WIMBLEDON — The middle aisle in Aldi is a treasure trove of things you can imagine a use for but almost certainly don’t need.
A second power drill in case your main one breaks, a bird bath that you’re never going to put in the garden or a tatty birthday present for a niece whose exact date of birth you’ve forgotten anyway.
That is until this weekend, when I came across something in the Wimbledon Aldi that so many people are now in the market for: a cheap padel racket.
At £22.99, this does beat out the majority of rackets in the market for the fastest-growing racket sport in the UK – but its symbolism is perhaps stronger than its practicality. Because this was the closest budget supermarket to the All England Club, itself the centre of the tennis universe for the last two weeks, and there was not a tennis racket in sight.
Five padel courts have opened within a few minutes of the All England Club (Photo: The i Paper)Clearly, the Aldi marketeers believe that everyone inspired to play tennis by the BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage of Wimbledon can be persuaded that the far easier padel, even in the lion’s den.
They might be right too. Take Wimbledon Park. In among the Lime bikes, the Portals, the columns of tents and labelled queue segments, there is a padel club that you might not even know was there. This is the common land where tens of thousands of people camp out every day during Wimbledon in hope of getting onto the hallowed turf.
But just next door, behind a line of tall fir trees that surround a fairly beaten-up athletics track, there are five padel courts that have been open for only a few months. Where youngsters used to practise shot put, pole vault and high jump, corporate customers now come in their dozens to exercise their latest obsession.
The courts are a bit quieter on the day I visit with three other members of the Wimbledon press room. The tennis scares people away a bit, staff on site say, because the park gets so much busier and parking within a mile is virtually impossible. But there are still a couple of groups out in the sweltering heat, and generally trying to book anything on a weeknight is tricky.
www.instagram.com/p/DadgJ08NKqm/By contrast, a little further around the lake, 16 tennis courts lie increasingly unused. With school holidays starting, junior camps will fill some of them up during the day, but you can always get a court if you want one.
Now it is not comparing apples with apples, since there are three times as many tennis courts, but it is worth pointing out that the padel courts are £60 an hour during peak times, while tennis courts do not cost even a quarter of that.
Companies regularly book out all five padel courts and run social tournaments as part of team-building exercises; that is harder to do with tennis where different abilities struggle to share the same court in any meaningful way. And the participation numbers are sky-rocketing: padel is up to 860,000 monthly players according to latest official figures, a number that has already doubled in each of the last two years. Next year it will almost certainly overtake tennis on current trends.
Tennis courts like these in Wimbledon Park are far cheaper – but less busy than their padel equivalents (Photo: The i Paper)Perhaps though, the most powerful blow landed by padel over tennis in the last two weeks was not in the park or in a supermarket, but at a brownfield site in west London. Andy Murray, former world No 1 tennis player now turned golfer and YouTuber, did not play in the legends doubles event at Wimbledon, or take up the BBC’s standing punditry invite. Instead, he was at an exclusive, invitation-only pro-am padel event called the ADV Cup. It was quarter-final day at Wimbledon, and Britain’s most recognisable tennis player was up the road playing padel with F1 drivers, boxers and Love Island stars.
Murray’s investment in the sport is partially opportunistic: tennis is well-established while padel is still in its early growth phase, where entrepreneurs like the Scot can get in on the ground floor. But it still speaks volumes that he is willing to put both time and money into these events. He might even get the chance to play at the All England Club one day, where committee members are more than open to the idea of building courts if they can get expansion plans through planning red tape.
Maybe they’ve been shopping in Aldi.
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