Inside the FIP Padel Tour: Why Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum Events Are the Backbone of Professional Padel

Padel’s rise from a niche racquet sport to one of the fastest-growing games on the planet hasn’t happened only on the show courts of Premier Padel’s biggest cities. It has happened, tournament by tournament, on the Cupra FIP Tour — the global development circuit run by the International Padel Federation (FIP) that quietly does most of the heavy lifting for the sport’s expansion.

If you’ve heard players or commentators talk about a “FIP Bronze” or a “FIP Gold” event and wondered what it actually means, here’s the full picture: what the categories are, how many points and how much prize money are on the line, and why this circuit matters so much to padel’s future.

Two tours, one pathway

Since January 2025, professional padel has operated as a two-tier system. At the top sits Premier Padel, the elite tour made up of Major, P1 and P2 events — the tournaments with the biggest prize pools, the world’s best players, and the TV cameras. Below it sits the Cupra FIP Tour, split into four categories: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

The FIP Tour is where careers are built. It’s the entry point for young and developing players chasing ranking points, the proving ground for pairs trying to climb into Premier Padel qualification, and — increasingly — the mechanism through which padel is being introduced to entirely new countries.

The four categories, explained

FIP Bronze is the base of the pyramid. These are the most accessible tournaments on the calendar, often the first professional events available in a country new to competitive padel. Prize pools are modest — typically in the €7,000–10,000 range for the whole draw — and the points on offer are the smallest of any category. But for players without a ranking, Bronze events are essential: they’re the only realistic way to get onto the FIP ranking ladder in the first place.

FIP Silver is the intermediate step. Fields are stronger, prize money moves up to roughly €15,000–30,000 per tournament, and the points awarded are meaningfully higher — enough to start making a real dent in the world rankings for players who are consistently winning matches at Bronze level.

FIP Gold is where the circuit gets serious. These tournaments carry total prize pools of around €50,000–80,000 and offer the largest points haul below Premier Padel level, which is why Gold events are, as the FIP itself frames it, the tournaments that matter most for players trying to climb quickly into the top of the world rankings and put themselves in range of Premier Padel qualifying spots.

FIP Platinum sits at the very top of the FIP Tour, just below Premier Padel itself. Prize pools jump sharply again, typically €120,000–150,000, putting them close to Premier Padel P2 territory, and they attract a noticeably higher standard of player — including established pros using them to defend ranking points between Premier Padel stops.

How the points actually break down

FIP ranking points are awarded per tournament category and per round reached, and they’re what determines a player’s world ranking, which in turn determines direct entry, qualifying position, or wildcard eligibility for bigger events — including Premier Padel.

As a rough guide to how the scale works: winning a Bronze tournament is worth in the region of 20–30 ranking points, while winning a Gold event can be worth well over 60 points on the same relative scale — several times more for the same effort, which is exactly the incentive structure that pushes players to keep moving up. Silver sits in between. Platinum, sitting just under Premier Padel’s own P2 category, offers the richest points return of any FIP Tour tier.

It’s worth noting that these figures shift slightly from season to season as FIP fine-tunes the system, and the exact scorecard (published annually by FIP as the “Ranking Scorecard”) is the definitive source — but the relative gap between categories has stayed consistent: each step up roughly doubles or triples the points on offer, which is deliberate. It rewards players for taking on stronger fields rather than staying comfortable at a lower level.

Rankings themselves are calculated from a player’s best 22 results across Premier Padel and Cupra FIP Tour events combined, on a rolling 52-week basis — so older results age off and get replaced, keeping the rankings a genuine reflection of current form.

Where the prize money goes

Prize money is distributed across the whole draw, not just to the winner — which matters a lot for players still building a career. As a general pattern across all four categories, winners take home roughly 20% of the total prize pool, while a meaningful share (often 20–25%) is reserved for players eliminated in the earlier rounds, so that simply qualifying for and competing in the main draw covers a chunk of travel and accommodation costs.

In cash terms, that means:

• A Bronze winner might earn somewhere around €1,400–2,000 individually (remember, these are doubles events, so team prize money is split between two players).
• A Silver winner is looking at roughly €3,000–6,000.
• A Gold winner can expect somewhere in the €10,000–16,000 range.
• A Platinum winner can earn approximately €19,000–24,000.

Scale that up across a full season of results, and it becomes clear why the FIP Tour — not just Premier Padel — is where most professional padel players actually make their living.

A circuit that’s growing fast

The scale of the 2026 Cupra FIP Tour season underlines just how central this circuit has become to padel’s global story. This year’s calendar includes more than 200 combined tournaments and close to 400 individual competitions across men’s and women’s draws, spread across 78 nations — 17 of them brand new to the tour, including Vietnam, Morocco, Poland, Kenya and Slovenia. Geographically, Europe still hosts the largest share (46%), but Asia (26%), the Americas (14%) and Africa (13%) are all expanding quickly, with the category structure itself growing too: Gold-level events are roughly tripling in number for 2026, and Platinum events are doubling.

That growth isn’t abstract. FIP reported that more than 5,000 athletes competed on the Cupra FIP Tour in 2025 alone — a 78% increase on the year before. Each of those athletes needed somewhere to start, and for the vast majority, that somewhere was a Bronze or Silver tournament in a country where professional padel barely existed a few years ago.

Why it matters

It’s tempting to think of a sport’s growth purely in terms of its biggest events — the Premier Padel Majors, the packed arenas, the prize money headlines. But the FIP Tour is arguably doing more for padel’s long-term future than any single showcase event could. Every new Bronze tournament in a country like Ghana or Cambodia is a small but real investment in padel’s next generation of players, fans and federations. The category system — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum — isn’t just administrative structure; it’s a deliberately built pathway that takes a complete newcomer to the professional game and gives them a realistic, points-and-prize-money-based route all the way to the top of the sport.

That’s why, if you’re trying to understand where padel is really headed, it pays to watch the FIP Tour just as closely as the Majors.

---

Sources:

• CUPRA FIP Tour 2026: more than 200 combined tournaments and 17 new countries for an increasingly global Padel — Padel FIP
• Ranking System & Points Breakdown — Padel FIP
• Differences between FIP Bronze, Silver and Gold Tournaments: Points and Prizes — Tienda Padel Point
• FIP Tour: Prize money distribution and amounts by tournament category — Padel Magazine
• Padel Rankings Explained: FIP Points vs Prize Money — Padel Earnings
• 2026 FIP calendar — Wikipedia