Michael Dorfman runs the Pro Padel League from New York, which is the correct city to run a padel league from if you are trying to convince Americans that padel is a real sport played by real professionals for real money. The league has ten franchises across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In March 2026 it closed a $15 million Series A led by Rick Schnall, who among other things co-owns the Charlotte Hornets, and this round valued the league at roughly ten times what it had been worth twelve months earlier. Dorfman is the CEO. He is also the owner of the New York Atlantics, the league's New York franchise, which is the sort of arrangement that would raise more governance eyebrows if the league were older or larger, and which is not currently raising any.
The way he tells it, none of this was the plan. Dorfman spent his twenties working at The Dorfman Organization, a fourth-generation family insurance brokerage that specializes in transportation. Seven years. Then in 2018 he co-founded Koffie Financial, sometimes called Koffie Labs, a Brooklyn fintech built to underwrite trucking and, eventually, autonomous transportation. Koffie raised $4.5 million in 2021. It was, on paper, an entirely reasonable second act for a fourth-generation insurance guy: same industry, new technology, new business model. He was the COO. Nothing about that resume predicted what came next.
What came next was Padel Haus, a padel club in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood, which opened during the pandemic when the tennis courts were unavailable and Dorfman, a New York tennis player, needed something to hit. Padel is played on a walled court in doubles with a solid, stringless racquet. It is not pickleball. Dorfman fell in love with it, which is a phrase that gets used loosely except when it precedes decisions like the one he made in late 2022, which was to lead an investment into Padel Haus itself.
From there the ladder gets short. In 2023 the Pro Padel League launched with seven franchises. Dorfman bought the New York team and named it the Atlantics. He is a lifelong Knicks and Rangers fan and describes the chance to own a professional New York sports franchise as one he could not turn down. By 2025 the league had expanded to ten teams and four tournaments. Dorfman acquired a majority stake in PPL itself from co-founders Marcos Del Pilar and Keith Stein, stepped away from his role at Koffie, and became CEO. Left Lane Capital led a $10 million seed round. In September 2025 the LA Beat sold for $10 million to a group that reportedly includes athletes. That is a fifty-times markup on the $200,000 that franchises fetched two years earlier, which is either a very good sign about padel or a very good sign about how fast small numbers can grow.
Then, in March 2026, Rick Schnall wrote the check that made the league feel real to the sports business press. Schnall is co-president of the private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, which is one of the largest and oldest PE shops in the world, and he owns a piece of an NBA franchise, which is the kind of resume that a padel league does not usually attract. The round was $15 million. The valuation was ten times the seed. Dorfman is now the CEO of a league whose franchises would collectively be worth a nine-figure number if you multiplied by recent transaction prices, which nobody promises you should do.
The pitch he makes to investors is roughly this. Padel is the fastest-growing sport in the world by participation. Women are about 38 percent of players and about 38 percent of fans, which is a demographic distribution that most professional sports would sacrifice a lot to have. American racquet culture is under-served: tennis is expensive to build for and pickleball is over-saturated at the amateur level. Padel sits in a middle band where luxury brands are willing to spend to reach the audience, because the audience already spends. He points to Formula 1 and MLS as templates: American sports properties that broke through because a small league found a way to look big on television and on Instagram before it actually was big.
The other thing he says, and this is where the insurance-family background quietly re-enters, is that a league is a long game with a lot of unglamorous scaffolding. Franchise agreements, television rights, player payments, tournament logistics, sponsorship reads, insurance for the players, insurance for the venues, insurance for the promoters. Dorfman spent a decade underwriting risk for trucking companies before he ever picked up a padel racquet. When he talks about broadcast quality, he talks about it operationally: better camera angles, AI-generated player heat maps, live event integrations with arts and culture programming, specialty uniforms that lean into the aesthetic side of the sport rather than the athletic one. This is somebody who understands that if you want a spectator sport, you first have to build something worth spectating, and that this requires more spreadsheets than storyboards.
The New York Atlantics part is worth pausing on. Dorfman is the CEO of the league and the owner of one of its teams. The league is small enough that this is neither unusual nor a scandal - PPL launched with founders wearing multiple hats, and its early years have been closer to a startup than a mature sports property. But it is a fact that will look different at ten teams and ten times the revenue than it does today, and Dorfman is presumably aware. Right now the New York franchise is a proof point. He is a Knicks fan running a New York team in a league he now controls, and if you think about the incentive structure for whether padel actually breaks through in the biggest media market in the country, that alignment is not the worst thing in the world.
What Dorfman appears to be building, in short, is a league that looks and feels like a sport before it is one. In American sports history, this is usually how it works. F1 spent years being a Netflix show before it was a sold-out weekend at the Miami Grand Prix. MLS spent years being a foreign-player pension plan before it was a David Beckham vehicle before it was Lionel Messi in pink. Padel's American arc will be its own thing, but the pattern - build the aesthetic, build the audience, then build the sport into that shape - is legible enough that a Charlotte Hornets co-owner apparently recognized it and wrote a $15 million check.
Dorfman studied sociology at Bates College. He is, in the best sense, the person you would design if you were trying to figure out who could turn a Brooklyn warehouse hobby into a professional league. Not a career sports executive. Not a broadcast guy. A person whose family business was insurance, who understood risk-underwriting from the inside, who could raise venture capital because he had already raised it once, and who happened to fall in love with the right sport at the right moment. Padel, on the current trajectory, is going to be a real business in the United States. Whether the Pro Padel League is the version of that business that wins is a different question, and one that Dorfman is now three years into answering.
The answer, at least so far, is that he keeps raising money at higher valuations and keeps selling franchises to people who understand exactly what a franchise is. That is not the same thing as winning. But it is not nothing, and in a sport most Americans still cannot spell, it is a very reasonable place to be.