What Padel Can Learn from the Futsal Boom in Indonesia
Sports
May 11, 2026
By Benson Kawengian, Owner and Group CEO of Datra
I have seen this before.
Not as an observer, not as someone who read about it afterward, but as the person who built it. In 2004, I co-founded Planet Futsal — Indonesia's first commercial futsal operation. I watched a sport that nobody in this country had ever played professionally grow from a single artificial-turf pitch in Jakarta to fourteen locations across ten cities in under five years. I watched the industry we created attract an entire generation of competitors, most of them chasing momentum rather than building businesses. I watched the correction arrive — quietly at first, then all at once.
Now I run Datra, Indonesia's foremost sports engineering, procurement, and construction company. We have designed and built sports facilities across the country for decades, from international stadiums to school gymnasiums, and in recent years, padel courts across Indonesia. When I look at what is happening in the padel market today, I am not speculating. I am watching a story I already know the ending of, and I want to give the people still writing it a chance to change how it ends.
A Boom That Feels Unstoppable — Until It Isn't
In 2004, the mood around futsal was electric. The concept was new. The sport solved a real problem — Indonesians who had grown up desperate to play football in dense urban neighborhoods, never enough land, never enough players, always getting chased off by the authorities. With futsal, you needed six people and an indoor pitch. The market understood this immediately.
Competitors arrived fast. Courts appeared in shopping malls, converted warehouses, and open lots. Investors who had never played the sport were building facilities because they saw the crowds and the revenue. The industry was expanding in every direction, and most of that expansion was happening without much thought about what would come next.
Now look at padel. Indonesia recorded 133 padel venues in 2024. The Indonesia Padel Report 2025 documented a 295% increase in clubs in a single year, with over 1,580 new courts built across the country — an average of 3.8 new courts per day. Jakarta alone now hosts nearly 400 padel courts, a significant portion of which have not secured a valid building approval permit. Courts are appearing in residential neighborhoods, generating noise complaints and lawsuits. Operators are racing to open before the competition arrives, cutting corners on permits, on civil works, on court quality, on any honest assessment of whether their location can support the numbers they are projecting.
The energy feels unstoppable. It always does at this stage.
What Is Hiding Beneath the Surface
In futsal, the problems did not announce themselves. The sport kept growing. Bookings kept coming in. And beneath that momentum, the operational foundations were quietly weakening.
By 2009, a detailed study of one of our Planet Futsal centers put numbers to what we had been feeling. Overall court utilization sat at around fifty percent. The break-even point was forty percent, so we were profitable — but unevenly, and only just. Larger courts ran at twenty-five percent utilization while smaller ones ran at nearly sixty. Our pricing structure was sending players to the wrong sizes and we had not noticed because the headline numbers still looked acceptable. Artificial turf on several pitches was degrading faster than its intended lifespan because we had not stocked the correct cleaning product for the surface material and had no preventive maintenance schedule in place. Food and beverage, which contributed nearly a quarter of total revenue, was underperforming because we had handed that operation to street-style vendors who created a poor experience and dragged the whole venue down with them.
The sport was thriving. The business underneath it was fragile.
Here is what a growing market does that fools you: it forgives mediocrity. Customers tolerate a cracked goalpost and a poorly maintained changing room when demand exceeds supply and there is nowhere else to play. Our operational study at the time found that the single most important factor driving a player's choice of venue was not the sport itself. It was clean, comfortable showers and toilets. The second and third factors were general facility quality and cleanliness. Players notice everything. They just do not tell you directly — they simply stop booking.
The moment supply catches up with demand, the customers who had been tolerating your operational gaps go to the competitor who does not have them. That transition happens faster than most operators expect, and by the time they see it in the numbers, the correction is already underway.
I see the same dynamic developing in padel today. The current generation of padel entrepreneurs is more sophisticated in some ways than the futsal investors of twenty years ago. They understand that a well-designed café keeps players on the premises longer. They know that the lifestyle dimension — the social element, the photography, the post-match coffee — is part of what makes the sport sticky. The surface-level experience at many padel venues today is genuinely impressive. But surface-level experience and operational discipline are not the same thing, and the gap between them will only become visible when the market gets crowded enough that players have real choices.
What the Tropics Will Teach You, Whether You Are Ready or Not
There is one dimension of operations where the futsal parallel is almost exact, and where I see padel making the same mistake in slow motion: the physical maintenance of courts and structures in Indonesia's climate.
Indonesia is a high-humidity, high-UV environment. In coastal cities, add salt air. These conditions are genuinely hostile to metal structures that are not built to the right specification, and the consequences of getting this wrong do not appear immediately. They appear in year two or three, by which point the money to fix them is harder to find.
