By Ethan E. Litwin and Mike Keramidas
In May 2026, Apollo Sports Capital (Apollo) led a $225 million investment in Pickleball Inc., the parent company of the Professional Pickleball Association Tour (PPA) and Major League Pickleball (MLP). The two leagues offer two different competitive formats: the PPA operates a tour similar to those run by the ATP or WTA in tennis, while the MLP is a co-ed, franchise-based team league with a draft system. According to Apollo, the transaction would create “the largest singularly operated pickleball ecosystem in existence.” This was no understatement. Apollo now has a minority investment in, or otherwise effectively controls, a portfolio of businesses spanning professional pickleball tours, tournament software, player ratings, indoor facilities, retail, and media, each controlling a different chokepoint in the industry. The following unpacks some of the details about Apollo’s varied investments and how they fit together in ways that raise barriers to potential competition in this quickly developing and growing sport.
Player Exclusive Contracts. In the sports industry, player exclusivity is the foundation of a league’s ability to attract investment, secure television deals, and sign sponsors. The United Pickleball Association (UPA), which operates the PPA and MLP, annually pays professional players more than $30 million in the aggregate in exchange for players’ contractual exclusivity for all pickleball-related activities, including exhibitions, clinics, camps, and play-with-a-pro events. Needless to say, as the history of the ABA, USFL, and, more recently, LIV Golf amply demonstrates, a rival professional tour cannot exist without access to elite players. Without the services of elite players, a rival tour cannot generate sufficiently compelling content to attract a media partner and, ultimately, sponsors. Without sponsors, a rival league would not be able to offer competitive compensation to players. In short, the UPA has now signed 80% of the world’s top 100 players, thereby depriving potential rivals of access to key assets they need to get off the ground. And these contracts are not merely window dressing: the UPA has actively relied on its exclusive rights when it terminated the contracts of James Ignatowich, Ryan Fu, and Vivian Glozman for competing in an unsanctioned event abroad. Without another league competing for their services, other athletes are unlikely to repeat these players’ mistake.
Software Platform. Among the assets rolled into Pickleball Inc. is Pickleball Play Solutions, the operator of PickleballTournaments.com and its companion league products. This software platform powers about 90% of organized tournament and league play, hosting some 4,500 tournaments and 2,000 league seasons in 2025, with web traffic averaging around five million visits per month. The competitive significance of this platform is easy to underrate. Thousands of tournament directors, from neighborhood round robins to national championships, run their operations, registrations, and historical player data inside this system. Any rival seeking to challenge the UPA or either of its leagues would first need to build comparable software from scratch and then persuade an installed base to abandon the tool it already knows.
Player Ratings. Pickleball Inc. holds an investment in DUPR, the Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating, which owns a registered trademark covering the rating of pickleball players. DUPR assigns a numeric measure to each player and has accumulated a dataset of more than 1 million rated players. DUPR now operates as the official, exclusive rating system across USA Pickleball-owned events. Ratings determine how competitive brackets are seeded and assist players with finding appropriate competition. Thus, a rival league using a different rating system could be functionally invisible to the numerous players who organize their play around DUPR.
Franchised Facilities. Pickleball Inc. also holds an investment in Picklr, the pickleball indoor facility franchisor that has more than 500 locations worldwide. This franchise system licenses court reservations, leagues, clinics, and tournaments to franchisees. Pickleball Inc. also owns Pickleball Central, an eCommerce retailer of pickleball equipment. These assets could play a key role in walling off competition from Apollo’s ecosystem. Recreational players likely first encounter the sport in such facilities, where they will also buy their paddle, register for a tournament, acquire a rating, and watch the professionals on the screen above the court. A facility captured within Apollo’s ecosystem may have scant commercial reason to host a rival sanctioning body’s events, promote a competing rating system to its members, or support a rival retailer.
