Padel teamwork: Hexagon partners with Premier Padel and the International Padel Federation to grow the sport and expand the Hexagon Cup By Heather McLean Friday, February 21, 2025 - 08:52
Print This Story
Hexagon Cup is teaming up with Premier Padel a major global professional padel tour, majority-owned by Qatar Sports Investments, and the International Padel Federation, which is the governing body of padel worldwide to super-charge the sport
With the second Hexagon Cup now put to bed, the team behind it now have to contemplate not only what to do next year to improve the ever-evolving production, but also how to fill the channels with more padel content to keep fans happy inbetween.
As to how Hexagon Cup is going to extend its content over the course of the year to maintain fan interest, it announced on 18 February that it is teaming up with Premier Padel a major global professional padel tour, majority-owned by Qatar Sports Investments, and the International Padel Federation, which is the governing body of padel worldwide. This strategic partnership is aimed at super-charging the growth of padel worldwide.
Fans love this, and they want more, and you can see that in our numbers
The padel trio will participate in a range of collaborations, initiatives and projects, drawing on the experience, networks and connections of all groups to drive the development of padel globally, overseen by the International Padel Federation (FIP).
Expanding the Hexagon circuit
In the immediate term, Premier Padel and Hexagon Cup will promote each others' existing events, while Hexagon Cup has already started the process of becoming a recognised FIP tournament. In addition, the parties will explore a further expansion of the Hexagon Cup circuit - which currently comprises of the single annual tournament in Madrid - in new and emerging padel territories worldwide.
Read more Focusing on the continent: Bringing the production of the second-ever Hexagon Cup inhouse with Mediapro
A second immediate project is the delivery of the first-ever FIP Intercontinental Cup, taking place in Europe this summer, where the Hexagon Cup team has been appointed by FIP to be a partner of the event. The tournament, which will also be supported by Premier Padel, will see further details - including date, venue and name of the tournament - in the coming months.
Jose Garnes, Hexagon Cup's head of content, comments that the Hexagon Cup is going in the right direction. What we're faced with right now is what we wanted. Fans love this, and they want more, and you can see that in our numbers. To give you an idea, our biggest day was Sunday [during the tournament], which is good. That means people were building up across the week; the Spanish feed alone got 300,000 views, with a concurrent of 25,000 people watching. That is with no paid boost or any marketing spend behind it. That is hardcore audience coming in, watching and staying.
In English we saw the increase as well during the week, and during the weekend our numbers remained steady on the English feed despite adding geoblock restrictions as some partners were taking the weekend games. That shows you that the interest is going up.
Read more Increasing knowledge: Developing graphics to inspire and educate hardcore Spanish fans and newbie English fans of the Hexagon Cup
YouTube is very valuable to us because we actually get real time perspective on how well we are performing, he continues. We can be in 46 different broadcast partners across the world that are taking our signal, but the time that it takes for us to get the reports on how well we performed at an event, you are finished, you are already planning for the next one. For us, we were seeing it live, how the viewers were coming and going and throughout the week, so that gave us a lot of confidence that the product that we were doing was for the right audience, but also that the idea of splitting the signal and then coming back to one was working because the audience was staying. We were seeing the numbers increase and increase.
This year there was an increase in the number of global viewers for the Hexagon Cup, with two million views on YouTube, an increase of 71% compared to last year. Those viewers had an average of 24 minutes of media viewing time, up 29.8% compared to 2024.
Teams compete in the Hexagon Cup, with each team owned by celebrities, including tennis stars Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal's academy, football player Robert Lewandowski, and Hollywood actress Eva Longoria [pictured on the court]
Merging foundations
At the highest level, Premier Padel and Hexagon Cup will merge their strong foundations in the world of sports and entertainment to work on a range of initiatives aimed at launching new tournament concepts, brands and ideas (including at potential motorsport and football events), all geared towards raising awareness of the sport, engaging new audiences and markets, and ultimately supporting FIP's Olympic pathway for padel.
Luigi Carraro, president of FIP, said: This strategic partnership between Premier Padel and Hexagon Cup is an important milestone for the development of professional and amateur padel - bringing together institutions that support the whole ecosystem of the sport and who focus on the collective interests. The International Padel Federation looks forward to working with both Premier Padel and Hexagon Cup to enhance opportunities for women's, men's and youth players worldwide and supporting our Olympic ambitions in the coming years.
Enrique Buenaventura, founder of Hexagon Cup, added: We want to take padel to a new level internationally and this is why we are so excited about this alliance with Premier Padel. Together, with the support of FIP, we have the shared goal of globalising the sport and achieving its Olympic inclusion at
