The number that follows you around the world

PadelNation talks to Jethro Binns, co-founder of LevelTech, about how the platform is building the rating infrastructure padel needs – and tackling a problem the sport hasn’t yet solved

For players, the appeal of padel lies in its openness. You walk into a club, find a game, compete. That experience depends on something most players never think about: a shared understanding of level. As the sport scales – more clubs, more cities, more countries – that shared understanding is fracturing. Different platforms use different scales. Club ratings drift from competition rankings. A number that carries meaning in one city means very little somewhere new. Players who move between systems quickly discover their rating is only as useful as the ecosystem that recognises it.

Padel’s doubles format makes this worse. Your rating isn’t just a reflection of your own ability — it’s entangled with whoever happened to be your partner. Move between platforms and that entanglement follows you, distorted. A number that looked meaningful in one system arrives somewhere new carrying someone else’s performance baked into it.

Every racket sport that has grown beyond its original community has eventually had to solve this. Squash solved it. Padel has not yet — but the infrastructure to do so already exists.

What squash learned — and what padel can borrow

LevelTech was co-founded by former professional squash player Jethro Binns and mathematician Richard Bickers to solve exactly this problem in squash. SquashLevels launched with a straightforward ambition: give every player a single, portable rating that works anywhere in the world.

Today SquashLevels operates in more than forty countries, is endorsed by both the Professional Squash Association and the World Squash Federation, and has been validated across more than 7.4 million match results. Its algorithm outperforms every major comparable system — including UTR, Elo, and Glicko — on predictive accuracy. Most importantly: when players are matched within a similar rating band, over 79% of matches are genuinely competitive. That is what good ratings actually produce. The real-world impact is measurable. When the Dutch Squash Federation adopted SquashLevels, tournament participation rose by 25% and 65% of team captains reported noticeably more competitive matches within a single season.

Applying the model to padel

PadelLevels applies the same algorithmic infrastructure to padel. Because padel is a doubles sport, partners rotate constantly. A credible rating model must work out how much credit or blame each individual deserves when four people contributed to the result — and it must do so across thousands of different partner and opponent combinations. Done poorly, this means playing with a strong partner artificially inflates a weaker player’s rating, and vice versa. LevelTech’s algorithm isolates individual contribution from partnership effects — producing ratings that reflect you, not who you happened to play with last Tuesday. Early validation — across more than 6,300 calibrated padel matches — produces near-equivalent accuracy to the squash result, without any padel-specific changes to the underlying algorithm. The framework is genuinely sport-agnostic. Jethro Binns, LevelTech’s co-founder and CEO, says: “Padel has a real opportunity that most sports don’t get. Because the growth is happening right now, the sport can choose to build a common language for level from the start — before the ecosystem locks in around competing standards. If players can carry a rating that’s trusted across clubs, competitions and countries, it keeps the sport open.”

What this means for clubs and federations

PadelLevels is live and already working with clubs across the UK, with match data flowing through integrations with major booking platforms including MATCHi, Matchpoint and Court 22.

For clubs, the starting point is simple: a free, fully managed box league, up and running in days. Coaches and managers provide initial level assessments; from there, every match refines each player’s rating automatically. That hybrid approach – human expertise at the start, data doing the work thereafter – means ratings are accurate earlier and trusted faster.

For federations, PadelLevels offers consistent, portable rating infrastructure that works across every club, league and competition within a membership – a national standard rather than a patchwork of platform-specific rankings.

LevelTech’s model is built on integration, not replacement. Clubs and platforms do not need to migrate their users – they connect, and their match data starts contributing to a rating network that spans the sport.

Partnerships

LevelTech is now actively partnering with clubs, leagues, federations, booking platforms and media partners who want to help build a shared rating standard for padel.

Binns explains: “For clubs, we are offering a free box league up and running in days and give their members a portable level from their very first match. For leagues and federations, there is the opportunity to connect their competition data to a rating network that works across the whole sport. We are also looking to work with booking and tournament platforms, integrating PadelLevels via API and offer users a credible, cross-platform level.”

For more info visit [www.padellevels.io](http://www.padellevels.io/)