Three years ago, pro pickleball looked like a genuine three-tour scramble: the PPA Tour, Major League Pickleball, and the APP Tour all signing players, all chasing sponsors, all competing for the same handful of dates on the calendar. That era is over. What's left in 2026 is a simpler, much higher-stakes picture — one heavily capitalized conglomerate that owns two of the three tours, and one independently-run operator that has deliberately stayed out of it.
On one side sits Pickleball Inc., the parent company formed when the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball merged their business operations in 2023 under the United Pickleball Association (UPA) banner, then rolled up retail and infrastructure assets and took a $225 million structured investment from Apollo Sports Capital and NHL/NBA owner Tom Dundon in 2026. On the other is the APP Tour, the USA Pickleball-sanctioned original that has stayed outside that consolidation since Ken Herrmann launched it out of Chicago in 2019 — though it's no longer a one-man operation either: the Chicago sports-marketing agency Intersport is now its majority owner and operator. It's still charting its own, much smaller-money path, independent of the PPA-MLP conglomerate.
PPA Tour + MLP
Assoc. of Pickleball Players
01 Three Tours Become Two
All three brands trace back to the same surge: pickleball's explosion from a retirement-community pastime into the fastest-growing sport in America. Connor Pardoe, a then-23-year-old who had been managing a senior-living portfolio, got hooked after watching his aunt play in 2018 and founded the PPA Tour that same year. The PPA's first event came in early 2020 at the Mesa Tennis Center in Arizona, where Pardoe lured stars like Ben Johns and Lucy Kovalova with $1,000 appearance fees — unheard-of money in the sport at the time.
Major League Pickleball followed in 2021, the brainchild of hedge-fund manager Steve Kuhn, who built it around a team-draft, coed-lineup format that played more like a traditional pro sports league than a tournament bracket. Ken Herrmann's APP Tour actually predates MLP, launching in Chicago in 2019 as, in its own words, the first and only tour USA Pickleball has officially sanctioned. Its defining feature has stayed consistent since day one: amateurs and touring pros compete at the very same events.
02 The Merger and the Money
In August 2023, MLP and the PPA Tour entered what the pickleball press still calls the "tour wars" — a roughly ten-day bidding frenzy where both leagues raced to lock up top players with exclusive contracts before the other side could. The fight ended not with a winner but with a merger: PPA and MLP combined their business operations under the United Pickleball Association, with Pardoe installed as CEO. Each tour kept its own brand and on-court format, but the ownership, the player contracts, and the calendar all consolidated under one roof.
That consolidation became formal and very well-funded in 2026. On April 30, the UPA closed a business combination that folded in Dundon-owned assets — Pickleball Central (the sport's largest equipment retailer), PickleballTournaments.com (event-management software with a reported 90% market share), and the court-building firm Just Courts — into a single new parent entity, Pickleball Inc. Apollo Sports Capital led a $225 million structured investment alongside Dundon Capital Partners, pushing the company's total funding to $315 million and its valuation to roughly $750 million. Dundon and the Pardoe family retain majority control; the five-person board added Apollo Sports Capital CEO Al Tylis alongside Pardoe, Jason Stein, Zubin Mehta, and Brian Levine.
03 The APP Story: Staying Independent
While Pickleball Inc. was being assembled out of mergers and private-equity rounds, the APP Tour was quietly running its own, much leaner playbook. Ken Herrmann launched the tour out of Chicago in June 2019, and its first official tournament was the 2020 APP Chicago Open, a hometown event that's now in its sixth year and counts among the longest continuously running stops in the pro sport. Unlike the PPA-MLP side of the business, the APP never merged into the United Pickleball Association or took on a UPA-style private-equity raise — but it isn't a pure founder-owned operation either. After striking a partnership with the Chicago sports-marketing agency Intersport in January 2022, the relationship deepened into a controlling stake: Intersport now describes itself as the lead investor and primary operator of the Association of Pickleball Players, and is identified in recent industry reporting as the APP's majority owner and operator. Herrmann remains the founder and runs player development, but the tour's business is steered by a four-decade-old agency that also produces PGA Tour and major college-sports events — not by a venture syndicate the way the UPA's is. It remains sanctioned directly by USA Pickleball rather than operating under a separate for-profit governing structure.
