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Senior World Cup 2026: 58 teams, not 58 countries
FIP’s final draw lists 32 men’s and 26 women’s teams across 33 delegations. What the 2026 Senior World Cup participation figures actually measure.
The 2026 FIP Senior World Cup final-phase draw listed 32 men’s teams and 26 women’s teams for the competition in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from 14–19 September. That is 58 team entries across 33 distinct delegations, not 58 countries or 58 players. The team totals come from FIP’s announcement; the delegation count is calculated by deduplicating its complete final group draw, published on 14 September.
Here, “Senior” means age-category competition: FIP specified a best-of-five format for each tie, covering 40+, 45+, 50+, 55+ and 60+ in its tournament preview. It is not an all-age participation survey.
What the participation totals count
| Measure | 2026 final-phase total | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Men’s teams | 32 | Entries in the men’s competition |
| Women’s teams | 26 | Entries in the women’s competition |
| Combined team entries | 58 | Men’s and women’s entries added together |
| Distinct delegations | 33 | Each represented delegation counted once |
| Delegations in both competitions | 25 | One men’s entry and one women’s entry each |
| Men’s-only delegations | 7 | No corresponding women’s entry in the final draw |
| Women’s-only delegations | 1 | No corresponding men’s entry in the final draw |
Source: FIP’s final group lists. Combined, distinct and overlap totals are calculations from those lists, not separately published FIP statistics.
The arithmetic is straightforward: 25 delegations entered both competitions, contributing 50 entries. Seven entered only the men’s draw and one only the women’s draw, bringing the total to 58 entries from 33 delegations.
The men’s-only delegations were Croatia, Egypt, Finland, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and Venezuela. Switzerland was the sole women’s-only delegation. “Delegations” is the more precise label for the deduplicated total because the draw includes Gibraltar; it should not be presented as a count of sovereign states.
These numbers describe the final phase, not every entry in qualifying. FIP’s 11 September tournament preview separately reported 11 men’s teams competing for ten final-phase places. Those qualifiers cannot simply be added to the 32: successful teams appear in both stages.
What the new qualifiers demonstrate
FIP’s 12 September qualifying report recorded three specific milestones:
- Gibraltar’s men won at their first participation in a team championship, beating Poland to qualify for the final stage.
- Slovakia beat Lithuania 3–2 to secure its first final-stage place in a team championship.
- Venezuela beat Ukraine 4–1, securing its first appearance in the tournament’s final stage.
Canada, Croatia and Lithuania subsequently secured the final three men’s places, according to FIP’s opening-day announcement.
Those results document first-time final-stage representation for the three teams highlighted in the qualifying report. They do not establish when recreational padel began in those markets, how many residents play, or how quickly participation is growing.
A measure of competitive reach, not player population
The draw shows the geographic reach of an international age-category event and the overlap between its men’s and women’s fields.
It does not supply an athlete headcount: teams are not players, and the five age categories do not establish squad sizes. Nor does one tournament draw establish a worldwide national-team total or a year-on-year growth rate.
For those different questions, see the separate analyses of how many countries have padel national teams and how many people play padel worldwide. Tournament entries, national-team representation and recreational participation measure different things.