Media Contracts. PickleballTV, the only round-the-clock network devoted to the sport, is a joint venture between the UPA and Tennis Channel. This joint venture produces all PPA Tour and MLP events and holds the right to show every match, as well as on-demand replays. PickleballTV also distributes select matches on larger channels, such as CBS, ESPN, and Amazon. A prospective rival tour could face the cost of not only producing live coverage, but also competing for attention against a dedicated channel holding years of accumulated content, viewership data, and the relationships that move that content onto larger media platforms. It is no secret that advertisers follow audiences and that sponsors follow advertisers. UPA’s media position presents a significant hurdle for a rival tour operator to overcome.
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From the foregoing, it appears that Apollo is running the playbook on how to monopolize a nascent industry. The architecture of this monopoly, what Apollo calls “the largest singularly operated pickleball ecosystem in existence,” is not self-evident from any individual component, but rather reveals itself only when those pieces are viewed holistically as an integrated strategy.[1] The PPA Tour feeds the rating system, which seeds the software, which populates the facilities, which supply the audience and retail, which sustain the media, which markets the tour. Any potential competitor cannot pick a single point of entry because entry at any one point likely requires entry across the board; accordingly, a potential rival would need to sign players currently bound by exclusive contracts, build software to run tournaments that is sufficiently robust to dislodge an incumbent with 90% market share, create a viable player rating system and persuade the sport’s governing body to bless it, secure media distribution against an entrenched dedicated network, and develop a facility and retail footprint of its own. Any one of those tasks would be daunting on its own. Taken together, the combination creates entry barriers that may prove to be impracticable, if not impossible, to overcome.
A Historical Antecedent. None of this is new. Four decades ago, a single cable channel built precisely this kind of integrated chokehold over a nascent industry. When MTV launched in August 1981, music videos barely existed as a commercial product. Many record labels, certain that radio was and would ever remain the medium where careers would be made, gladly handed over what they viewed as advertising to this start-up cable network for free. That fundamental miscalculation seeded MTV’s bottleneck over the recorded music industry. Indeed, within a few years, PolyGram and MCA, the most notable labels that had refused to surrender their artists’ work for free, were begging MTV for a deal.
MTV’s gamble paid off, inverting the historical power that labels had enjoyed over radio. A single cable channel with finite airtime but armed with outsized promotional power became the place where a hit was certified, displacing radio as the arbiter of what the public heard and purchased at record stores. MTV had what Apollo appears to be building—a moat around a loyal and motivated customer base. Launching its “I Want My MTV” campaign, MTV leveraged both its audience and rock stars such as Sting, Mick Jagger, and David Bowie to demand that recalcitrant cable operators carry its network. After securing wide distribution across cable networks, MTV pressed the labels for exclusivity, ensuring the clips it played could not be readily played elsewhere. So, when Ted Turner launched his Cable Music Channel to challenge MTV’s dominance, CMC’s grand ambitions for 10 million viewers crashed against this wall of exclusivity and folded after roughly a month in business, leaving MTV’s parent free to simply buy out Turner for a paltry sum. MTV would continue acquiring cable channels that showed music videos for years until no independent channels remained.
MTV regularly defended its business practices before the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and in federal court in lawsuits brought by would-be rivals. Yet, despite the obvious fact that MTV had amassed considerable power, none of its practices were ever found unlawful. Free content had secured the supply of music videos, and MTV’s targeted 12-to-24-year-old audience not only secured distribution and advertiser demand but also made MTV the industry’s gatekeeper. Exclusivity and acquisition then fortified its position in the market. As appears to be the case for any rival seeking to enter into pickleball, an upstart could not challenge MTV on only one front because MTV’s power was built across multiple markets for content, carriage, audience, and the limited airtime on MTV that had become vital to the labels. Like pickleball, the idea of a music video channel was new, and by the time industry players grasped the importance of the assets that MTV had been assembling, it was too late. For those concerned about maintaining competition in pickleball beyond the court, time is quickly running out.
[1] The authors take no position on the legality of any of the conduct described in this article. U.S. antitrust law only prohibits the attempted or actual acquisition of a monopoly through anticompetitive means. Many companies have, in fact, lawfully acquired market power through a variety of means not prohibited by the law.
