Metric methodology

Utilization is the share of the offered court time that was in use. In use means the court was no longer free to book at that time, whether a player had booked it or the club needed it itself.

It is the same measure for a club, a location, a region and a whole market. In the club report you pick the month; on the market pages it is the last full month.

Offered is the time a court is open. Opening hours are not part of the booking data, so we read them off when courts were free to book: per club, court kind and weekday. Where a single court differs, a hall that opens later than the rest of the site for instance, its own narrower hours apply to it.

• Indoor and outdoor are treated separately. If the outdoor courts open from 8 to 20, the night outside counts on neither side.
• A newly added club has no utilization until we have seen enough days to work out its opening hours.
• A running month reaches yesterday.

Utilization is an approximation. It describes what we can observe: how much of the offered court time was no longer free. It does not describe what a club billed.

It can therefore sit below or above the real utilization: not every booking is visible to us, and hours a club keeps for itself, for coaching or a league, count as in use.

The price per court-hour is the average price of the court-hours in use whose price the club displays. It is weighted by use: hours with a lot of play weigh more than quiet ones.

The basis is the price the club displays. What a player pays after a membership, a voucher or a discount isn't visible in it. The price is for the whole court at that time, so for all players together.

Court-hours at an estimated price and court-hours without a price stay out.

Revenue for a month is the sum of the prices of every court-hour in use. Each hour is valued at the price the club displays for that court at that time. Where we do not know it, we estimate it from the other prices of the club; where that is not possible either, the hour adds nothing.

• Above 25 % of the court-hours in use without a price we publish no revenue.
• Below that we name the missing share under the figure, and an estimated share above 25 % as well.

Revenue can sit below or above what the club actually took: not every booking is visible to us, and hours the club keeps for itself are valued too.

We see the displayed prices, not the settlement. Memberships, vouchers and discounts do not appear in them, and neither does secondary income such as drinks or racket rental.

Where a longer booking costs less per hour than the shortest one, we value an hour slightly too high. And because hours a club keeps for itself count as in use, revenue reads too high at clubs with many courses and leagues.

Counted are the active clubs we track continuously and their active courts. A club without an active court does not count.

That is the supply we can measure, not the whole market. Market coverage is what says which part of the market it is.

Only clubs we have coordinates for appear on the map.

Some clubs rent their courts through two separate booking pages, indoor and outdoor for example. We still hold them as one club, with the number of courts that actually stand on the site rather than the sum of both pages: the same court can appear on both.

Such a club gets a utilization rate and a price only when the two pages cannot offer the same court in the same hour. Otherwise we publish no figures for it, and its courts keep counting. Sometimes the figures describe only the main booking page while the rank and the map compare the whole venue; the report says where that applies.

So our club count for a place can sit below the number of separately bookable offers you find there.

Market coverage says which part of the clubs we know of here we track continuously. "12 of 18" means: of the 18 clubs we know of here, we track 12.

Clubs we do not know of yet are missing from both numbers. The share is therefore an upper bound and can dip when we find new clubs.

It does not depend on the month shown: it describes the market as it stands today.

A location is the town a club sits in. For metro areas we group several towns into one region, the Ruhr area for example, and a club then counts in its region rather than twice.

Utilization and price of a location are worked out over all of its clubs rather than as an average of club rates: a large club weighs more.

The ranking holds only locations with at least two clubs we track. With one club the row would be that club's own report under a place name. The location list below holds every one of them.

Each cell is the utilization of one hour on one weekday in the month shown, worked out over every court and every day of that weekday. Darker means fuller.

An hour with nothing offered stays empty. Hover a cell and you see its court-days: each court on each day counts once.

A single cell can rest on few days even when the club as a whole is well measured.

We therefore name the time window in the text only when the busiest time stands out clearly and rests on enough days. Otherwise it says nothing.

The calculator compares your planned club with active clubs that have a similar court count and a similar indoor share. The build type sets the indoor share: outdoor means no indoor courts, while every hall type and the air dome mean indoor courts only.

We search around your pin in stages: 10 km first, then 25 and 50 km, then with less strict criteria, then 150 and 300 km and finally the whole market your plan covers. Anything beyond 50 km is only shown once you agree to the wider comparison area for this site. From the 300 km stage on, the indoor share no longer counts and the court count may differ widely. A stage carries the comparison once the hours in use, the utilization and the price each rest on at least 3 clubs; otherwise the search moves on to the next stage. The market basis names the stage it rests on and how many clubs it draws on. If even the whole market does not carry the comparison, the calculator runs on industry assumptions.

Three figures come from the comparable clubs:

• Hours in use per court per day: for each club, its court-hours in use divided by the days its courts were offered. That is its utilization times its open hours, the same utilization as everywhere else in the product, expressed in hours. The field starts at the clubs' median.
• Open hours per day: how many hours a court at these clubs was offered on an average day it was open. Days on which a court was not offered at all do not count.
• Price per court-hour: the median of the clubs, each taken over its hours in use with a displayed price.

Each figure names the number of clubs it rests on, which can be fewer than the whole comparable group, for instance for the price. Hours in use above the open hours are capped at the open hours.

The basis is the last 28 settled days. The middle half of the clubs sits beside the hours in use as a range and sets the scenarios of the profitability model.

The market basis is a comparison with existing clubs. A forecast for your operation holds only as far as that comparison does.

• It assumes your club runs like the comparable clubs, whether they come from the surrounding area, the wider region or the whole market.
• It describes four measured weeks with no seasonal pattern, and the calculator carries them over to the whole year.
• Time a club keeps for itself counts as in use, and the prices are displayed prices.

From the location we compute three areas: everywhere you can reach by car in 10, 20 and 30 minutes. They follow the OpenStreetMap road network, at the speed limit where it is known and at a typical speed for the road type otherwise. Traffic, time of day and parking are not included.

