loss of tennis courts. By August 2025, local reporting suggested those courts, not Powerleague’s, were the likeliest route to Peterborough’s first padel venue. Now the city is set for both, and the land-use question has shifted from whether padel arrives to who gets pushed aside as it does.