Cupra FIP Tour 2026: The Complete UK Fan Guide

The Cupra FIP Tour is professional padel's international development circuit — the arena where ranking points are won, careers are built, and the next generation of Premier Padel players earn their right to compete at the top level. In 2026, the tour has expanded to its most ambitious scale yet, with over 200 tournaments across more than 60 countries, and a growing British presence that makes it directly relevant to UK padel fans.

This guide covers how the tour works, what the categories mean, how prize money and ranking points break down, and what the 2026 expansion means for UK players and the sport's growth in Britain. For context on how the professional game fits into padel more broadly, see our getting started with padel guide.

How the FIP Tour fits into professional padel

Professional padel operates across two primary tiers. At the top sits Premier Padel — the elite circuit featuring the world's best players at Majors and P1/P2 events. Directly below that is the Cupra FIP Tour, which serves as both the development circuit and the ranking engine for the entire sport.

The International Padel Federation (FIP) governs both circuits, ensuring that FIP world ranking points — accumulated across Premier Padel and FIP Tour events — determine player seedings, entry requirements, and circuit access at every level. This unified structure, which came fully into effect from 2024 following the merger of the World Padel Tour and the FIP-backed Premier Padel, means the pathway from club-level competition through to the world's biggest events is clearly defined.

The Cupra naming reflects the Spanish car brand's title sponsorship, which has grown alongside the sport's commercial momentum. FIP and Cupra renewed their partnership heading into 2026, with Cupra's involvement helping fund the tour's geographic expansion and the doubling of Platinum-category events.

Tournament categories: Bronze to Platinum

The FIP Tour uses four tournament categories, ranked by prestige, prize money, and ranking points on offer. Understanding these categories is essential for following where British players compete and what results actually mean in the context of world rankings.

FIP Bronze events represent the entry point for aspiring professional players — accessible, widely distributed, and useful for building ranking points from a lower base. In 2026, Bronze events have reached countries that have never previously hosted an international padel tournament.

FIP Silver events attract a stronger field and offer meaningful ranking points for players in the mid-tiers of the world rankings. Many European FIP Silver events draw strong UK players.

FIP Gold events — which have tripled in number for 2026 — are where genuine ranking movement happens. A Gold title can shift a player from outside the top 200 into a seeded position at subsequent events. The 2026 season opened Gold events in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, as early as March.

FIP Platinum sits at the top of the FIP Tour pyramid. Platinum events have been doubled in number for 2026, with the season opening at the prestigious Palais des Sports in Marseille. These events attract fields that overlap with lower-ranked Premier Padel players and offer both the largest FIP prize pots and the highest ranking points outside of the Premier Padel circuit itself.

Your FIP world ranking is calculated from your best 22 results in a rolling 52-week window, meaning points expire exactly one year after they were earned. This rolling system rewards consistency rather than peak performances, and keeps the rankings genuinely reflective of current form.

The 2026 expansion: 17 new countries and five continents

The headline figure for 2026 is 17 new countries hosting their first-ever Cupra FIP Tour event. The expansion spans Asia (Cambodia, Singapore, Vietnam, Pakistan), the Indian Ocean (Maldives), and several other regions new to the circuit. Combined with the existing 40-plus nations, this brings the tour's geographic footprint to over 60 countries — making it one of the most geographically distributed professional sports circuits in any racket sport.

Around 95% of 2026 events use a combined format, hosting both men's and women's draws simultaneously. This structure reduces logistical overhead for host venues, increases spectator value, and means men's and women's players often share the same tournament week and practice environment.

For the sport's global development, this matters. Padel is no longer a Mediterranean phenomenon. The LTA and Padel England have consistently cited international competition exposure as a key driver of UK player development, and the expanded tour provides more points-earning opportunities at events closer to British players' ranking targets.

British players on the FIP Tour

The UK has a growing professional padel presence, and the FIP Tour is where most of that competitive activity takes place. Padel England, operating as a sub-body of the LTA, manages British players' international competition calendar in coordination with FIP entry systems.

The LTA's 2026 performance competition calendar confirmed five FIP Tour events as part of the British competitive programme, alongside seven LTA Padel British Tour Grade 1 events and 21 Grade 2 events. For aspiring juniors, three FIP Promises tournaments provide a direct pathway into the ranked circuit.

At the senior level, British No.1 Christian Medina Murphy (men's) and Aimee Gibson (women's) have been the most active on the international circuit. Catherine Rose — British women's No.2 — made an early mark in 2026, winning a FIP Bronze event in Singapore alongside her Spanish partner Lucía Pérez Parra. British No.3 Tia Norton has also featured in FIP qualifying draws.

The pathway for British players is straightforward in structure if demanding in practice: accumulate FIP Tour points, build rankings, and aim for qualifying draws at Premier Padel events — including the London P1 in August, where British wildcards are anticipated. This is exactly the kind of professional structure that Padel England has been advocating for, and the LTA's £1.5 million investment in padel infrastructure (announced for 2023–2025) was partly justified by this professional development pipeline.

Getting more British players into international competition also requires a strong domestic pipeline. For anyone wanting to understand how to play padel at a competitive level, developing the technical foundations early is what separates recreational players from those who eventually reach the FIP circuit.

For an explanation of padel rules and the sport's scoring format — which applies to FIP Tour matches just as it does at Premier Padel — our rules guide covers everything from serving mechanics to match tiebreaks.

UK context: following the FIP Tour from Britain

For UK fans, the Cupra FIP Tour is less glamorous than Premier Padel but arguably more personally relevant. When Catherine Rose wins a Bronze event in Singapore, or when a junior from the LTA's padel programme earns their first FIP ranking points, those are stories that connect directly to the British game's trajectory.

The LTA Padel website maintains a regularly updated event calendar listing FIP Tour events with registration details for British players and viewing information for fans. While coverage of individual Bronze and Silver events can be limited, Platinum events receive more comprehensive streaming via the FIP's YouTube channel and official website.

For fans newer to professional padel, understanding the FIP Tour also helps contextualise Premier Padel. When commentators mention world rankings, those rankings are the same FIP rankings built across both circuits. A player ranked 80th in the world has earned their points across FIP Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum events — and those points determine whether they qualify for Premier Padel draws.

The combined men's and women's format used at most 2026 FIP Tour events also means that if you watch a Platinum event stream, you are watching both tours simultaneously — twice the competitive padel for the same investment in a morning or afternoon.

The season structure and Finals

The 2026 FIP Tour runs across 11 months, from February through to December, with the season Finals closing the year in the first week of December. The Finals aggregate the season's top performers — with points capped by category — into a season-ending championship field.

Unlike Premier Padel's Finals in Barcelona (which features only the top 16 pairs from the Premier Padel circuit), the FIP Tour Finals draw from across all four categories and all competing nations. This makes the Finals a genuinely global event in composition, and increasingly competitive as the tour's geographic reach grows.

For 2026, the doubling of Platinum events and tripling of Gold events means more players can realistically accumulate the points required to challenge for Finals qualification. That increased depth — more competitive tournaments, more countries, more prize money distributed lower down the draw — is precisely the kind of structural health that a growing professional sport needs.

British fans with a serious interest in following the circuit should bookmark the Padel FIP calendar and the LTA Padel event page, which lists UK-relevant events with entry deadlines and streaming links where available. Our tournament calendar tracks the full 2026 schedule in one place, and player profiles covers world rankings and the British players currently competing on the FIP Tour.

The Cupra FIP Tour will not replace Premier Padel as the headline professional product — but for anyone genuinely following the sport's development, and for anyone invested in British padel's trajectory, it is where much of the most meaningful action takes place in 2026.