Major Drama Between Professional Pickleball Tours Picks Back Up

Over the weekend, while the leading professional pickleball tour (the Professional Pickleball Association or PPA) was sweating away holding a major event in Kansas City’s heat, and while its erstwhile tour competitor the Association of Pickleball Players (APP) was visiting Philadelphia for its latest stop, the “other” major player in the professional realm of the sport was making some serious moves.

Late Thursday night on August 24th, Major League Pickleball (MLP) announced that it had begun signing the sport’s top players to multi-year, guaranteed contracts. These contracts will guarantee massive pay days (6-figures annually), cover travel and lodging, provide healthcare, create an “off-season” for the exhausted players, and exclusively tie the players to MLP going forward. It was a massive shot across the bow of primarily the PPA, but also the APP, which still claims a few Premier-level players on its books and now looks like it may be poached of its top talent for a second successive year.

But the real news is the collapse of the PPA-MLP merger, which was struck back in November 2022 but which has never been officially consummated, and the weekend-long press-release competition between the two tours as they raced to sign players. By Saturday afternoon, most of the 2023 PPA-exclusive players had announced their intentions to either commit to 3 years on the MLP, or to re-up with the PPA for a 3 year term of their own. The PPA has re-launched its “Vibe” team competition, which existed for about a week last November before the two entities called a truce and agreed to collaborate, meaning we’ll now have multiple competing team and (presumably) touring competitions in 2024.

The collapse of this agreement is both surprising and not surprising. First off, the two entities have completely different visions for how the sport of Pro Pickleball should be done. Neither one is right nor wrong. The PPA thinks a touring model (as other individual racquet sports like Tennis, Squash, and Racquetball) is the best way forward, holding dozens of events per year, having a points table, and having the easy ability to say, “Anna Leigh Waters is the #1 Female in the world.” Meanwhile, the MLP’s approach is a team competition/Franchise model, where players compete, build value as a brand, and team champions are named. This approach has been quite successful for billion-dollar entities in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB, so there’s no arguing against it. So these continued battles have an underpinning of a competition for just how the public consumes the pro sport going forward. Both of the driving egos funding the organizations think they’re right, and are pushing their agenda.

There’s apparently no love lost between the two billionaires funding the two competing initiatives (Tom Dundon of the PPA and Steve Kuhn of the MLP), and despite the agreement struck last fall, the MLP was (to this observer) losing traction as the pre-eminent voice of the sport as the PPA has held dozens of events to the MLP’s three thus far in 2023. Kuhn and the MLP wanted more events, to have more influence in the sport, but the PPA was pushing back, wanting to host more events and to limit how many team events their players would be released for. There are just not enough weekends in a year to satiate the demand both tours wanted for 2024, and this split seemed in many ways inevitable.

However, the breakup is surprising to me because of the amount of money and influence it seemingly will cost Dundon and Pardoe. In their November, 2022 agreement, both men were gifted MLP franchises gratis, a $10M value (if you believe the current valuation estimates of the MLP franchises anyway). Dundon took over the Seattle team (super league finalists in the spring season), while Pardoe was given the Utah team. They also reportedly received 20% ownership share in the MLP itself. Now, all that value is likely kaput, and along with it the MLP has poached a huge number of PPA’s former “exclusive” players, gutting the depth of the PPA tour.

As of this writing and publishing mid-Saturday afternoon, MLP has announced the signing of at least 30 players on its twitter page, most of whom were PPA exclusive players in 2023. The PPA has fought back and retained a handful of its players, notably the sports’ two top players in Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters, but the damage is now done. The PPA is clearly betting that having the two top players is the pathway forward, while the MLP has a pretty solid base of players upon which to build its brand going forward.

Fallout from this weekend’s events could be rather interesting. Just thinking aloud:

• There’s now a slew of players who are PPA exclusive and seemingly cannot play MLP events going forward, but we’ve already done an entire draft for the fall season. Are we going to just have a big do-over?
• There’s now two entire MLP franchises in existence with vacated ownership; do they just sell those a-new or fold them?
• What happens to the PPA draws for the rest of this season? If there’s 30 players who are now MLP-exclusive, with more announcements coming, will we even have a full 16-person draw on the women’s side for the rest of the year?
• Heck, will the finals if this weekend’s PPA event even be competed if they’re involving now-MLP exclusive players?
• What about PPA’s TV deals? Their TV partners can’t be happy about the sudden loss of 30+ of its players. Same for MLP, will the loss of the sport’s top players like Johns, Waters, Parenteau, and others affect MLP’s contracts?

It is hard to begrudge the players for taking the money. Some of them must be absolutely pinching themselves, that they get to play pickleball for six figures annually. Good for them, and I’m glad they got paid.

However, these moves are absolutely horrible for the fans. We now have a complete split of talent, with top players on both sides, and both the PPA and MLP events will suffer for it going forward. We already had a huge issue with the dominance of Johns and Waters; now they have almost nobody to compete with them as their top up and coming rivals have decamped for the MLP.

I cover a ton of pro pickleball in this space, recapping every pro event after it happens, and including interviews and analysis of the pro industry and its players. I fully understand that many pickleball players really could care less which tour Ben Johns is signed with, and most couldn’t pick a top player like Lea Jansen out of a lineup. But the pro game drives innovation, drives sponsorship, drives television deals, and drives the money pouring into the sport. And now all these legacies that the tours were building are diminished. Titles earned going forward will be astericked as being against weakened fields.

I’m sure we’ll be revisiting this issue as the dust settles, so in the meantime we’ll re-cap the two pro events happening this weekend and see what happens next.