Playa del Carmen hosts the Pro Padel League, and its own team plays at home

For four days at the end of September, the Poliforum in Playa del Carmen became a stop on a professional padel tour that otherwise runs through New York, Los Angeles and Miami. The Pro Padel League brought its ten franchises to the city from September 24 to 27, and one of them was playing at home: México Waves, the league's only Mexican team and the one that represents Playa del Carmen.

It is an unusual thing for a town of Playa's size to host. The league is a team competition built on the American franchise model, with city teams from the United States, Canada and Mexico each fielding men's and women's pairs, and a season that moves from arena to arena. Playa del Carmen was the third of five stops in 2026, after New York in July and Los Angeles in August, and ahead of Guadalajara in November and the finals in Miami in December.

A home team, and what it carried in

México Waves arrived with a title to its name. In Los Angeles on August 16, David Gala and Maxi Arce won the men's final for the Waves against the Florida Goats, 6-4, 3-6, 10-2, according to the specialist site Padel Addict. The council and the organisers billed the team as the league's reigning champion. Strictly, the crown it brought home was the men's title from that previous stop; the 2025 season as a whole was won by the New York Atlantics, the league says.

The Waves began in front of their own crowd on the afternoon of Thursday, September 24, and began well. According to the Playa del Carmen council, Gala and Arce beat Ignacio Vilariño and Javier Martínez of the New York Atlantics in two sets, 6-2 and 6-3, and in the women's match Lucía Peralta and Patricia Martínez came from a set down to beat Sofía Saiz and Marta Talaván, 1-6, 6-3, 10-3. Mayor Estefanía Mercado performed the coin toss before the men's match.

They finished it the same way. In the men's final on Sunday, September 27, Arce and Gala beat Álvaro Meléndez Amaya and José Antonio García Diestro of Miami Padel Club 6-4, 7-6 (7-3), giving México Waves the men's title at a second stop in a row, after Los Angeles, La Palabra del Caribe reported. The women's final went to the San Diego Stingrays, whose Claudia Jensen and Verónica Virseda beat Jimena Velasco and Raquel Eugenio Barrera of Las Vegas Smash 6-2, 6-4. The league's executive director, Mike Dorfman, praised the venue and the crowd and said the league was interested in coming back.

What the organisers and the city expected

The figures around the event are the organisers' and the council's, and they are worth reading as such. Presenting the tournament on September 2, the council said it would share a prize fund of more than US$150,000, and that, according to the organisers, more than 8,000 people were expected over the four days, with a broadcast reaching more than 100 countries and, in the United States, coverage on CNBC and Telemundo. The event's own website set its expectation higher, at more than 10,000 spectators and more than 28 hours of live coverage. No attendance count had been published by September 28.

The organisers also said the players included several ranked among the world's top 30. Mercado framed the tournament as a local story rather than a visiting one. "It is not a club that is visiting us," she said at the presentation. "It is a team from here, competing with the great stars of international padel." At the opening she called the league a chance to show the city's natural beauty, culture and food alongside the sport.

The promoters, the brothers César and Leonel Fernández del Campo, made the same point from the players' side. "In Los Angeles we felt a little alone," César Fernández del Campo told reporters. "Here we are the home team." Leonel Fernández, the team's chief executive, asked fans from Cancún, Cozumel, Tulum and Mérida to come to the Poliforum as well.

A sport that started in Mexico

There is a neat circle in all this. Padel was invented in Mexico, in Acapulco in 1969, when Enrique Corcuera adapted a court at his home by blending squash walls with elements of platform tennis. It went on to make its name in Spain and Argentina. In Playa del Carmen this September it came home, with a Mexican franchise playing in front of a Mexican crowd.

The city says it now wants to widen who gets to play. At the tournament's presentation, Alberto López Castro, who heads the Instituto Municipal del Deporte, said the city was working on projects to build public padel courts to bring the sport to more people, Clic Noticias reported. He gave no number of courts, no site and no date, so for now it is an intention rather than a program.

What the week does and does not show

The Poliforum is Playa del Carmen's main public sports complex, a sprawl of courts, a skating track, fields and a covered dome, and the council said it had been given a refreshed look for the tournament. Hosting the league shows that the city can stage a televised international event there. It does not, by itself, show a lasting economic effect: the council spoke of hotel, restaurant and commerce activity, but no figures for the event's economic impact have been published, and a four day tournament is a small thing next to a destination's ordinary visitor traffic.

What it does show is a town whose sporting life is broader than the beach. Playa del Carmen now counts a professional padel team among its own, and its council talks of the city as a venue for events of this kind. For the people who live there, the more lasting part may be the courts the city says it wants to build. For more on the city and its neighborhoods, see our Playa del Carmen page.

Sources: H. Ayuntamiento de Playa del Carmen, bulletins of September 2, September 23 and September 24, 2026, on the Pro Padel League presentation, preparations and opening day. Pro Padel League, 2026 calendar and teams, propadelleague.com, and its release on the 2025 City's Cup finals. Padel Addict, Los Angeles results, August 17, 2026. PPL Playa del Carmen event website, for its attendance and broadcast expectations. Clic Noticias, Santiago Salazar Pérez, September 2, 2026, for the public courts plan. Publimetro México, September 14, 2026. La Palabra del Caribe, September 28, 2026, for the final results.