In 2025, 1,042 padel tournaments were held in the Netherlands. A year earlier the figure was around 770. That 35 percent growth is impressive, especially when you consider that the number of participating players also rose by nearly a quarter, to more than 68,000.
But that's exactly where the strain is. Because behind each of those 1,042 tournaments is someone who processes the registrations, draws up the groups, emails out the schedule, keeps track of the results and puts together the knockout round. In many cases these are the same volunteers who did it last year too, with less.
Where the hours go
Most club tournament organizers estimate that preparing and running the event takes three to six hours per tournament, purely on the administrative side. Keeping track of registrations, drawing up a fair draw based on skill level, communicating schedules, processing results and manually assembling the knockout round.
That's time not spent on the tournament itself. No welcome speech, no atmosphere, no attention for the players. Those things disappear once the logistics take over.
What goes wrong without a system
When you organize by hand, mistakes are easily made. A team left out of the draw. A result that never came through. A group schedule that worked on paper but not against the court layout. Small things that cause big frustration for players who set aside a whole day for it.
Clubs that run several tournaments a year notice that the load is cumulative. The first tournament always works out. By the third or fourth tournament of the season the energy is gone and the margin for error is bigger. That's not because the volunteers have gotten worse, but because the system doesn't scale with them.
Automation as a practical answer
Many of the time-intensive tasks in tournament organization are repeatable and rule-based. A group draw based on rating is a calculation, not an art. Generating a knockout bracket as soon as the group stage is done, the same. Publishing standings after every result you enter, likewise.
Once those steps are automated, the organizer has time left over for what can't be automated: the experience, the communication, the atmosphere. That's what players look back on, not whether the Excel sheet ran smoothly.
Payment as an extra bottleneck
One underrated part of organizing is handling the entry fees. For open tournaments many clubs still rely on bank transfers, followed by manually checking who has already paid. That takes time and creates hassle.
A system that handles iDEAL payment at registration solves that in one go. No chasing, no manual bookkeeping, no participants who forget to pay.
More tournaments is fine. If you can handle it
The growth in the number of padel tournaments is good news for the sport. More events, more participants, more experience. But that growth is only sustainable if the organization scales with it. Ditching manual tracking is the first step. Not because Excel is bad, but because it doesn't scale.
The clubs still running ten tournaments a year five years from now won't be the clubs with the most volunteers. They'll be the clubs with the best systems.
