The short answer: On 4 September DUPR published a list of the ten fastest-growing pickleball countries, “ranked by DUPR user growth over the last 12 months”. All ten are in Asia, led by the Philippines at 1,213%. The table measures how fast new accounts are opening on DUPR, not how fast pickleball is growing. The countries at the top are, to a striking degree, those where DUPR has just signed a deal that makes a DUPR account necessary. Vietnam, which DUPR itself says is a top-five country by users, comes tenth. My view: it is a useful document about DUPR’s business and a poor one about the sport. It should not be quoted as anything else.
A signing in Ho Chi Minh City
On 24 April, DUPR’s chief operating officer, Kevin Kim, was in Vietnam for what the company called “an official signing and inauguration ceremony”, with local media and “a dedicated DUPR-branded activation”. The occasion was DUPR’s first Asian headquarters, announced five days later. Under the deal, DUPR also became “the exclusive rating system across all DJOY events globally”. D-Joy is one of the region’s biggest organisers, and the agreement covered its tour legs, its Masters and its academy.
“Asia is one of the most important growth markets for pickleball right now, and Vietnam is at the center of that momentum,” said DUPR’s chief executive, Tito Machado. D-Joy’s chairman, Dang Quang Anh, explained what the deal meant for players: “Having a single, trusted rating system across all of our events strengthens the experience for players.”
Hold on to that sentence. A single rating system across all events means, in practice, that a player entering a D-Joy event needs a DUPR account. Exclusive rating deals are how rating companies grow. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it does mean we should be careful about what the next DUPR table measures.
What does the table actually say?
The methodology is one sentence long: “We pulled 12 months of new user growth across DUPR.” Here are the results:
| Rank | Country | DUPR user growth, 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Philippines | 1,213% |
| 2 | Indonesia | 405% |
| 3 | China | 183% |
| 4 | India | 182% |
| 5 | Japan | 170% |
| 6 | Thailand | 170% |
| 7 | South Korea | 159% |
| 8 | Singapore | 153% |
| 9 | Malaysia | 120% |
| 10 | Vietnam | 110% |
DUPR’s conclusion is that “Asia is having a moment”, and that its data “is one of the clearest ways to see it play out in real time”. The conventional reading, which has already been repeated in Vietnamese state media and elsewhere, is that this is a league table of the world’s pickleball booms.
It isn’t, and the table itself tells you why. There are no base numbers. A country that goes from 100 DUPR users to 1,313 posts 1,213%. A country that goes from 100,000 to 210,000 posts 110%. DUPR knows which is which. We don’t, because it hasn’t published the figures.
Why is the Philippines first?
Look at what DUPR announced in the Philippines during, and just after, the twelve months the table covers.
On 18 June, DUPR announced a partnership with the Philippine Pickleball Federation, founded in 2019 and a member of the Global Pickleball Federation. The PPF’s website now says that its sanctioned events run through Pickleball Global, are synced to DUPR, and require players to have DUPR IDs.
Two weeks after the table appeared, on 18 September, DUPR announced a partnership with InstaCourts to bring ratings to open play in Manila, and spoke of “hundreds of DUPR-rated matches”. That falls outside the window, but it shows the direction of travel.
So within the window, DUPR became mandatory for the national federation’s sanctioned events. Just after it, DUPR moved into recreational open play in the capital. If you require every tournament player in a country to open an account, accounts will open. That may well also reflect a boom in Philippine pickleball. But you cannot tell from this table how much of the 1,213% is the sport and how much is the paperwork.
That is the argument in a sentence. The top of the table follows the contracts.
Why is Vietnam last?
This is the most telling line in DUPR’s own material. In its April release, DUPR said Vietnam “now ranks among the top five countries globally by DUPR users and continues to show the fastest month-over-month growth across the platform”.
Five months later, the same country is tenth on DUPR’s growth list, at 110%.
Both statements can be true. DUPR’s April claim was about recent monthly momentum, and the September list covers twelve months. But put together they show the mathematics of percentage growth. A country that already had a large DUPR base, large enough to be top five in the world, cannot double and redouble like one starting from nearly nothing. On a percentage table, being big early looks like being slow.
If you wanted to know where pickleball is biggest, Vietnam’s tenth place would mislead you. It is tenth because it is large.
Does the table agree with anything else?
Japan is the one country where an independent measure exists, and it is worth putting the two side by side with care.
Pickleball One’s survey of 30,000 people, carried out in March 2026 and cited in TBS and dentsu’s release this month, estimated about 330,000 players in Japan, up roughly sevenfold on the previous year’s estimate of about 45,000. That is growth of more than 600%. DUPR’s table puts Japan’s account growth at 170%.
The time windows are not the same. The survey is a year-on-year snapshot, and DUPR’s figure is the twelve months before September. The two methods measure different things: people who play at least occasionally, against people who open a rating account. So I don’t claim the gap is precise. But it points the opposite way to the Philippines. Japan had its own domestic ranking systems run by the JPA and the PJF. Since their merger, the federation’s FAQ has said those systems are “currently under review”, while DUPR “can continue to be used”. Where a country’s competitive structure does not depend on DUPR, DUPR’s growth seems to understate the boom. Where it does, the growth seems to overstate it.
Has this happened before?
Every analytics company that sells a measuring stick eventually publishes a league table measured with it. WPM asked in June whether DUPR had found pickleball’s equivalent of football’s expected-goals model. The answer was: not yet, because nobody outside the company can test it. The growth table is the same problem in a different form. A rating that becomes the standard is genuinely valuable to players. The same features that make it valuable, exclusivity and mandatory IDs, make its user counts useless as a census.
Europe offers a cleaner comparison. In August 2024, Pickleball England made DUPR its “official and exclusive rating partner”. If the table measured contracts, you might expect England to appear. It doesn’t, because the window is 2025–26 and that contract’s spike would have come earlier. That is consistent with the argument, though it doesn’t prove it, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
What would change my mind?
One thing: base numbers. If DUPR published the number of active rated players in each country at the start and end of the window, together with the share of new accounts created through federation or partner events, we could separate the sport’s growth from the company’s. DUPR obviously has those figures. Until it publishes them, the honest description of the table is the one in its own heading. It shows DUPR user growth.
A quick word on the method
The table and the methodology sentence are quoted from DUPR’s 4 September post. The Philippine, Vietnamese and English partnership details come from DUPR’s own announcements and, for the Philippines, the PPF’s website. The Japan comparison uses Pickleball One’s survey as reported by Pickleball One and cited by TBS and dentsu. The 600%-plus figure is WPM’s arithmetic from 45,000 to 330,000. We have not yet asked DUPR for base figures. That is the obvious next step.
My verdict
DUPR is building something genuinely useful in Asia, and its exclusive deals with federations and organisers are the right way to make a rating standard. But a company cannot sign up a country’s tournaments and then present the resulting sign-ups as evidence of the country’s enthusiasm. The fastest-growing pickleball country in the world may well be the Philippines. This table can’t tell you. It can tell you, very precisely, where DUPR’s sales team has been.
What to watch
Watch D-Joy. If the table is a map of contracts, Vietnam’s DUPR growth should rise as the Vietnam HQ deal of 29 April works through a full twelve months. If next year’s table has Vietnam climbing the list, you will know why.
