Padel Has Rating Systems. Does It Have a Common Language?

On Saturday I posted about Gilberto (Tito) Machado, the CEO of DUPR, and what he has built in pickleball. A comment on that post stopped me.

Alvaro Quintana Sanjuan is the Director of Padel at Centercourt in New Jersey. He wrote this:

"Today a 4.0 from Spain, a 4.0 from an app and a 4.0 from a tennis background are three different players, and the club pays for it with bad matches. Do you think padel will end up with one common rating like pickleball, or stay split by country?"

That is an operator describing what the split costs his club: the same number arriving with three different meanings.

I have been the visiting player

I have played padel once or twice a week for the last six months. I have been rated more than once, in more than one place, and I could not tell you what any of those numbers mean. I come from competitive tennis, where the rating follows you. I have never had to guess what my number meant.

It took a while to find the right group. Eventually I did, and the matches got good.

Then I moved. One of the first places I played was a club in West Palm, new to me. It was not a new club. It had been open for two years.

I showed up for open play, and the mix was rough. Good people, bad matches.

The man at the desk was great. I told him who I was and how much I had played. To get me signed up for anything, he had to go into the system and change my rating by hand. Six months of matches, and my number did not walk through the door with me. A person had to override the software so a regular player could play.

Nobody from the club followed up. Not a call, not a message asking how it went or what I was looking for. The rating was one problem. The welcome was another.

They had a new player standing at the desk telling them exactly what he wanted. Two years in, the system still made me a stranger.

I cannot tell you whether that was a platform problem or a club process problem. As the player, I experienced them as the same thing.

Here is my answer.

Where I land

My bet: one rating becomes the default in US padel.

Globally, the split lasts longer. Existing national and platform systems have their own structures and constituencies.

In this country, I expect operators to push convergence. They are the ones placing players when the numbers disagree.

Not necessarily the first rating built. The one enough operators trust outside the system where it started.

The systems already exist

Anyone who tells you padel is waiting for its first rating system has not looked.

PLAYTOMIC grades players on a 0 to 7 scale, adjusted by match results, inside its own booking world.

World Padel Rating calls itself the official rating system of the US and Canadian padel associations, runs its own circuit, and offers its API to third-party platforms that want to plug in.

PadelLevels comes from the team behind SquashLevels, which became the standard in its sport.

Playbypoint runs NPRP, a rating system its own documentation describes as universal across every club using Playbypoint.

A newer entrant, Universal Padel Rating, states on its own homepage that zero universal standards exist today, directly above its offer to become the one.

Different routes into the same operator problem.

The systems exist. The open question is how far a number's authority travels.

NPRP travels across clubs, on one platform. WPR offers to travel across platforms, through integrations. Neither is the same as a number every operator accepts on sight. A rating can cross clubs and still stop at the platform line. It can cross platforms and still have to earn the trust of the coach placing tomorrow's match.

Pickleball ran this experiment already

DUPR's position in pickleball was not built on math alone.

It was built on distribution. Official rating of the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball (MLP), and of USA Pickleball itself. Earlier this year, Playtomic chose to integrate DUPR’s established pickleball rating. On October 21, Life Time Inc. announced DUPR is being built into its app, so the rating now sits inside how a national operator's members find matches.

The algorithm earns trust. Distribution puts that trust to work.

Padel gets the same test. Not identical economics. The same question: whose number is recorded everywhere the matches happen.

The decision hiding inside this one

Here is what I think operators are missing, and it is the part that matters most.

When you adopt a booking platform that carries a rating, you are choosing more than software. You are deciding who holds your players' competitive history, and on what terms you can ever get it back.

The question is not whether the platform is acting badly. It is whether the club understands the dependency it is creating.

Ask the questions now, while the answer is still cheap:

If I leave this platform, what happens to my players' ratings? Can the match history and the ratings be exported, and what will another system actually recognize?

Can a visiting player walk in with a number from another system and have my staff trust it on day one?

Who can change a disputed placement, and under what rules?

An export file is not the same as a portable rating. Getting your match records back and having another system honor the number are two different things.

Those are custody questions. The player relationship is the most valuable asset a club owns.

That is a decision, not a download.

What this looks like Monday morning

If you run padel programming, three moves before this gets decided for you.

First, inventory your levels. How many rating systems are already inside your building, between your booking app, your leagues, and your coaches’ own assessments? Establish who can change each one and which assessment wins when they disagree.

Second, ask your platform what leaves with you: match history, ratings, or both. Get the answer in writing before you need it.

Third, agree on a placement protocol. When a new player arrives with a number from somewhere else, your staff needs a consistent way to assess it, even if that protocol is a coach's assessment you build yourself. Until the systems agree, your team needs a method. A bad first match is the one a new player remembers.

This is a conversation for Orlando

The International Association of Pickleball and Padel Facilities SMASH 2026 runs November 17 to 19 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, inside the Athletic Business Show. The Tuesday program has a session of its own on DUPR, with Tito Machado on it, at 11 AM. That afternoon, the Padel Business Summit runs from 1 to 5, followed by networking at 5 PM.

Ratings in the morning. Padel operators in the afternoon. The connection is worth making.

This belongs on that agenda. Bring your position. I will bring mine.

REGISTER HERE

Choose your rating the way you would choose a business partner. Understand what it connects, what it controls, and what happens if you leave.

Go find your court, and see you in Orlando.

Mike

Sources

- Alvaro Quintana Sanjuan, comment on "Tito Machado" LinkedIn post, October 24, 2026

- IAPPF, SMASH 2026 official agenda (DUPR In Depth session, Tuesday 11 AM; Padel Business Summit, Tuesday 1-5 PM), iappf.org

- Playtomic, "The Playtomic Levels: ups & downs," Playtomic player help center, playerhelp.playtomic.com

- World Padel Rating, worldpadelrating.com; EIN Presswire, "World Padel Rating (WPR) and Playbypoint Partner to Transform the Club and Player Experience in Padel" (WPR as the USPA official rating system), einpresswire.com

- LevelTech, "Introducing PadelLevels," leveltech.io; Padel Business Magazine, interview with LevelTech co-founder Jethro Binns (SquashLevels provides the official world squash ratings; endorsed by the PSA and the World Squash Federation), newsletter.padelbusinessmagazine.com

- NPRP by Playbypoint, nprp.io ("universal across every club using Playbypoint")

- Universal Padel Rating, homepage, universalpadelrating.com ("0 universal standards exist today" - checked October 25, 2026)

- DUPR, "Playtomic Partners with DUPR," dupr.com

- Life Time, "Life Time Makes it Easier for Members to Find Competitive Matches with DUPR In-App Integration," PR Newswire, October 21, 2026, prnewswire.com