Sources: CB Insights, PitchBook, Prospeo, APP Chicago Open recap
The APP's business identity shifted in 2023, when it rebranded from the Association of Pickleball Professionals to the Association of Pickleball Players, a name change meant to signal that the tour represents the full spectrum of the sport — from the touring pros featured on national broadcasts down to the recreational players who fill out its draws — rather than positioning itself purely as a pro-only circuit. That grassroots-first identity shows up directly in the tour's growth strategy: instead of chasing institutional capital, the APP has expanded mainly through partnerships. A multi-year title sponsorship with Humana anchors the annual Humana Cup, a team event that in 2025 featured 84 Champions-division players and 60 Masters-division players competing across six tour stops. Internationally, the APP ran its inaugural Atlantic Cup pitting Team USA against Team Europe, and in 2025 it struck a partnership with Global Sports to build player pathways into India, Dubai, and Vietnam, two years in the making, alongside its own 2026 Kuala Lumpur Open.
On the talent side, the APP doesn't operate the same closed-shop contract system as the UPA — there's no equivalent of the PPA/MLP's 150-plus exclusively signed roster. Instead, the tour's open, amateur-and-pro-together structure means a mix of cross-tour pros and rising players show up in its draws, and its rosters shift year to year as players build new partnerships; Megan Fudge teaming up with Sofia Sewing for the 2026 season is a recent example of the kind of pairing news that drives the tour's competitive storylines. The APP doesn't publish revenue or profitability figures the way Pickleball Inc. does in its investor materials, and that's consistent with its overall posture: a privately held business — majority-owned by Intersport rather than a venture syndicate — that's chosen broadcast exposure and grassroots tournament volume over a UPA-scale capital raise.
04 Show Me the Money
The headline figures make Pickleball Inc. look like a runaway success: combined revenue across its newly merged businesses topped $140 million in 2025, and the pro properties alone — PPA Tour and MLP together — pulled in $60 million in 2025 revenue, about half of it sponsorship money, with leadership projecting $74 million for 2026. The PPA Tour drew an average of 791,000 viewers on CBS in January 2026, and MLP averaged 499,000 on the same network the previous August — both described by the league as all-time linear viewership records for the respective properties.
Revenue growth and outright profitability are two different things, though, and the UPA's own internal history hints at which one has been harder to pin down. Twice now — first in early 2024, again in mid-2025 — the league has gone back to its signed pros and asked them to restructure guaranteed contracts downward. The first round cut some player salaries by roughly 30%. The second round, announced in June 2025, split players' remaining guaranteed payouts into smaller annual installments stretched out through 2028 rather than paying them as originally scheduled, while shifting more of total compensation into a performance-based prize pool. That's a fairly standard move for a league managing cash flow while it scales — but it also suggests the funding headlines and the day-to-day economics of running two pro tours haven't always lined up neatly.
What the league actually loses has occasionally surfaced in public, too. Reporting from inside the pickleball-media ecosystem has described the PPA Tour as having lost tens of millions of dollars a year while continuing to honor player contracts in full — a framing that comes from The Kitchen, a UPA media partner, but lines up with the broader picture of guaranteed deals handed out faster than revenue could cover them. The clearest public flashpoint came in January 2025, when a leaked internal investor email surfaced indicating the UPA was seeking a $10 million bridge loan by mid-January to meet its obligations. League leadership pushed back hard on the "emergency" characterization: Chief Strategy Officer Samin Odhwani said the UPA had done about $50 million in revenue in 2024, "right on plan," and that the $10 million was already committed by existing investors rather than a scramble for outside cash. Both things can be true at once — strong and growing top-line revenue (roughly $50M in 2024, the $60M pro-tour figure in 2025), and a business still burning money and leaning on its backers to bridge the gap. That's the gap the Apollo round and the contract restructurings are both meant to close.
The same parent company has also been extending its reach into equipment governance, standing up the UPA-A as a for-profit alternative to USA Pickleball's role in paddle testing and certification — a move that's drawn pushback from smaller paddle brands worried about new fees and a regulator that also happens to own the tours its rules will govern. It's a reminder that Pickleball Inc.'s ambitions extend well past running tournaments; the Apollo capital is explicitly earmarked for building out media, infrastructure, and what the company calls a full "pickleball ecosystem."
The APP Tour's financials remain much less visible by comparison. As an independently held company that hasn't taken outside money anywhere near Pickleball Inc.'s scale, it doesn't publish revenue or profitability figures, and its business model leans more heavily on the side that pays the bills in grassroots sports: amateur tournament entry fees from events that mix pros and recreational players in the same draws, broadcast deals, and sponsorships like the Humana Cup. Without a $750 million valuation to defend, the APP doesn't face the same pressure to show hockey-stick growth — but it also doesn't have anywhere near Pickleball Inc.'s capital to outbid for stars or build season-long broadcast infrastructure of its own.
