London P1 Organizers Pledge Ten-Year Push to Own August

The confetti has settled at Olympia, the courts have been dismantled and Martina Calvo has flown home with history in her bag. Now the people who built London P1 from the ground up are already plotting what comes next — and their ambitions are unapologetically grand.

Saudi Arabia-based events company Sela, which organised the inaugural London Premier Padel P1, holds a ten-year agreement to stage the tournament at Olympia London. Olympia itself is locked in for at least five years and very likely another five after that. The venue filled to capacity for the fourth consecutive day on the final Sunday of the 2026 event, and over 20,000 spectators attended the week across all sessions. The message from the organisers was unambiguous: this was a beginning, not a peak.

"Wimbledon owns July," one senior figure involved in the event told ESPN. "We want padel to own August."

Bigger and Better for 2027

Plans for the 2027 edition are already taking shape. Organisers have promised a "bigger and better" event at the same Olympia location in the same early-August window. Among the ideas under active consideration is an amateur cup running alongside the professional tournament, where the winner would earn entry into qualifying or even the main draw — a concept that would tie recreational players directly into the professional spectacle and give the event a community dimension no other Premier Padel stop currently offers.

The 2026 event offered a glimpse of what that could look like. The prize pool of €479,068 attracted the full strength of the world's top players, and both finals delivered on the biggest stage. Martina Calvo and Claudia Fernández beat world No. 1s Gemma Triay and Delfi Brea 7-5, 6-3 in the women's decider, with Calvo becoming the youngest Premier Padel champion ever at 18 years, one month and four days. Arturo Coello and Agustín Tapia then edged Alejandro Galán and Federico Chingotto 6-3, 5-7, 7-5 to claim their eighth title of an extraordinary 2026 season.

The School Question and a Long-Term Calendar Play

One structural challenge the organisers acknowledge is the clash with the British school summer holiday. Running a padel festival during the week that most families are away from London reduces the potential domestic audience, particularly for younger fans. From 2028 onwards, the plan is to shift to a date outside the school break — a change that would require Premier Padel's calendar cooperation but would, in organisers' view, significantly expand grassroots engagement.

The ambition aligns with padel's own growth curve in the UK. Britain passed one million registered players earlier this year and the sport has surged into mainstream leisure chains, with David Lloyd Clubs alone now running 166 courts across 47 venues. Monthly player numbers at that single operator jumped from 3,300 in 2023 to 18,100 in 2025. London P1 arrived just as the infrastructure to sustain the fanbase was maturing.

The Jewel in the Crown

Sela's stated ambition is to make London P1 "the jewel in the crown" of the Premier Padel tour — a positioning challenge given the emotional weight that Madrid carries for Spanish fans, or that Paris and Roland Garros carry for French tennis. But Olympia's combination of heritage venue, central London location, and the BBC and ESPN reach achieved this year gives the event tools that few other padel stops possess.

The 2027 London P1 date has not yet been officially confirmed, but the early-August slot at Olympia is considered the baseline. The amateur cup format, the schools calendar adjustment and the broader "own August" messaging suggest that the organisers see a ten-year window not as a long-term lease but as a runway for building something structural — a padel institution in a city that, before this summer, had never hosted a Premier Padel event.