Padel is the fastest-growing racquet sport in the region and globally. The Abu Dhabi Padel Master in 2023 was an international padel tournament hosted at the Hudayriat Island padel venue, attracting top-tier players from the world padel circuit, regional and international broadcast coverage, and a multi-day spectator programme across qualifying, main-draw, semi-finals and the headline final.
IP Care delivered the IT operation for the tournament. This case study walks through what is technically distinctive about international padel tournament IT relative to other racquet sports, the multi-court operational pattern, the court-side and broadcast integration, and what we have carried forward into subsequent padel work in the region.
— What is technically different about international padel IT —
Four things shape international padel tournament IT relative to tennis and other racquet sports.
The first is the court format. Padel is played on enclosed courts smaller than tennis courts, surrounded by glass walls and metallic mesh that contain the play. The physical court structure shapes both the broadcast camera placement and the RF coverage plan. Standard tennis camera angles do not translate directly. Standard arena WiFi cell planning has to account for the metallic court enclosures, which are partial RF reflectors and absorbers in ways that empty arenas are not.
The second is the multi-court tournament structure. International padel tournaments run multiple courts simultaneously through the qualifying and early main-draw rounds, with the draw consolidating onto a centre court for the semi-finals and final. The IT operation has to support timing, results, broadcast and officiating workflows across multiple concurrent courts in the early-round phase. The pattern is similar to outdoor tennis tournaments but the courts themselves are physically smaller, closer together and structurally more complex than tennis courts.
The third is the ball-tracking and review integration. Modern international padel uses video review systems with ball-tracking integration, broadcast graphics overlay and chair-umpire workflow integration. The systems are vendor-specific (Premier Padel and the broader world padel circuit have introduced ball-tracking technologies that broadly mirror tennis Hawk-Eye in function), and the venue IT operation has to provide the network plant, the camera positioning support and the integration with chair-umpire and broadcast workflows.
The fourth is the broadcast envelope. International padel tournaments broadcast to a growing global audience across the Spanish-speaking world (where the sport is most established), the broader European market and increasingly the Middle East and Asia. The broadcast presence at a tournament of this calibre is comparable in scale to a WTA 500 tennis event, and the broadcast LAN has to accept multiple rights-holder production teams operating in parallel.
— Architecture —
The Hudayriat Island padel venue build for the tournament was anchored on the venue's permanent infrastructure with tournament-specific additions: high-density WiFi 6 coverage across the spectator areas around the show court and side courts, hospitality, broadcast positions and back-of-house, with conservative cell planning around the metallic court enclosures; a Cisco Catalyst 9500-class broadcast LAN physically segmented from every other network, engineered to broadcast-grade latency and redundancy for the international rights-holder coverage; a dedicated ball-tracking integration network connecting the camera array, processing rig and chair-umpire and broadcast positions; court-side connectivity for chair umpires, scoring tables and tournament officials across all active courts; press centre LAN with broadcast-grade uplinks; and the standard outdoor CCTV layer integrated with venue command and ADMCC.
— The kit —
Approximately 50 environmentally rated HPE Aruba WiFi 6 access points across the show court spectator area, side courts, hospitality and back-of-house. A redundant Aruba CX 8325 switching core. An active-passive Palo Alto firewall pair. A Cisco Catalyst 9500-class broadcast LAN with capacity for multiple rights-holder production teams. A dedicated ball-tracking integration network. Court-side connectivity at the show court and side courts. Press centre LAN. Outdoor CCTV layer. The NOC ran continuous through the tournament week.
— Operational rhythm —
Tournament rhythm follows the draw progression. Qualifying and early-round days run multiple courts simultaneously across afternoon and evening sessions — the operational load is broad. Quarter-finals and semi-finals narrow the active footprint to two or three courts. The final-day singles match on centre court is the marquee broadcast event with maximum broadcast pressure but minimum operational breadth.
Pre-tournament validation cycle was three days. T-3: full integration test across all networks, ball-tracking walkthrough with the broadcast and officiating teams. T-2: multi-court timing and officiating dry runs across all active courts. T-1: dress rehearsal of every category of incident response, hard validation freeze before the first match. Match days: continuous monitoring across all active courts with dynamic re-allocation of monitoring focus as the draw progresses and courts go inactive; broadcast posture intensifying as the tournament approaches the final.
— What works —
Conservative RF cell planning around the metallic court enclosures. The structural composition of padel courts — glass walls and metallic mesh — creates RF behaviour that differs from a dry arena or an open outdoor tennis venue. Cell sizing, antenna placement and propagation modelling all need to be more conservative than a standard arena event of comparable attendee density. The 2023 build did this and the only RF finding of the tournament was traceable to a temporary press-position change, not the venue design.
Multi-court operational discipline. The capacity to monitor and operate across multiple concurrent courts in the early rounds while maintaining broadcast and ball-tracking focus on the show court is the operational pattern that distinguishes international padel IT from single-court formats. The bridge cadence and dashboard structure reflect this — per-court view aggregated into a tournament-wide view with the show court always foregrounded.
Continuous integration with the chair-umpire and broadcast teams. The ball-tracking integration is a continuous engagement through the tournament, not a transactional pre-event handshake. Treating it as continuous is what produces clean officiating across the multi-day window.
Cross-pollination from our tennis work. The capability we developed for Hawk-Eye integration on the World Tennis League (2022, 2023 indoor arena editions) and the Mubadala Abu Dhabi Open (outdoor WTA tour) translated effectively to the ball-tracking integration for padel. The architecture is portable across racquet sports; the sport-specific specifics adapt within the template.
— The hardest moment —
The hardest single moment was a transient finding on the show-court spectator WiFi during one of the busier evening sessions — sustained per-attendee throughput in one section briefly dropped below the design tolerance during a peak crowd-density window. The root cause was a propagation deviation around a temporary press-position layout change that had been added overnight. The on-site engineering team adjusted antenna placement during the inter-session window, restored the design throughput, and the issue did not recur. Same lesson as the FINA championship and the World Tennis League year-one builds — temporary press-position changes need same-day RF re-validation.
The ball-tracking integration ran cleanly through every match of the tournament. The broadcast LAN held for every international rights-holder feed. The chair-umpire workflow and the multi-court timing system operated cleanly across the tournament week.
— What we would change for a future edition —
Pre-stage additional spectator-area WiFi coverage pods specifically for the highest-attendance show-court sessions, rather than relying on adjusting existing cells to absorb late-stage attendance density variations. The cost is modest; the avoided inter-session adjustment is meaningful.
Move the ball-tracking integration to a sustained footprint between tournament editions rather than rebuilding it per event. Padel is growing fast in the region and the cumulative readiness for the next tournament is meaningfully better with a sustained baseline.
— Why this matters —
Padel is among the fastest-growing sports globally and has established a particularly strong base in the UAE and the wider GCC. The capability to deliver international-tournament-grade IT for padel events — multi-court operation, conservative RF cell planning for metallic court enclosures, ball-tracking integration, broadcast LAN for multiple international rights-holder production teams — is a specific blend of arena event-IT experience, tennis tournament tooling and padel-court-specific RF discipline.
For tournament organisers, federations and venue operators planning international padel events in the UAE, the lesson from the Hudayriat Island engagement is that padel tournament IT is materially different from indoor tennis arena IT and from non-racquet sports IT. The right partner has explicit padel-court RF coverage experience, ball-tracking integration history and the multi-court operational discipline that transfers from outdoor tennis tour work. The Hudayriat Island engagement is the foundation of this capability in our portfolio.