Le World Padel Tour is the professional circuit of padel worldwide, so far everyone has heard about these tournaments or seen the best points posted on the internet. But how is this circuit structured? How many tournaments are played during the year? What is the prize money distributed? Who are the headliners of the WPT?

You will have all the answers to your questions in this article on the world circuit of Padel !

1 / The circuit

Played from March to December, the circuit is divided into 3 categories of tournaments:

  • The Masters: 4 for 2018
  • The Opens: 11 for 2018
  • The challengers: 7 disputed in 2017, the 2018 calendar is still not available

Players score points individually in each tournament and the 8 best female and male pairs qualify for the Final Master at the end of the year.

We can see the omnipresence of Spain in terms of the calendar, the World Padel Tour growing up should open up to more and more countries wanting to organize tournaments in the future.

It should be noted that unlike the men's circuit which hosts up to 4 major tournaments per week, the padel only offers one tournament at a time. So the best are everywhere, all the time.

2 / How a tournament is going

Each tournament hosts from 28 to 32 teams at most with preflights (qualifiers) and pre-previews (pre-qualifying) that allow teams that do not fit directly into the final table to be able to qualify. It is at the level of pre-previas that our reigning French champions, Bastien Blanqué and Johan Bergeron, scrap each week to climb the ranking

3 / The Prize-money

The Men's Masters are the best endowed tournaments (except the Final Master) with a global prize-money of 90 000 €.

Champions€ 9 x 000,00
finalists€ 5 x 850,00
Semifinalists€ 3 x 375,00
Quarter finalists€ 2 x 025,00
Eighth of finalists€ 1 x 012,50
First round450,00 € x 2

Females are much worse off with 28000 €

champions€ 2 x 660,00
finalists€ 1 x 820,00
Semifinalists€ 1 x 060,00
Quarter finalists600,00 € x 2
Eighth of finalists325,00 € x 2
First round200,00 € x 2

The prices are 20% lower in the Open category but we can see that you have to be part of the top 10 in the world to be able to hope to earn a good living on the circuit of Padel Global. Over the past 5 years, the endowments have been increasing sharply, which allows us to hope for a more extensive and much better endowed circuit in the years to come.

In the challenger category the prizes are getting closer to the future tennis circuit.

MenWomen
Champions€ 1 x 400,00930,00 € x 2
finalists800,00 € x 2630,00 € x 2
Semifinalists500,00 € x 2350,00 € x 2
Quarter finalists325,00 € x 2210,00 € x 2
Eighth of finalists180,00 € x 2125,00 € x 2
First round130,00 € x 275,00 € x 2

4 / The best players

On the men's circuit, Pablo Lima and Fernando Belasteguin dominated the 2017 circuit.

Belasteguin, world number one for 16 years, played 314 games on the circuit for 293 victories. A ratio of 93% completely insane which makes him the head of the gondola of padel global. With his friend Pablo Lima they played 14 finals in 15 tournaments contested for 8 titles.

The only ones to have contested the hegemony of the world number one last year are Carlos Gutiérrez (Alias ​​Sanyo) and Francisco "Paquito" Navarro. 11 finals for them with 5 titles at stake. Unfortunately this pair decided to disband in 2018, let's hope they will continue to push Bela / Lima each with their new partner.

The twins Maria José and Maria Pilar Alayeto left nothing but crumbs for their opponents during the 2017 temporada on the women's circuit. 9 titles and only 2 surprising defeats in the semi-finals out of the 11 tournaments they played together, a real raid!

Third in the rankings is former professional tennis player Marta Marrero, who has moved from one discipline to another in a spectacular way. This gives a lot of hope to all the former players and tennis players. No title for her this year with 7 defeats in the final.

Mario Cordero

Mario Cordero

Mario Cordero is a fine technician of the team. He observes, he analyzes, he returns to themes to bring his expertise. Complete, the man is as in the field!