In futsal, we watched artificial turf degrade faster than its projected lifespan on courts where nobody was using the correct cleaning product, where sand infill was not being replenished, where no grooming schedule had ever been established. Goalposts were rusting. Bolts were working loose under normal play and nobody had assigned anyone to check them. Black spots had formed on a blue polyurethane court from months of being cleaned with the wrong detergent. None of this was dramatic. All of it was preventable. And all of it was visible to the players who noticed and quietly chose somewhere else.
The padel version of this is already playing out across Indonesia. I have visited padel facilities in this country where structural steel is showing serious corrosion within two to three years of opening. I have seen turf that has never been groomed, glass panels that are not properly tempered, bolts that have worked loose and gone unnoticed because nobody put a maintenance schedule in place.
That glass issue is not a minor point. There have been actual injury incidents at padel courts in Indonesia caused by untempered glass panels. Tempered safety glass is not a premium specification. It is the minimum standard for a sport played at speed inside a glass enclosure. Any court built without it is not just a future maintenance problem — it is a present liability.
Hot-dip galvanized structural steel is the baseline, not an upgrade, for a court that will still be performing correctly in year seven rather than failing in year three. The quality of the metal, how it is cut, how it is coated, and how the joints are assembled are not cosmetic differences. They are what you are actually buying when you invest in a court. Any supplier who is not leading with that conversation in a country like Indonesia is not the right partner for your facility.
The Economics Nobody Is Running Honestly
Beyond the physical maintenance question, there is a financial calculation that most padel investors are not making with enough honesty.
In the futsal study, the break-even utilization rate was the number that mattered most. But what the data also showed was how unevenly utilization was distributed. Morning sessions ran at thirty-four percent. Afternoons at forty-nine. Evenings at sixty-two. The court that looked fully booked from the outside was carrying a very different economic reality when you examined it hour by hour, court by court, across a full week. That variance made staffing decisions complicated, catering projections unreliable, and financial models built on peak-period numbers dangerously optimistic.
Padel investors are making the same error. Court rental revenue per hour looks attractive. Occupancy rates at well-run venues on Saturday evenings look even more attractive. But sustainable padel economics require understanding what the full week looks like — the Tuesday mornings, the weekday afternoons, the shoulder periods that determine whether the business can carry its fixed costs through a slow month. Research on mature padel markets consistently finds that between twenty and thirty-five percent of a sustainable venue's revenue needs to come from sources beyond court rental: coaching, food and beverage, events, memberships, and community programs. In the futsal operation, that non-rental revenue was what gave us a buffer when utilization softened. Without it, the math turns hostile faster than most operators have planned for.
The other consistent mistake I see is overbuilding on civil infrastructure. The instinct is to build something substantial — to make a commitment that signals seriousness and permanence. But a well-chosen existing space, a former tennis court, a commercial warehouse, a covered outdoor area with the right zoning, can be transformed into a fully functional padel venue without locking you into fixed costs that the business cannot carry if demand falls short. Padel court structures can be removed. The land can be repurposed. In a market still finding its equilibrium, that flexibility is not a downgrade. It is a form of protection.
Start with two courts. Prove the demand. Reach genuine utilization. Then expand from a position of confirmed strength.
Sweden Chose Volume. Denmark Chose Patience. Indonesia Is Choosing Right Now.
The clearest external evidence that the futsal pattern is repeating at global scale is what happened to padel in Sweden.
Between 2019 and 2022, Sweden went from a few hundred padel courts to over 4,000. In Uppsala alone, the count went from fourteen to nearly one hundred in twelve months. By 2024, more than one hundred facilities had been closed or converted. Up to ninety percent of padel operators in Sweden and Finland either collapsed, filed for bankruptcy, or entered restructuring. Financial overreach, oversupply, and costs that had never been modelled accurately — the same three forces that quietly hollowed out the weaker futsal operators in Indonesia — arrived faster and harder in a market where the boom had been more extreme.
Denmark watched this happen across the border and chose a different approach. Danish padel grew more slowly, built around well-organized clubs that prioritized community infrastructure and professional management over speed and court volume. The result is a market that is smaller than Sweden's peak but far more durable, and still expanding.
In Indonesia, this same choice is being made right now, venue by venue, city by city. In Jakarta's premium districts, the pressure that precedes a correction is already visible: permits skipped, locations chosen by availability rather than demand analysis, revenue models that assume the best-case scenario as a baseline. In the second and third-tier cities — Makassar, Medan, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Balikpapan — the first-mover advantage is still genuinely available. A well-located, well-run padel venue in those markets can become the anchor of a local sports community in a way that is increasingly difficult to achieve in South Jakarta.
