The WPT director: ”Starting next year there will be more broadcasting”

Whether the World Padel Tour should broadcast more matches from the tour has been hotly debated. Both among players and viewers. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper Marca, Mario Hernando, sports director at World Padel Tour, now opens up for broadcasting more matches for next season. 

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper Marca, World Padel Tour for the first time talking about the upcoming season. They talked about a topic that causes much debate among the spectators of the sport— broadcasting. 

Without going into too much detail, Fernando Hernando promised to expand the offer of World Padel Tour matches: 

”Starting next year, there will be more broadcasting days to offer more visibility to our players and more hours of spectacle to the fans.”

The circuit managed by Estrella Damm, which received the entry of Rucio Investments as a retail partner last May to strengthen its expansion scheme, only broadcasts three instances of its tournaments regardless of whether it is Open or Master: quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals. But now, many more matches will be shown on YouTube, or if they change their streaming location to another platform.

According to the newspaper Olé, the decision not to broadcast from Thursday is a business line: resign spectators from that day to concentrate as many views as possible during Friday - Saturday - Sunday. Sebastián Nerone (World Padel Tour player and commentator) said something about this in an interview.

"Today, the World Padel Tour has an excellent product that is consumed in three days: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which are quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals. Obviously, the growth will make that the round of 16 and the first round will be broadcasted at some point, but in the meantime, today, you are waiting for the quarterfinals. You say: 'Hey, there's padel on Friday, I can't miss it. But if you as World Padel Tour complete that grid of the whole padel week you say 'I don't know when to watch it because I have to watch Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday'...'. In a current way, you are more dependent on those three days. And I don't know if it is convenient for them to leave a little camera there without sound or ambient sound. Maybe as a business strategy, it doesn't suit them", were Nerone's words.

On the other hand, another of the promises corresponds to creating an OTT platform that will bring together the padel community to generate interactions between them. And the third and last one points to internationalization: 

Hernando said that World Padel Tour is in talks with several networks to reach more countries through TV, a step before doing it physically by staging its tournaments outside Spain.