Padel
Get to know Sandy Farquharson - the voice of Premier Padel on Red Bull TV
Sandy Farquharson’s life changed forever when he was introduced to padel. Here’s how he went from a tennis pro and coaching on the ATP Tour to becoming the voice of Premier Padel.
The booth sits high in the stand, a glass box looking down on the court. Below, a rally is building: a drive, a lob, a scramble back toward the glass. All the while, Sandy Farquharson is leaning into the microphone, headset on, one hand tracing the shape of the point in the air. For the English-speaking audience watching Premier Padel on Red Bull TV, his voice has become instantly recognizable.
Farquharson is the man tasked with turning a new, fast-growing sport into something a first-time viewer in Manchester or Mumbai can follow. It’s a job with far more moving parts than most people watching at home would ever realize.
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From the baseline to the booth
On the mic during the Italy Major in Rome
© Samo Vidic
Farquharson didn’t set out to be a broadcaster. He played NCAA Division 1 tennis in college in the United States before turning professional. He then moved into coaching and worked with players on both the ATP and WTA Tours. A little over a decade ago, he was the head tennis coach at a tennis academy in Dubai, a week from flying home for good, when padel intervened.
A place opened up in a local padel tournament; he stepped in and won. He’s quick to puncture the story: the standard in Dubai back then, he insists, was low. But on the drive to the airport, on his way back home, his phone rang. The Crown Prince of Dubai had watched the final and wanted to offer him a job running racquet sports at a new sports complex. He decided to stay.
What followed was a crash course from icons at the very top of the game. He spent months in Spain, training with Fernando 'Bela' Belasteguín, Pablo Lima and Horacio Álvarez Clementi, names that now carry the weight of legend, but who were far more reachable a decade ago. He went on to play for Great Britain, coached the United Arab Emirates national team, and in 2019, founded The Padel School alongside his brother Tom.
Sandy Farquharson founded The Padel School with his brother, Tom
© Samo Vidic
The School grew out of a simple frustration. He kept repeating himself in lessons, with the same corrections, the same explanations, day after day. So he started filming short videos for his players and posting them online. There were no English-language padel resources to point anyone toward, so he built them himself. That instinct to take a complex skill and break it down so a player can actually use it has been the thread running through everything he has done since.
“When Red Bull [TV] reached out to me for the commentary, it was because they'd discovered my social media content,” he says. “They thought I’d be a good native English-speaking commentator to join the broadcast.” He had called a few of his own tournaments back in Dubai, but the Red Bull TV role was the first official commentary job of his career.
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What a Premier Padel matchday actually looks like
Farquharson has a great understanding of the game through coaching
© Samo Vidic
Farquharson’s mornings belong to The Padel School: a couple of hours on the platform with members, coaches and academy teams scattered around the world, almost all of it remote now. If the tournament city is generous, he’ll take that work to a coffee shop somewhere central, then fit in a gym session. From lunchtime, the day turns toward the broadcast.
“There will almost certainly be a run-through with the team,” he says. “Preparations for the matches coming up, knowing who’s playing, getting statistics on those players, understanding the schedule.” A typical day mixes live studio segments with co-hosts and stretches of commentary from the box.
How much homework goes into a single match depends on the round. Quarter-finals throw up less frequent pairings and players he doesn’t know as well. For most matches, though, he leans on years of accumulated knowledge of the players, their patterns and the rhythms of the tour.
"The real challenge is volume," says Farquharson
© Samo Vidic
The booth itself is usually perched high in the stadium, with a clear line down to the court, and a good view of the crowd. Two commentators, a screen each, one audio box controlling the headsets. A laptop or tablet sits off to the side, running live match statistics, so he can pull up a number mid-rally and tie it to a particular player. He works off a combination of the live feed and the action directly in front of him.
And the hardest part? Not what you’d expect. “I’m very grateful, and I enjoy the work,” he says. The real challenge is volume, with several matches in a day, sometimes back-to-back. “If a match is going on for a long time and it’s not the most interesting of games, it can be difficult to keep entertaining for those watching.” A commentator, after all, doesn’t get to choose the script.
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A coach’s eye
Farquharson trained alongside padel legend Fernando Belasteguín
© Alberto Nevado/Red Bull Content Pool
What separates Farquharson from a commentator who simply names the shots is the way he watches. Years of coaching, from beginners in Dubai to pro players in the GB national set-up, have given him a clear picture of who is on the other side of the screen. “I’ve either been on court with them, or they’ve watched my content, or they’ve been a member of our platform,” he says. “I have a pretty good idea of who’s watching, and therefore how I can explain what’s happening.”
When Juan Lebrón unloads his signature smash or Alejandro Galán conjures a winner from nowhere, the casual viewer sees a great shot. Farquharson sees the build-up. “The biggest thing I see that the average viewer may not be aware of is the shots that led to that moment,” he says.
