The best padel rackets under £100

Under £100 is a genuinely good place to shop for a padel racket, which was not true a few years ago. Two things changed: the sport grew enough that mid-range production got cheaper, and previous season discounting became routine.

What you get for the money

At £70 to £100 you should expect a fibreglass or low grade carbon face, a soft or medium EVA core, a round or soft teardrop shape, and a finished racket that will last a season or two of regular play. That is a perfectly good racket for anyone below a decent intermediate level.

What you will not get is a stiff high-carbon face, a genuinely head heavy diamond that holds up, or the low weight tolerances that the expensive rackets advertise.

Two routes to a good racket under £100

Buy a current entry-level racket from a major brand. Head, Adidas, Dunlop, Babolat and Bullpadel all make competent rackets in this bracket, and Decathlon's Kuikma range is better than its price suggests. The advantage is availability, warranty and stock in the weight you want.

Buy a discounted mid-range racket from last season. This is where the real value sits. A racket that launched at £180 and now sells at £95 is a substantially better racket than anything designed to hit £95. The disadvantage is that stock is unpredictable.

See everything under £100 with a live UK price

Where the floor is

Below about £50 the compromises stop being acceptable. You are into rackets where the face delaminates from the core within months, the surface goes smooth quickly, and the weight distribution is inconsistent enough that two of the same model feel different.

There are exceptions, mostly heavily discounted stock from real brands, and those are worth taking. What is not worth taking is an unbranded racket at £35 on a marketplace listing, however good the photograph looks.

The trap in the middle

Beware the £60 to £80 racket sold as an advanced or professional model. Genuine high performance construction costs more than that to produce, so a racket at that price claiming an 18K carbon face and a hard core is either heavily discounted old stock, in which case fine, or it is not what it says it is.

Checking whether several UK shops list the same racket at a similar price is a decent sanity test, and it is one of the things a comparison site is actually useful for.

What to spend the difference on

If your budget is £100 in total, spend £80 on the racket and the rest on two overgrips, a wrist cord and a cover. The overgrips will affect how the racket feels more than the last £20 of racket would have.

And if £100 is not a hard limit

The £100 to £160 bracket is where the largest quality jump happens, mostly in the face material and core consistency. If you play twice a week or more and expect to keep playing, that bracket is better value per year owned than the one below it. Above about £200 you are paying for the last few per cent, and for the sponsorship of professional players.