Pro Padel League opens 2026 season in New York with national TV deal

The Pro Padel League used Hammerstein Ballroom to launch its 2026 season from July 9-12, turning the New York opener into the league’s sharpest test yet of whether team padel can travel as a North American media property. With 10 teams spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico, the event was built as more than a showcase match weekend. It was the first checkpoint for a five-stop calendar that now runs from Manhattan to Miami.

New York opened the slate, followed by Los Angeles from Aug. 13-16, Playa del Carmen from Sept. 24-27, Guadalajara from Nov. 19-22 and Miami’s City’s Cup Finals from Dec. 3-6. PPL said four of the five events sit in team markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Playa del Carmen and Miami, while Guadalajara extends the league deeper into Mexico. “Our 2026 season schedule reflects the next phase of the Pro Padel League's growth,” PPL CEO Mike Dorfman said.

The broadcast setup gave the opener its biggest commercial edge. PPL announced a partnership with USA Sports that will bring national television coverage to the 2026 season, putting the championship matches from each regular-season stop on a far larger platform than the league has had before. In New York, that meant the city’s opening weekend doubled as a live audition for sponsors, broadcasters and new viewers who may be seeing team padel in a national window for the first time.

The league’s financial picture also showed momentum behind the schedule. PPL raised $15 million in new funding after taking in $10 million in seed money in March 2025, a sign that investors are willing to back the sport’s U.S. expansion beyond one-off exhibitions. That matters because padel’s challenge in North America is not only on-court quality but repetition: a format that can be sold, televised and understood across multiple markets.

PPL added another layer in June when it named Fever its official ticketing partner. Fever said the New York opener was the first PPL competition sold through its platform, giving the league a cleaner ticketing and fan-data pipeline as it tries to build habits around the product. PPL II, launched in February as a player-development initiative, pushed the same message from a different angle. The league is not just staging events; it is building the scaffolding for a season that can keep returning.