Miscellaneous
Everyone treats the PPA-MLP merger like it was one press release and a handshake. It wasn't. It was four years of two tours fighting over the same small pool of players. I watched most of it from the outside. I'm well connected in the sport now, so I can add some of what I've learned since.
I was a sophomore and junior in college, leaning hard into the sport. I'd found it was fun on the court and a great way to make friends, and I was also deep into studying business. This was the first time those two interests actually crossed paths. I wanted so badly to understand the real deal structure behind the merger, but I had nothing to go on beyond what the public got.
Phase 1
PPA and MLP didn't start as rivals. Connor Pardoe founded the PPA in 2019 as an individual bracket tour, singles and doubles, weekly stops, a champion crowned every week. Steve Kuhn launched MLP in September 2021 with a completely different pitch: eight teams, coed rosters, equal playing time for men and women, a franchise model built for broadcast.
The two formats could have coexisted. They didn't, because of what PPA did next. In 2021, PPA introduced the sport's first exclusive player contracts. Then in January 2022, the Pardoe family sold a majority stake to Dundon Capital Partners, and PPA moved roughly 30 of its leading players onto fully exclusive three-year deals. Base guarantees ran $60,000 to $100,000 before prize money, more than $3.1 million in total 2022 player compensation. MLP answered by partnering with the open-contract APP Tour and scaling up its own team count and prize pools.
That's the actual root of the conflict: control over access to a small number of players good enough to headline either tour, not the scoring format or which product people liked better.
My Perspective
From the outside, it just looked like a pure bidding war. Guys who'd entered the sport less than 24 months earlier, above average at best, started signing with agents because it was a gold rush, and were suddenly getting paid maybe ten times what they were actually worth. It couldn't have been a better spot to be in.
Phase 2
PPA tried to beat MLP at its own game. On November 3, 2022, it launched VIBE, a six-team league built on PPA-contracted stars, with Mark Cuban announced as its first owner. Seven days later, MLP and VIBE announced a "strategic merger," continuing under the MLP name.
This is the moment most casual fans misremember as the PPA-MLP merger. It wasn't. The joint statement was specific: MLP and the PPA Tour's VIBE league were combining as a team property. The PPA Tour itself, the individual bracket business, stayed completely separate and kept running its own calendar under its own ownership. VIBE disappeared as a competing team league, and MLP absorbed its PPA-aligned talent, VIBE's four teams (Utah Black Diamonds, Seattle Pioneers, Arizona Drive, and Dallas Pickleball Club) kept playing under the MLP banner, but PPA and MLP remained two different companies with two different fights still ahead of them.
My Perspective
I'd completely forgotten about VIBE until I sat down to write this. It was a real pop-up league, built solely to pressure MLP, and it worked well enough that MLP bought it out. I think it was a smart move on PPA's part. They looked like they were losing at the time, and this at least slowed the bleeding.
Phase 3
This is the real Tour War. On August 24, 2023, while PPA was mid-event in Kansas City, MLP announced it had begun signing top players to multi-year guaranteed contracts, off-seasons, and enhanced security. The timing wasn't an accident. MLP was trying to flip the player-control advantage PPA had built since 2022, before PPA could respond.
Podcast accounts from The Dink and King of the Court, recorded in real time as this was happening, describe a messier trigger than a simple two-sided negotiation. Zubin, MLP's own negotiator on the earlier merger term sheet, resigned about a week before the signing war broke, and Steve Kuhn reportedly went quiet on PPA right after. According to King of the Court, agent Sam Flaxman (a former PPA player liaison, by then at Top Notch Management) brought Kuhn roughly 20 players ready to sign if MLP walked from the deal, and that's reportedly what got Kuhn the board votes to do it. MLP's own team owners said they were blindsided: one told King of the Court it felt like "warfare," another called it "a sneak attack," both aimed at Kuhn, not at PPA. There's a specific accusation behind PPA's anger too: those same accounts describe the term sheet as barring either side from signing the other's contracted players, and PPA had let its own contracted players compete in MLP's 2023 season on the assumption a merger was close. If that term actually existed, MLP's move reads less like an aggressive pivot and more like a breach. None of this is confirmed by a public document, so treat it as reported, not verified.
What followed was two weeks of rapid signings and counter-offers. The Dink's live tracker, which only counted public social announcements and never verified actual contracts, eventually logged roughly 100 MLP signings and 55 PPA signings. For players, it was the best position they'd ever been in: multi-year guarantees, competing bids, real negotiating power for the first time. For the two businesses, it was a bidding war neither side's revenue could actually support yet.
PPA's counter-strategy was to hold the top of the pyramid rather than match every offer. Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters, the two players nobody in the sport seriously argues aren't number one, re-signed new three-year PPA deals rather than testing the market. MLP went after depth instead, signing players in roughly the seven-through-twenty-five range where it had a real shot. Podcast reporting at the time pegged PPA's contract buyouts around $25,000 against roughly $500,000 for new MLP deals. Buyout size isn't salary, but a gap that wide says plenty about how one-sided the guaranteed money got.
King of the Court walks through exactly how those two weeks unfolded, hour by hour: Tour Wars Explained - MLP v PPA Pt. 1.
