At the center of this innovation are Vianney Doubois (54 years old), a Frenchman who lives in the Netherlands and is the CEO and founder, and Marcos Gutiérrez (40 years old), a Spanish engineer originally from Ciudad Real and based in Belgium, who is in charge of explaining all the details of this tool to MARCA. His goal is to raise the level of one of the fastest-growing sports in the world. Shohib Kabir, a 29-year-old Dutchman, completes the team.
The idea came about when Vianney, playing paddle tennis, noticed that his backhand partner seemed to be more decisive and win more points. This curiosity led him to conceive an app that would collect data to understand each player's influence on the partner. "I got in touch with him when I heard some interesting data on a World Padel Tour broadcast. I was already working with coach Pablo Crosetti, I loved the idea and joined the project," explains Marcos.
Phrases like "Have you seen this graph that shows that Galán is the player with the most winners?" or "The other day I saw a graph that shows that Carolina Navarro is the best defender on the women's circuit" have become common among padel fans on social networks in recent months. And few have not yet discovered Padel Intelligence, a tool that has gained ground since the beginning of the season, both among players and coaches as well as fans.
Vianney and Marcos began to shape their project in 2022, recognizing the great potential they saw in it, especially given the demand for a sport that, in their opinion, needed more statistical analysis. "Circuit statistics seemed very basic to us compared to what LaLiga or ATP offer, for example. We started contacting coaches and players and they loved the idea. We have already worked with almost all the top male and female players," adds Gutiérrez, highlighting that Padel Intelligence helps to better understand the game not only for professionals, but also for amateurs.
The data collection process is carried out using proprietary PICA (Padel Intelligence Certify Analyst) technology and has a team of 15 workers distributed between South America and Europe. "It is a manual process, only a mobile device or tablet is needed, as if it were the control of a video game console, and a series of commands to record each action. The workers receive prior training and then perform the games in person or via live streaming," Marcos explains. This training work is complemented by a "style guide" that everyone follows, especially focused on more subjective actions such as forced or unforced errors: "It is important to have a single criterion".
Since the quarterfinal round in 2023, they started analyzing matches, but noticing that the coverage was limited for several players, they decided to start from the first round of the draw. This year, they have already done this at Premier Padel's Riyadh, Doha, Acapulco and Puerto Cabello events, which has increased the workload and led to expanding the team, even with some students doing internships.
After each match, Padel Intelligence provides detailed data on winners, unforced errors and percentage of points won with the first serve, as well as global reports that compare players in specific actions of the game. But the highlight of this tool, according to one of its managers, is the 'Contribution score' graph, which shows the evolution of each player during the match and his or her influence on the match. "At a glance, you can see at which moment and in which set a player performed better based on different actions. It's like the rating in basketball."
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