The starting point is snapped to a grid of about 100 metres and then to the nearest road. Farm tracks, forest tracks and driveways do not count. If there is no road nearby, there is no area.

In the radius mode we show three circles of 5, 10 and 20 km in a straight line around the location instead of the drive-time areas. Roads, rivers and mountains play no part, and the starting point is not rounded. We count the people exactly as for drive time: a square entirely inside the circle counts in full, a square cut by its edge counts by the share of its area inside. The rule at national borders applies in the same way.

A circle is more even than a drive-time area but less realistic: it takes in places you can only reach by a detour and leaves out places just beyond it on a fast road. Clubs within the radius are counted by straight-line distance from the location.

Population figures come from the 2021 census, laid out in squares of one square kilometre. A square that lies entirely inside the area counts in full. Where the edge of the area cuts through a square, the share of the square inside the area counts.

The figure is therefore an estimate. We round it: to one decimal place from a million upwards, to the nearest thousand below that and to the nearest ten below a thousand.

Only people living in Germany and Austria are counted, and the road network ends at those borders. Where an area comes within about 2 km of another country, the affected figures carry an asterisk and the country is named. The figure is too low there, because the people on the other side are missing.

• The population is as counted in the 2021 census.
• Drive times assume free-flowing roads. In rush hour the area is smaller.
• The figure says how many people live nearby, not how many of them play padel. It does not feed into any figure in the profitability calculator.

Population: Eurostat, 2021 census, population grid at 1 km resolution. We convert the grid values to the drive-time areas and the circles.

Road network: © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Every input carries one of three labels:

• Observed: taken from the comparable clubs, with the number of clubs n it rests on
• Assumption: a preset reference value, with its typical range where a source gives one
• Your input: set or overridden by you

Hours in use, price and open hours follow the market until you change them or adopt the industry value: move the pin and they take on the new site's figures. Whatever you have set stays put, and each of these values can go back to the market figure.

The investment is the sum of the cost lines of your build type. There are five to choose from: existing hall, hall conversion, new hall build, air dome and outdoor. The build type also decides whether the courts are indoor or outdoor. Each line is per court or one-off; in the existing hall, for example, the courts and the hall adaptation are per court, while fit-out and planning are one-off.

A grant is deducted as a percentage, and the model works with the investment after the grant. In year 7 the carpet and net renewal per court is added.

The loan is the investment after the grant less your equity. The annual debt service A follows the annuity formula with loan L, interest rate i and term n in years. It stops once the term ends.

Rent or lease, staff, insurance, energy and water as well as maintenance are per court per month; software and marketing is one monthly amount per site. Air domes also carry a winter surcharge per court from November to March. All costs are net.

Booking and payment fees come on top, as a share of court revenue, preset to 4%. They follow each year's revenue.

From year 2 fixed costs and prices rise by 2% a year; the debt service stays fixed.

Revenue is worked out from the hours in use per court per day and one average price per court-hour. Where the site has a market basis, both come from the comparable clubs, and so do the open hours; otherwise industry assumptions apply, each marked as one.

• In every scenario the hours in use stay at or below 95% of the open hours.
• Year 1 is set at 75% of steady-state revenue.
• Extra revenue is an optional monthly line, preset to 0; it follows the same ramp-up and indexation as court revenue.

Usable days depend on the build type: 355 in the halls, 340 under an air dome and 210 outdoors. The open hours only set the ceiling and the percentage shown beside the hours, because revenue is calculated from the hours in use.

All prices are gross, including 20% VAT; the calculation uses net values. It applies the standard VAT rate of the market the site is in.

The break-even h* is the number of hours in use per court per day at which net revenue in a steady-state year covers fixed costs, fees and debt service. Extra revenue and the year-7 renewal are deliberately left out. The same figure appears beside it as a share of the open hours.

Where break-even lies above 95% of the open hours, the cap every scenario keeps to, the calculator reports it as out of reach.

Payback is the point at which cumulative cash flow before financing covers the investment after grants (the project view), interpolated linearly within the year. That cash flow is EBITDA less the renewal in year 7.

Where payback is not reached within ten years, the calculator says so instead of extrapolating. The cumulative cash-flow chart shows how the equity comes back.

The conservative and optimistic scenarios scale the expected hours in use by the spread of the comparable clubs, to the level of their weaker and their stronger quarter. The factors are the 25th and the 75th percentile of the clubs' hours in use, each divided by the median.

Where there is no such range, or it is narrower than 2% of the median, fixed factors of 0.8 and 1.15 apply, marked as an assumption. In every scenario the hours in use stay at or below 95% of the open hours.

• Taxes and depreciation (every result is pre-tax)
• Net present value and internal rate of return
• Buying the land
• Membership models

Each of these limits is also stated on the calculator itself.

A month here is always a calendar month. A club gets figures for a month once we have observed its courts on at least half of the days. A day the club was closed counts as observed.

Below that, utilization, the heatmap, revenue, price and rank stay empty, and the club enters no average and no ranking. Its courts keep counting, in the court count of a location for instance. The same fields stay empty for a club run through two booking pages that cannot be told apart.

There is no minimum number of days on top of that: a figure stands even when it rests on few days.

The club report compares the club you are looking at with active clubs in the same country that have a similar court count and a similar indoor share. That club is not among them, and neither is its second booking page.

We look within 50 km first. When there are not enough clubs with figures there, we widen the search: first to less similar clubs, then to 150 and 300 km, finally to the 30 most similar clubs in the market. The line under the comparison names the step it rests on: the radius, widened criteria or the whole market.

Below 3 clubs with published figures we show no comparison. The number beside a comparison names the clubs that actually carry a figure there, not every club in the group.