My Perspective
This was insanity. Listening to the players who lived through it, it was pandemonium, plain and simple, a classic supply-and-demand problem playing out in real time. Nobody had time to think anything through. It all happened at once, and people you'd trusted for years suddenly weren't people you could trust anymore. Handshake deals got rushed through in the chaos. Pandemonium is really the only word for it.
On September 13, 2023, PPA and MLP announced an agreement to combine under a new holding company, backed by $50 million. That was a ceasefire and a term sheet. It was not a completed deal, and the next five and a half months proved it.
Phase 4
The interim period is where the real financial strain shows up. Steve Kuhn resigned all MLP leadership positions on October 17, one month after being named to the proposed merger board. By late November, MLP was asking players to accept 40% pay cuts with workdays reduced from 200 to 120, and PPA was requesting voluntary cuts of 25% to 40%. In December, MLP's own player letter said prior leadership had issued contracts that were "unsustainable and unauthorized."
Reporting in mid-January described a rival financing proposal complicating the deal and some player payments running late. None of that was ever confirmed by a public document, but it lines up with everything else: the merger everyone announced in September wasn't fully financed yet, and closing it meant clawing back exactly the guarantees that had just been used to win the signing war.
The deal actually closed on February 29, 2024, backed by $75 million, up from the $50 million announced in September. More than 150 players had multi-year contracts with the combined entity. The board that closed the deal wasn't the board that was announced in September, either: Tom Dundon and Steve Kuhn, both named personally in the original release, were replaced by Dundon Capital's CFO and former MLP CEO Julio DePietro. Nobody in the public record has ever explained where the extra $25 million came from.
My Perspective
This is where things get interesting, and where my business brain kicks in. Everyone loves the headline numbers, players getting paid huge guarantees. What gets less attention is what it actually takes to sustain that. The players are one side of it, but the operational side matters just as much: PPA and MLP have to stay profitable and solvent to make good on those numbers. Default on what you owe a player and it works like a bank run. Everyone comes asking for their money at once, and the whole thing goes under.
Phase 5
The parent company took the name United Pickleball Association on March 27, 2024. It solved the problem that actually mattered: one player umbrella, one calendar, no more bidding war between PPA and MLP for the same 150 people. The competition for players didn't go away, though. It just moved inside the building.
The redesign of player deals in 2025 stretched final-year guarantees across three years and leaned harder on performance-based prize money instead of fixed pay. Four players, Quang Duong, James Ignatowich, Ryan Fu, and Vivian Glozman, had their contracts terminated in 2025 for exclusivity or attendance breaches, mostly tied to unsanctioned international events. That's the clearest sign that exclusivity, the exact thing that started the Tour Wars in 2021, is still the central mechanism holding the business together.
Then on May 1, 2026, Apollo Sports Capital led a $225 million structured investment that rolled PPA and MLP together with Dundon's retail, software, media, and infrastructure holdings under a new parent, Pickleball Inc. More than half of that raise reportedly went to restructuring debt and investor positions left over from the 2023-2024 scramble, not new growth money. Tom Dundon and the Pardoe family remain majority shareholders, according to the company; transaction counsel says the new parent is majority owned by Dundon Capital. Both things can be true at once, and neither confirms his personal cash contribution, which has never been disclosed.
By the numbers the company will actually share, MLP's 2026 season final drew CBS's largest audience in league history, PPA runs a 20-stop domestic calendar plus international events across four continents, and the combined businesses reported more than $140 million in 2025 revenue. None of that answers whether the leagues themselves are profitable yet, whether MLP team owners have a real economic model, or whether the new rules body, UPA-A, actually becomes independent of the company that created it. It started that transition in August 2026, targeting November 1.
| Phase | What happened | The real fight underneath it |
|---|---|---|
| 2019-2022 | Two tours launch, PPA goes exclusive | Who controls access to the best players |
| Nov 2022 | VIBE folds into MLP | Team format consolidates, PPA Tour itself stays separate |
| Aug-Sept 2023 | The signing war, then the ceasefire agreement | Neither side's revenue can support the bidding |
| Sept 2023-Feb 2024 | Pay cuts, a resignation, a delayed close | Financing the deal means clawing back the guarantees that caused it |
| 2024-2026 | UPA, then Pickleball Inc. | Exclusivity and governance credibility, not roster wars, are the live issues now |
The sport's underlying tension never got resolved across these five phases. It relocated: the bidding war between two companies became a negotiation between one company and its own contracted players. Pickleball clearly has one dominant commercial center now. What's still being decided is whether that center can run a fair league and a credible governing body out of the same building.
I've been talking to PPA myself about my own contract situation, and it's a process, to put it mildly. A lot of people are involved, and they've clearly taken a hard stance to make sure what happened before, players taking advantage of the league during its early growing pains, doesn't happen again. They've tightened their grip on players and aspiring pros as a result. It's a no-funny-business operation now, and that's by design.
Closing Thoughts
This might be one of the most interesting business cases our sport will ever produce. I hope that once the dust settles, more clarity and more stories come out of this stretch of time, because this is the birthplace of the sport as a business. If pickleball ever really takes off, this is the moment you'll be able to point back to and say that's where it started. No doubt about it.