Inside the UK Padel Audience

Padel has become hard to miss. But who is actually behind the audience?

We designed a UK padel audience to find out.

The result is a useful example of what audience design can reveal when you start with behaviour rather than a broad demographic label: around 350,000 UK adults, with distinctive brand affinities, media habits and geographic concentrations.

Padel is the hook here. The wider point is what becomes visible when an audience is built closer to the source.

How we designed the audience

The audience was built from anonymised mobile network and transaction data, then analysed across behaviours, brand affinities, media habits and location.

The same principle applies to the scores throughout. A higher affinity or index score means the audience is more likely than the general population to engage with that brand or appear in that location.

That’s what takes us from a broad label like “padel players” to the much more specific picture that follows.

The brands that stand out

Fitness is one of the clearest signals.

Strava has an affinity score of 7.16, with Garmin at 5.71. The audience actively tracks its sport and values measurable progress.

Premium fashion also features strongly. END. records an affinity score of 8.61, followed by Uniqlo at 7.00 and Adidas at 6.21. The pattern is not pure luxury. It points towards quality, function and contemporary style.

Away from sport and fashion, OpenTable scores 6.37, SeeTickets 6.28 and DesignMyNight 5.66, showing the importance of dining, live events and social occasions within the wider audience picture.

Sky Bet also over-indexes at 5.63, an interesting outlier that points to an audience with a close interest in competitive sport.

Premium, digital-first media habits

The media picture adds another layer.

The Financial Times has the highest premium news affinity at 6.25, followed by The Times at 5.28. The insight pack connects this with higher income, professional occupations and financial confidence.

Sport media is another strong theme, with engagement across BBC Sport, talkSPORT, ESPN and Sky Sports.

Acast scores 5.99, while Steam, Telegram and TimeOut also over-index. The wider media picture includes Spotify, Reddit, Netflix, The Mirror and ITVX.

Together, those signals build a much fuller understanding of how this audience spends its time beyond the padel court.

Where the audience concentrates

The geography is equally specific.

Cheshire's Golden Triangle is the highest-indexing area overall. Hale leads at 9.08, followed by Alderley Edge at 7.47, Mobberley at 6.67, Wilmslow at 6.45 and Bowdon at 6.37.

South West London is another stronghold, with SW London at 4.71 and West London at 3.50. The Yorkshire and Harrogate corridor over-indexes across LS22, with Bramham at 6.09 and Wetherby at 5.83.

Further clusters include Radlett at 6.05, Stockport at 3.11 and Bournemouth at 2.66.

It is this level of geographic detail, alongside the brand, lifestyle and media signals, that turns an audience definition into something planners can start to build around.

From one audience to yours

Padel is only the worked example.

The real value is the depth audience design can bring to a brief: who the audience is, what they engage with, how they consume media and where they are concentrated.

Skyrise builds bespoke, cookieless audiences from anonymised mobile network and financial transaction data, then uses the same audience definition across planning, activation and measurement. That audience can then be activated across programmatic media, including digital out-of-home.

If this is what one padel audience can reveal, imagine what yours could look like.