A Quick Rewind: How We Got Here
For most of the past three years, pro pickleball has revolved around two heavyweight brands: the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA), featuring traditional bracketed events, and Major League Pickleball (MLP), built around team-based, city-affiliated competition. After a whiplash 2023 filled with contract tug-of-wars and a start-and-stop merger attempt, the two sides closed their deal in early 2024 and created a single parent company, the United Pickleball Association (UPA). The consolidation was backed by a substantial new investment and allowed both formats to continue under one umbrella.
What the Unified Landscape Looks Like in 2025
The UPA model keeps the familiar split: PPA Tour events for individual glory and MLP events for city teams, drafts, and playoff drama. In 2025 that structure expanded with more MLP regular-season stops and a postseason that stretches from regional venues to marquee host cities, including a season finale set for New York’s Central Park. For the PPA side, the slate added international swings and special showcases while preserving the weekly rhythm fans know.
Why The Rivalry Still Matters—Despite the Merger
“Peace” on paper didn’t erase the competitive tension. After the 2024 unification, player pay scales and contract terms remained hot topics. By mid-2025, the league and top pros were renegotiating deals, adjusting appearance fees and incentives to match the sport’s growth curve. In short: the entity is unified, but the ecosystem is still evolving, and the give-and-take between tours, teams, and athletes continues to shape the product fans see.
Format Tweaks and Rules That Changed the Viewing Experience
MLP leaned further into fan-friendly pacing with roster and format refinements for 2025, including adjustments to scoring that emphasize decisive, TV-ready moments while preserving traditional rally flow in PPA brackets. Those tweaks, paired with tighter event run-of-show, have made broadcasts punchier and in-venue sessions easier to follow.
Follow the Money: Media, Streaming, and Reach
The sport’s visibility jumped again in 2025. UPA’s dedicated FAST channel, PickleballTV, widened distribution through YouTube TV’s lineup, while local broadcast groups added shoulder programming and weekend windows. The net result is simple: it’s never been easier to catch a pro match on a big screen or a phone.
The Global Push
Pro pickleball is no longer a purely American tour. With UPA-branded international events and a world championship framework, 2025 marked a more serious attempt to seed pro competition abroad while keeping North America as the home base. That expansion creates new pathways for international players and sponsors and gives U.S. fans more late-night (or early-morning) viewing.
What This Means for Players
For the pros, the blended calendar means more starts, steadier appearance fees, and clearer pathways from team play to individual rankings. Multi-year contracts—first touted when the merger closed—brought stability and lifted overall payouts compared with the pre-merger bidding-war era. The growing number of televised slots also raises the value of performance at high-profile stops, because a breakout week now resonates with fans and sponsors worldwide.
What This Means for Fans
Fans benefit on two fronts. First, the product is easier to follow: a unified storyline, marquee rivalries that carry from PPA singles into MLP team weekends, and a postseason that actually feels like a postseason. Second, accessibility is way up—free streams, more linear TV, and better schedules for in-person attendance. If you’re heading to a sun-splashed venue, don’t forget the practical side of spectating (yes, pickleball sunglasses help when the championship court faces west).
If you prefer to mirror the pros you’re watching, there’s a deeper runway than ever to try the tech you see on court—spin-forward faces, thermoformed builds, and lighter swingweights show up across professional pickleball paddles. You’ll spot plenty of Joola pickleball paddles and CRBN frames, among others, in the hands of touring athletes; both brands have been mainstays at big events, and their pro signatures often track directly with on-court trends like shorter backswings and fast-hand exchanges.
The Rivalry’s New Shape
The PPA–MLP tension used to hinge on “who signs whom.” In 2025, it’s become a creative rivalry inside a single house: whose format creates the most drama, which weekends produce viral moments, and how well the league can balance player workload with a year-round calendar. The scheduling puzzle now includes international showcases, team drafts, and high-stakes playoff weeks—an ecosystem that gives fans more “big match” nights and gives players more bites at the apple.
What to Watch Next
Two arcs will define the near future. First, the economics: as viewership and sponsor interest rise, expect continued fine-tuning of player compensation, appearance structures, and event tiers. Second, the product: rules and presentation will keep inching toward clarity and speed—tighter broadcasts, smarter replay, and arena-style show courts that look and feel like big-league productions. The goal is a clean ladder from local clubs to the sport’s brightest stages, with a season narrative casual fans can follow from opening day to the trophy lift.
Pro pickleball’s civil war has cooled, and in its place is a unified engine that still runs on competition—PPA and MLP formats pushing each other to be better inside one organization, with the athletes and the audience benefitting from the pressure. If 2024 was the handshake, 2025 is the rollout, and it’s starting to look like the blueprint the sport needed.
