Focusing on the continent: Bringing the production of the second-ever Hexagon Cup inhouse with Mediapro
Hexagon Cup has made a new graphic for this year’s broadcast with FoxTenn and WTVision, this one showing viewers the teams’ strategy on attacking the other team’s weakest player, with vertical coverage on the court
The second-ever Hexagon Cup took place in Spain from 29 January to 2 February 2025. Over five days of fast-paced padel action, the event achieved new high attendance figures, with more than 30,000 spectators in the Madrid Arena, and both Saturday and Sunday were sold out.
The event’s fan base is growing year on year through its broadcast; the number of global viewers increased, with two million views on YouTube, up 71% compared to 2024. Those viewers had an average of 24 minutes of media viewing time, up 29.8% compared to 2024.
The website had 126,000 users interacting with it. In addition, between Instagram – where 5.8 million accounts were reached – Tik Tok, X and LinkedIn, the tournament had a total of 20 million views and a growth of 20% in the total community, exceeding 55,000 followers.
In addition, the event featured 46 global broadcasting partners (seven more than in the first edition), bringing the Hexagon Cup to nearly 750 million households (+9.5% compared to 2024).
“As head of content, I’m trapped into two bubbles; I’m trapped into the bubble of “padel is the best thing in the world!”, and then you’re travelling to the international padel of Hexagon Cup that goes, “how do we bring more people in?”. And I need to cater for both.”
In the inaugural year for the Hexagon Cup, Aurora Media Worldwide was the host broadcaster. This year, that role was bought in-house, with Mediapro’s Portugal-based operation running the production services for Hexagon Cup.
As to why, Jose Garnes, Hexagon Cup’s head of content, says that in the first year, Hexagon Cup needed a knowledgeable production partner to get the broadcast for a completely unknown entity off the ground. In this second year, it was ready to explore what else it could do with the broadcast to optimise it.
Garnes explains why the second Hexagon Cup has involved so much change at the top: “So we took advantage of the great experience that Mediapro has in padel. That team has been producing Premier Padel, the top official professional padel tour worldwide, founded by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) together with the International Padel Federation (FIP) and the Professional Padel Association (PPA). So their knowledge of the sport is second to none. Also, Hexagon, FIP and Premier have just announced a strategic partnership.”
Continues Garnes: “What we wanted to make sure of is that we had a differentiator with the rest of the padel tournaments. So the editorial team was us, the technical and the service and the structure was provided by Mediapro.”
One of the things Hexagon Cup learned in its first year was that its Spanish-speaking audience is its hardcore padel fanbase, whereas the English-speaking fans are newer to the sport and the athletes.
“So one of the reasons we changed to Mediapro was their knowledge of the sport, their flexibility to provide a fully produced feed English and Spanish, and the fact that they were based in mainland Europe meant that costs were more efficient and we were able to be more agile compared to bringing an external host broadcaster into Spain,” explains Garnes.
The inaugural Hexagon Cup took place in 2024. The host broadcast was conceived and developed by Aurora Media Worldwide . This year, Hexagon Cup has gone inhouse with production services from Mediapro, in order to focus on its hardcore Spanish-speaking fans
Spanish hardcore fans
Garnes is trapped between a rock and hard place in terms of the audience for Hexagon Cup, which is either the Spanish speaking hardcore padel fan or – at the other end of the scale – the English speaking new-to-padel fan, both of which must be served.
He says: “The biggest challenge this year was catering for a Spanish audience and then thinking about how do you cater for an international audience. It’s huge change of mindset [between the two audiences].
“Normally when you come from your international broadcast, you always think that your main feed is in English by nature due to football, racing, Olympic sports; they almost always are in English. For us it’s not; it is the other way.”
Garnes continues: “You need to understand that the majority of the audience that you are broadcasting to don’t understand what is happening [in the matches]. The reason I say that is because as the head of content, I’m trapped into two bubbles; I’m trapped into the bubble of “padel is the best thing in the world!”, and then you’re travelling to the international padel of Hexagon Cup that goes, “how do we bring more people in?”. And I need to cater for both because the people who think that padel is the best thing in the world, they just want more padel, they want more and more and more. Whereas the other side they go, “yes, but who are these people on TV?” How do you present the personalities? How do you present the sport? And that is very difficult because at the core of the production, you need to be able to come out and hit those two bubbles.”
Garnes says the Spanish commentators talk to their audience about the athletes’ backgrounds and personalities as the viewers know the stars well. He goes on: “In Spanish you can fill the air a lot, because [viewers] have the knowledge; they can talk about the pairings, where do they come from. Whereas in English, if we go into that level of detail, you lose the audience because it’s still trying to learn the names [of the athletes].
“So what we did is with our crews this year round, is we split the signal and most of the time the main signal was in Spanish and then the English signal would open up and go into educational videos, like how you doing this, how do you do a serve, how do you return? Meanwhile in the Spanish feed, we’re talking about personalities. And then at some point they come back together and join the same feed. So suddenly your Spanish audience who love the sport are getting catered content for them, and an international audience that may be taking it into the UK, US, in Australia, in Asia, they’re getting information about the sport, and how do you play it.”
This split feed was able to be created in a single OB truck on site. Comments Garnes: “Normally when you do different feeds or different signals you have mini desks and producers teams doing that around each feed. For us to be self-efficient and not exponentially increase our costs, we ran everything from the same truck. [It required] a lot of clever thinking to allow us to be able to split the feed, but the audience did not realise that they were actually watching a bespoke feed for them coming out of the same truck.”
Teams compete in the Hexagon Cup, with each team owned by celebrities, including tennis stars Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal’s academy, football player Robert Lewandowski, and Hollywood actress Eva Longoria [pictured on the court]
As to plans for the Hexagon Cup next year, Garnes says social media influencers are next on the list for a feed split. He explains: “As we go forward, we need to do more bespoke feeds and that means more teams on the ground to be able to do a fully hosted Spanish feed with presenters, studio, and a fully hosted English feed maybe by markets, by Europe, USA.”
Garnes continues, looking ahead: “The other part that we haven’t really touched is the influencer market. The influencer market in padel is really growing and they have some great personalities, mainly Spanish speaking, but also they can have great audiences. So how can we tap into creating a feed for them that they can host or they can present for themselves and for them to reach the audience?”
One group of influencers – which is also a major differentiator between the Hexagon Cup and other padel tournaments out there – is Hexagon Cup’s celebrity team owners, who are likely to want to activate their own channels going forwards.
Garnes concludes: “So the challenge that we faced this year and last year was how do we get this off the ground? How do we cater forward for two groups [of viewers]? Next year is going to be how do we do it even better and how do we open another avenue of audience, which will be the influencer audience.”
This year DAZN took the broadcast in Spain, as well as Teledeporte, a free to air Spanish TV channel operated by Televisión Española (TVE), and Hexagon Cup also broadcast the production on its YouTube channel.