The operators who will still be running in 2030 are the ones choosing the Denmark model today, before the Sweden outcome makes the choice for them.
Why Padel Has Something Futsal Never Did
For all of the above, I am not pessimistic about padel's future in Indonesia. And the reason is genuinely structural.
Futsal entered Indonesia as something foreign. We were asking a nation of football lovers to embrace a different format on an artificial surface inside a building. The uptake was strong, but we were always working against the gravitational pull of the real thing: outdoor football, played on grass, whenever anyone could find the land. That ceiling on futsal's cultural depth was real and it never fully lifted.
Padel enters Indonesia against a very different backdrop. This country has one of the deepest racket sport cultures in the world. Indonesian badminton is a global institution. Tennis has a meaningful presence. Padel sits naturally between those two sports in feel, pace, and social format. It is more accessible than squash, more dynamic than tennis for the casual player, and easier to learn than either. For the Indonesian who grew up with a racket in their hand, padel is not foreign. It is familiar in a new form.
The data supports this intuition. Indonesia recorded the highest global growth in gross monetary value per padel court in 2024, rising 173% year on year. Ninety-two percent of people who play padel for the first time return after their first session — one of the highest retention rates of any sport in the world. And the community dimension is already taking root in a way that is commercially significant: in Jakarta, 42% of padel bookings are made by organized communities rather than individuals. That means leagues, regular groups, and social ecosystems are forming around the sport organically. Those are exactly the players who book thirteen weeks in advance, who bring new players in, who stay for food and drinks afterward. In the futsal study, building that kind of committed community demand was one of the key recommendations for improving court utilization and revenue predictability. Padel is generating it naturally.
Padel will not replace badminton or soccer in Indonesia, not in any timeframe worth modelling. It is, and will remain for some time, a sport anchored in the middle-to-upper socioeconomic segment. But as equipment costs come down and the sport embeds itself more deeply into urban social life, the foundation for something genuinely lasting is there.
The sport will survive and grow. The question is which venues will still be standing to benefit from it.
What Futsal Learned That Padel Still Has Time to Apply
Twenty years in this industry has left me with a few things I believe without reservation.
Understand your unit economics before you break ground, and be honest about them. Model your break-even utilization rate. Stress-test it at thirty percent below your projections. Build the revenue mix from the beginning — court rental as the foundation, with coaching, food and beverage, events, and community programming as the structure that creates resilience when utilization softens. The padel venues that will still be profitable in five years are the ones that built that mix from day one rather than discovering they needed it after the first difficult quarter.
Choose your location with discipline. Oversaturation in Jakarta's premium districts is already real. The genuine opportunity now is in cities where good courts are scarce and where a serious operator can build something the community organizes itself around. And size your build to the demand you can verify, not the demand you are hoping for. Start smaller. Prove it. Expand from strength.
Invest seriously in the physical quality of what you are building, and maintain it systematically. In Indonesia's climate, the difference between a court built to the right specification and one that cut corners on materials or galvanization is not visible on opening day. It becomes visible in year three, when the repairs cost more than the savings ever did. The same is true for a maintenance schedule: tighten the bolts, groom the turf, stock the right cleaning products for the right surfaces. These are not glamorous investments. They are what separates the venues that players keep coming back to from the ones they quietly stop booking.
Build community before you build more courts. The court is the platform. The community is the business.
And work with people who have the experience to tell you when something will not work — before you have already committed to it. In a market full of suppliers who have been selling padel courts for two or three years and presenting themselves as authorities, the most valuable thing a partner can offer is the willingness to say no. That is not a common posture in a market driven by momentum. But it is the one that will define who is still around when the momentum passes.
The futsal industry in Indonesia is now entering its third decade. It matured, it consolidated, and it found its real place in the country's sports culture. The venues that survived are the ones that built seriously and operated with discipline. The ones that chased the boom without the foundations are gone.
Padel is still in its first chapter. The decisions being made right now — about location, about build quality, about maintenance, about community — will determine who is still standing when this chapter ends and the next one begins.
Tighten your bolts. Know your numbers. Build community. Think long.
Benson Kawengian is the Owner and Group CEO of Datra Internusa and Datra Sports, Indonesia's foremost sports engineering, procurement, and construction company. With four decades of combined experience, Datra has designed, supplied, and built sports facilities across Indonesia — from international stadiums and large public venues to school gymnasiums and padel courts at Jakarta's most prominent commercial addresses. If you are planning a padel facility and want an honest conversation about what it will actually cost and what it will actually take, visit datra.id or contact us here.
