TPD Meets: PadelLevels with Jethro Binns

Padel is one of the fastest growing sports in the UK, but ability on court has always been hard to measure properly. Most clubs rely on self-rated levels or informal club rankings borrowed from other racket sports, which makes it tricky to run fair leagues or know how you actually compare to someone at another club. PadelLevels was built to close that gap. We caught up with co-founder Jethro Binns to find out how the platform works.

The Problem With Padel Ratings in the UK

Padel has grown quickly, but the tools around it haven't always kept pace. Most rating methods in use today were built for tennis or squash and adapted after the fact, rather than designed around how padel is actually played and scored. That leaves clubs guessing when they group players for box leagues, and players with no real way to track whether they're improving or how they'd fare against someone from a different club altogether.

What Is PadelLevels?

PadelLevels is a rating and ranking platform built specifically for padel. Instead of a fixed, self-assigned number, it gives players a dynamic rating that updates after every match, so it reflects current form rather than a guess made months ago. A few things it covers:

  • Ratings: a rating that moves with every result, letting players compare their level at club, national and international scale
  • Box Leagues: automated group and league management for clubs, removing the manual admin of running a season
  • Americanos: built-in support for Americano format tournaments, one of the most popular social competitive formats in padel
  • Mobile app: match results, rating history and comparisons, accessible on the go
  • LevelTech: the rating engine behind PadelLevels comes from SquashLevels, giving it over a decade of grading experience adapted for padel rather than built from a standing start
  • Enterprise and API tools: for larger operators and federations who want ratings data feeding into their own systems

It's currently working with clubs across the UK as it grows, including PadelLevels' existing partnership with iPadel.

What This Means for Clubs and Players

For clubs, it means running a structured league or social night without having to build the admin around it from scratch, and grouping players by something more reliable than guesswork. For players, it means a rating that travels with you between clubs and events, and an actual answer to "how good am I, really?" instead of a self-assessed guess.

About Our Guest: Jethro Binns

Jethro Binns is Co-Founder of PadelLevels, bringing the LevelTech rating technology behind SquashLevels into padel with the aim of giving the sport a genuine, sport-specific way to measure playing level.

What's Next

As more UK clubs move toward structured formats like box leagues and Americanos, a proper rating system stops being a nice-to-have and starts being infrastructure. Expect to see more of PadelLevels showing up across the padel calendar as it grows.

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