Sex differences in professional padel players: analysis across four seasons

ABSTRACT

Despite the growth of research on padel, available literature is mainly focused on male samples of modest size. This study characterised the differences in performance between men’s and women’s top-class padel players competing in the World Padel Tour (WPT) across four entire seasons (2016–19). Game performance indications from 1070 sets (532 matches) were collected from the official WPT website records. Men and women’s performance were compared by means of the set result and the season. Men padel players performed a smaller number of actions, winners and errors per game than women, except winning smashes and smashes, by order of effect size (ES) magnitude: winning smashes (ES = 1.27), smashes (ES = 1.26), unforced errors (ES = 0.59), winners (ES = 0.55), breakpoints won (ES = 0.42), breakpoints (ES = 0.41) and winning volleys (ES = 0.24). Additionally, sex differences in unforced errors, winners, breakpoints, and breakpoints won become bigger as the time goes, with men showing an increasing greater performance. These findings confirm the existence of sex differences in professional padel performance and a worrying trend to becoming bigger. The sex specificities should be considered to both optimise training and competition plans and mitigated these sex disparities in padel players.

KEYWORDS:

• Racket sports
• performance indicators
• competition
• gender
• paddle tennis

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.