05 Where the Players Actually Are
More than 150 pros are currently signed across the combined PPA/MLP roster, meaning most of the sport's most recognizable names — Anna Leigh Waters, Ben Johns, Anna Bright, Tyson McGuffin, Catherine Parenteau, Hayden Patriquine — are UPA properties, splitting their year between the PPA Tour's fall-spring individual tournament season and MLP's summer team-draft league. The APP Tour draws from a wider, more porous pool: because it isn't a closed shop the way UPA contracts are, it regularly features touring pros mixing it up in the same draws as serious amateurs, plus an expanding slate of international players coming through its Atlantic Cup and Asia-Pacific partnerships.
Most of a contracted pro's income never shows up on a scoreboard. League salary, not prize money, is the largest single paycheck for the typical signed UPA player — and that salary is what's actually being negotiated, cut, and restructured behind the scenes.
Based on reporting from The Dink PickleballPay inside the UPA system is dramatically tiered, and it's worth understanding because it explains why a player's UPA ranking matters more for their bank account than any single tournament result.
Tier breakdown per Godfather Pickleball's analyst estimates — not official league disclosure.
Sponsorship is where the gap widens even further. Anna Leigh Waters signed a multi-year Franklin Sports paddle deal in January 2026 that analysts estimate is worth more than $10 million over three years, anchored around her signature Aurelius paddle. Ben Johns holds a long-term JOOLA partnership reportedly worth roughly $1 million a year in base value plus royalties on JOOLA Perseus paddle sales — a deal Front Office Sports has described as among the largest individual endorsement agreements in the sport's history. Outside analyst estimates (not official disclosures) put Waters' total 2026 take-home near $4 million after taxes, agent fees, and travel, with Johns close behind around $3 million — figures broadly consistent with Waters' own agent telling Forbes she'd clear $3 million-plus back in 2024, and Johns telling CNBC the same year his combined pickleball income exceeded $2.5 million.
Prize money itself, by contrast, is almost an afterthought for the league's biggest stars. A PPA singles tournament winner typically takes home around $1,335 in pure prize money; a winning doubles team splits roughly $3,535. For a contracted pro, that's pocket change next to a guaranteed UPA salary. For the much larger pool of unsigned players grinding the APP Tour and PPA's amateur/challenger circuits, though, prize checks and paddle-deal stipends are the whole paycheck — which is exactly the gap the league pay structure is built around.
MLP's team ownership layer adds a separate, faster-moving wealth story. Franchises that sold for as little as $100,000 when the league launched in 2021 were being valued near $10 million within about three years — a roughly 100x jump that's pulled in an ownership group reading like an all-star roster of its own: LeBron James, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Kevin Durant, Drew Brees, Naomi Osaka, and Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry among them. That valuation surge happened well before the 2026 Apollo investment, and it's one of the clearer signals that institutional sports money sees real long-term value in the league structure — independent of whether the pro tour business itself is profitable today.
06 The Bigger Picture
Step back from the two organizations and the broader pickleball economy tells a more measured story than either tour's press releases. U.S. participation hit roughly 24 million players in 2025, marking a fifth consecutive year as the country's fastest-growing sport — but the equipment side of the business, the part that actually has to turn participation into revenue, is a comparatively modest ~$480 million global market as of 2025, projected to grow at a fairly unspectacular 5.6% annually toward roughly $825 million by 2035. The court and facility-building boom that powered the sport's early years is already showing signs of a shakeout, with operators warning that the gold-rush phase is ending and the winners going forward will be the ones who can run sustainable businesses rather than just open courts fast.
That's the real tension sitting underneath the APP-versus-Pickleball Inc. storyline. One side is betting that the path forward is vertical integration and institutional capital — owning the tours, the retailer, the tournament software, and increasingly the equipment-certification process itself. The other is betting that staying lean, independent, and close to the amateur grassroots is the more durable model once the hype cycle cools. Both bets are still very much live. What's no longer in question is that pickleball's pro game has stopped being a side hustle for its top players — Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns are now operating in genuine professional-athlete income territory, even if most of the 150-plus other pros signed beneath them, and the much larger field competing on the APP Tour, are still working a far more modest, far more precarious version of the same dream.