“When people watch padel on social media, they see the highlights, the flashy shots, the finishes. What they don’t see are the two to five shots that set up that opportunity, what players are doing strategically to get an opening. At the highest level, they have to work really hard to get there.” His task, mid-rally, is to make that invisible work visible without slowing anything down.
Sandy Farquharson knows his padel history
© Samo Vidic
Knowing the sport’s past helps him read its present. The hours spent with legends like Belasteguín, Lima and Álvarez Clementi taught him not only technique but also the origins of padel, its structures, foundations, and character. “The sport is changing,” he says, “but many elements of padel have stayed the same: the social side, fair play, the community.” He’s firm on the point: a commentator who doesn’t know the history can’t do the job properly today.
That eye carries into the women’s competition, which he doesn’t believe needs a different approach so much as a different appreciation. The women’s game, he notes, is built less on the raw weapons and physicality of the men’s tour and more on patient construction, with a special focus on how points get built, set up and finished. The commentary should honor that effort just as readily.
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Talking to the world
Sandy Farquharson knows that padel commentary is a delicate balancing act
© Samo Vidic
Red Bull TV brings Premier Padel to a genuinely global audience, and a large slice of that audience is meeting the sport for the first time. Holding the hardcore fan and the total newcomer in the same sentence is a balancing act that Farquharson has been practicing for years.
“It’s something I’ve had to do with my content over the last 10 years,” he says. Emerging padel nations need different advice from countries seven or eight years into the game. “Sometimes it’s explaining a basic rule. Sometimes it’s giving a more complex analysis of the points and the players.”
Farquharson covers tournaments all around the world
© Premier Padel/Red Bull Content Pool
He sees the commentary as an extension of The Padel School's mission. He built that platform because he believed everyone should be able to access good coaching, improve, gain confidence and bring their friends into the game. To him, the booth is the same idea on a larger scale. “I’m trying to help viewers understand the game better so they get more enjoyment out of it, share it more with their friends, explain it to their non-playing padel friends, and hopefully introduce more people to the sport.”
He’s aware, too, that words carry. Recreational players copy what they see the pros do, sometimes badly, like swinging for an out-of-the-court smash from the serve line because Bea González made it look easy. If his commentary nudges someone to stay patient for one more shot, or to grasp that points are constructed rather than won off a single swing, he’ll take it. “That’s the kind of influence I’d be happy with.”
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The global tour and the team behind the commentary
Sandy Farquharson is quick to praise his broadcast colleagues
© Samo Vidic
The job is also a passport. Premier Padel has taken Farquharson to Doha, Marbella, Acapulco and Roland Garros in Paris, the last of which clearly lingers. He watched the French Open on television a few times as a kid; walking those grounds now, with padel among them, still lands.
The atmosphere he rates highest, though, is Buenos Aires: a knowledgeable, electric crowd that knows the play, players’ families in the stands, emotion everywhere. For a handful of events a year (Buenos Aires and London among them this season), he travels in person rather than calling remotely.
He’s quick to credit the people around him. The operation is large and very international: producers, videographers, editors, and the whole crew behind an event. The chemistry, he says, genuinely impresses him, given how spread out the team is. In the booth, chemistry matters even more. “If you’re commentating with a friend in the box, it’s that much more natural, and hopefully more enjoyable to listen to.”
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The road ahead
Farquharson brings a wealth of knowledge to the commentary booth
© Samo Vidic/Red Bull Content Pool
In Farquharson’s view, newer formats stretch the job in fresh directions. The Reserve Cup, with its entertainment-driven team format, throws unusual pairings together and shuffles coaches between camps, a fun thing for a padel fan to watch, he says, even if the stakes differ from a ranking event. The incentives there are the team environment and the prize money, rather than the race to world number one.
The bigger picture is what keeps him optimistic. Farquharson has watched padel go from a sport people had genuinely never heard of to one played in more than 90 countries. He admits he was briefly worried about its trajectory in the years before any English-speaking nations engaged. That worry is long gone.
Sandy Farquharson thinks the sport of padel has a bright future
© Samo Vidic
He sees the broadcast as central to the next leap, especially if padel reaches the Olympics. “When it becomes an Olympic event, there are going to be many, many people watching who have no idea about the sport,” he says. “It’s very important that a strong broadcast is available to them.”
Ask him where padel commentary itself will be in five years, and the answer is more about ambition than prediction. He’d like it to carve its own path, something dynamic and exciting to watch. If it were up to him, he says, padel would feel less like tennis and more like football.
For now, the rally below the glass is still going. Farquharson watches a player drift back toward the back wall, recognizes the pattern starting to form, and leans toward the microphone again, ready, as ever, to tell the world what it’s about to see.
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Where can I hear Sandy Farquharson and watch Premier Padel?
Tune in to Red Bull TV to hear Sandy Farquharson in full flow
© Samo Vidic
You can watch every Premier Padel tournament from the quarter-finals onwards, live on Red Bull TV. For full tournament schedules, ticketing, results, and player news, head to the Premier Padel website.
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