Best padel shoes for men in 2026

What the men's part of the question actually means

Court shoes are not engineered differently for men and women in any way that affects how they play. What differs is the last — the shape the shoe is built around — and the sizing run. Men's lasts are generally cut wider through the forefoot and straighter through the midfoot than women's lasts in the same nominal size, which is a fit difference rather than a performance one.

That has one real consequence worth acting on. A shoe sold in a single unisex size run is built on one last, which means half the people buying it are in a shoe whose proportions were set for someone else's foot. The Joma Open Men 2572 is the only shoe on this page with a men's designation in the model name, and that is the reason it is here rather than any claim about its performance.

The second consequence is about numbers. Where a brand publishes a men's and a women's version of the same model, the lab figures quoted for one do not transfer cleanly to the other, because the tested pair was a different shoe. We say which pair was measured whenever the source states it.

The sole is the decision, and padel is not hard court

Padel is played on sanded artificial turf. Functionally that behaves like a thin layer of loose grit over a hard base: grippy right up until it is not, and the point at which it stops gripping is set by your sole pattern more than by anything else you are wearing.

A hard-court tennis sole is a modified herringbone with a flatter, more continuous contact patch, designed to grip an abrasive fixed surface and to resist being worn away by it. Put that on sanded turf and the sand sits between the rubber and the base, which is the configuration where a planted foot suddenly slides. That is the mechanism behind most padel ankle injuries.

• Herringbone or clay-style — the deepest channels, the best grip on a well-sanded court, the least to bite into when a court wears bare.
• Hybrid — a compromise pattern that behaves predictably across sanded, bare and carpet-style courts. The right default if you play at more than one venue.
• Hard-court tennis sole — the wrong tool. It will work after a fashion and then let go at the worst moment.
• Running shoes — the wrong tool for a different reason: no lateral structure at all, on a surface where the loaded movement is sideways.

If you want this unpacked properly, padel shoes vs tennis shoes is the page that compares the two sole designs directly, and best padel shoes is our main padel shoe roundup. Tennis shoes vs running shoes covers the other half of the mistake.

How these picks were made

Racket & Rally does not run a test lab. Nothing on this page is written as though we had hit with, worn or measured anything ourselves, because we have not. What we do instead is read the published specification sheets and the third-party lab measurements cited at the foot of the page, set them against each other, and say which differences change something you will notice.

Every product here is already in our registry, which means it carries a cited retailer or review source and a verified listing. Our full selection criteria set out the method, and the editorial policy covers corrections and how often pages are revisited. Prices are never written into the page — the number on each buy button is the live one.