The Report
We’re Back From Birmingham. The English Open Changed Everything
We have been missing for a week. There was a good reason.
The World Pickleball Report went quiet while I spent six days behind the microphone at Birmingham’s NEC for the 2026 English Open. Somewhere around the 60 courts, thousands of players, two Championship Courts, video reviews, very long days and rather too much talking, the normal morning routine disappeared.
It was worth it. The English Open felt like a tournament crossing a line. The move from Telford worked. The scale worked. The professional competition delivered, the Unity Cup showed why the grassroots game still matters, and the volunteers somehow kept the entire thing moving.
But success creates new expectations. Pro qualification needs another look. So do the round-robin formats. Video review worked, but the process around it can improve. The broadcast now has enough happening around the courts to become much more ambitious.
A few years ago, Pickleball England taking over this much of the NEC would have sounded ridiculous. Next year, everybody will walk back through the doors expecting it to be normal. That is the real challenge now.
Read our full English Open review5,000 Players Are Heading to the World Cup. Who Actually Pays to Get Them There?
The numbers coming out of Da Nang now belong to a serious international sporting event: more than 5,000 athletes, 81 countries and territories, 156 national teams and Heineken’s name attached to the World Cup.
Then consider Canada. Players in its independent World Cup programme were told to budget roughly C$3,000 to C$5,000 each to represent their country. The junior team has already been withdrawn after funding attempts failed.
This is not an argument that Heineken should be buying plane tickets. It is a sign of where international pickleball currently sits: the stage, sponsors and national-team spectacle are developing faster than the financial machinery underneath the athletes.
Who pays for international pickleball?Los Angeles chose Dallas. Dallas sent them home.
The MLP quarter-finals produced exactly the sort of mischief the opponent-selection format invites. Los Angeles chose sixth-seeded Dallas and then lost a superb three-match series. Brooklyn removed defending champion Columbus. Half of the top four seeds disappeared.
St. Louis had rather less drama, beating Texas 3-0 twice and winning 66 points to 20 across the series. New Jersey advanced too, although Palm Beach managed something almost nobody had done all season: beating Anna Leigh Waters and Noe Khlif twice in mixed.
Newport Beach also reinforced something MLP has been teaching us all year. Roster construction is not a fantasy draft. Dallas’ mid-season rebuild is thriving, while Columbus assembled four elite names and still found itself out before New York.
Inside a wild MLP quarter-final weekendWhat If Pickleball Sold Sponsors Players, Not Impressions?
Leapmotor’s expanded deal with Australia’s NPL is more interesting than another car parked beside a pickleball court.
NPL members receive a six per cent Leapmotor discount. Every Leapmotor vehicle buyer receives an NPL membership. The partnership reaches into NPL events and The Jar venues rather than disappearing once the professional match ends.
That raises a useful commercial question. Emerging pickleball properties cannot yet compete with football or tennis on audience size. They may have something those sports struggle to reproduce: regular, physical access to communities of people who actually play.
Why the NPL deal mattersAt 60, Your Sporting Career Might Only Be Starting
There is something wonderfully brutal about being 63 years old and worrying whether anybody is going to draft you.
The new U.S. Legends 60+ competition has six franchises, 60 roster places, combines, a draft and a five-event season. Players paid $225 to attend the combine and $1,300 to enter the draft process.
The interesting part is not simply that pickleball lets people keep playing when other sports have faded away. It may allow them to keep being athletes, complete with selection, rejection, teammates, rivalries and something serious to prepare for next month.
The sporting career that starts after 60Yes, we disappeared for a week
Last Monday I warned that English Open week might make the World Pickleball Report slightly erratic. It turned out to be more straightforward than that: there simply was not enough day left.
Nick Hobbis and I spent the week commentating from the two Championship Courts while trying to absorb as much as possible from everything happening around the NEC. By the end, the event had become the job, the story and most of the waking hours.
Normal service resumes now. There is plenty to catch up on, which is why today’s edition is a little fuller than usual.
Tournament coverage should be more than a phone on a tripod
World Pickleball Studio is our new broadcast-production arm, built to give tournaments the studio treatment that has usually been reserved for much larger sports.
Pre-shows, analysis, tournament desks, player interviews, highlights, sponsor integration and post-event coverage can all sit around the match footage organisers already have.
We are currently onboarding the first founding events and talking to tournaments and brands about Platform, Partner and Premium coverage.
Explore World Pickleball Studio →Been wondering where we went?
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