Markus Gaebel

The IOC's May 2026 plan to shrink Brisbane 2032 puts squash's Olympic future at risk just months after its LA28 debut. While netball runs a 100,000-signature campaign and the ICC president lobbies IOC sessions, the WSF's pitch reads as one meeting and a press release. Frustrating part: squash sits on extraordinary unused arguments — the global racquet sports boom, urban-sport credentials, and the shift to sport-as-preventive-healthcare. The arguments are there. The campaign isn't.

Racquet sports are booming — 35M padel players, 220M badminton, 106M tennis — yet the decade has delivered the worst wave of facility failures in 40 years: 120 padel bankruptcies in Sweden, 27% squash decline in England, vanishing Munich courts. The reason: every facility is two businesses at once — a leisure operation and a real-estate asset — and most operators run only one. Article 1 lays out the framework: five sports, five tribes, the 100–150 players-per-court reality, minimum scale.

The racquet sports sector is making consequential decisions — facility builds, investments, market entry — on fragmented information and personal intuition. No standardized benchmarks, no comparable facility data, no structured KPIs exist. Sport-by-sport fragmentation and rapid growth have masked this gap, but as markets mature, the margin for error is shrinking. The industry needs structured knowledge infrastructure that combines evidence with experience to support better decisions.