Tennis Is Losing Players to Pickleball: 41% of UK Switchers Will Play Less Tennis

The most-asked question we get from the UK racket-sports industry is some version of: Is pickleball really cannibalising tennis?

The answer, from our 500-player survey, is yes — partially, asymmetrically, and faster than the LTA would like.

28% of UK pickleball players are former tennis players. Of those, 41% say they will play less tennis now they play pickleball, and 14% have stopped playing tennis altogether. That is a real switcher cohort, and it skews disproportionately to the kind of mid-life recreational tennis player that the UK club system relies on for its core membership revenue.

But the story isn’t only cannibalisation. 31% of UK pickleball players had never played a racket sport before. The sport is recruiting net-new participants at a higher rate than it is poaching them. The right framing isn’t “tennis is dying”; it’s “the racket-sport pie is getting bigger, and tennis isn’t growing the new piece.”

Here’s the data.

Key findings

• 28% of UK pickleball players came from tennis
• 19% came from squash or badminton
• 11% came from padel
• 31% had never played a racket sport before
• Of former tennis players: 41% will play less tennis now
• Of former tennis players: 14% have stopped tennis altogether
• Of former padel players: 33% will play less padel now
• Average age of tennis switchers: 52 (markedly older than the overall pickleball average of 47)
• 73% of tennis switchers cite physical impact (“less hard on my joints”) as a primary reason

Where UK pickleball players come from

The full sport-of-origin breakdown:

Two big takeaways:

1. The single largest cohort is “I never played a racket sport before”. Pickleball is recruiting from gym-quitters, lapsed runners, the over-50s, and — critically — women who have never picked up a racket as adults. (Our demographics report covers this in detail.)

2. Tennis is the largest cannibalisation source. Of the 69% of pickleball players with a racket-sport background, four out of every ten came from tennis.

Why tennis players switch

We asked the 28% of players who came from tennis to tell us why they made the switch. Multi-select responses:

The top three answers all describe pickleball doing something tennis structurally cannot:

• Joint impact. Tennis on hard courts is brutal on knees, hips, and rotator cuffs. Pickleball’s smaller court, lighter ball, and lower-impact strokes are a meaningful relief, especially for the 52-year-old median tennis switcher in our sample.
• Social structure. Tennis is overwhelmingly played in pairs or fours of people who already know each other. Pickleball “open play” pairs strangers on the same court constantly. That structure is a feature, not a bug.
• Court availability. Booking a tennis court at peak hours in any UK city is hard. Open-play pickleball doesn’t require a booking at all.

The “play less tennis now” cohort

Inside the 28% who came from tennis, this is what they told us about their future tennis playing intentions:

The combined “play less or stop” share — 55% — is a non-trivial reduction in tennis volume from this segment. It’s worth noting the 10% who say they’ll play more tennis: this is a small cohort of players who picked up pickleball as a cross-training tool and reported that it sharpened their hand-eye and net play.

What this means for the LTA, tennis clubs, and council courts

Three concrete implications:

1. The tennis “core member” is the most at-risk segment

Tennis switchers in our sample skew to: mid-life (median age 52), recreational level (3.0–3.5 NTRP equivalent), social-doubles preference, mid-week daytime players. That is exactly the recreational tennis player who underpins UK club membership economics.

If tennis clubs lose 14% of that cohort outright and another 41% reduce frequency, recreational tennis is looking at a multi-percent annual revenue drag — small in any one year, large compounded over five.

2. Mixed-use clubs are winning

The smartest UK racket-sports clubs are reading this and adding pickleball lines to two of their existing tennis courts. Several of the clubs we track — Pickleball England partner clubs in particular — report that 5–10% of their tennis members now play pickleball at the same club, increasing total membership value rather than shifting it. That is the playbook for tennis clubs that don’t want to lose the switcher revenue.

3. Padel growth is partially overstated

A quieter finding: 33% of former padel players in our sample say they’ll play less padel now they play pickleball. Padel’s UK growth has been driven by capital deployment (court installations) more than by player retention. If the early adopters are starting to switch — and our survey suggests at least some are — the padel court overbuild story will look very different in 18 months.

And the answer to the bigger question: is pickleball killing tennis?

No. The pickleball wave is overwhelmingly additive to UK racket-sports participation: 31% of players are net-new to the category, and the sport’s growth rate is ~2× the rate of tennis decline that we’d attribute to the switcher effect.

But pickleball is redirecting a meaningful slice of mid-life recreational tennis volume. The clubs and councils that read this and act in 2026 will be in a far stronger position than the ones that read this in 2028.

Methodology

PickleballOne UK Player Survey 2026, fielded 2 March – 6 April 2026. n = 500 UK-resident pickleball players who play at least once a month. Switcher questions: “What was the racket sport you played most often before pickleball?” and follow-up multi-select on motivation. Margin of error ±4.4 percentage points at 95% confidence. Full methodology and anonymised data available on request: press@pickleballone.co.uk.

Citation

Source: PickleballOne UK Player Survey 2026 (n=500). https://pickleballone.co.uk/blogs/learn/tennis-to-pickleball-switchers-survey-2026

Press contact

press@pickleballone.co.uk