The Institute restructures — and spins off RacqI
A sharpened mandate for the Institute, and a separate company — RacqI – Racquet Sports Intelligence — dedicated to data infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
After several quiet months, the Racquet Sports Institute has completed an internal restructuring: a sharpened mandate for the Institute, and the founding of a separate company, RacqI – Racquet Sports Intelligence, dedicated to data infrastructure and artificial intelligence. The silence was deliberate. Over the past months, the Institute has been rebuilding how it works rather than publishing what it knows.
Two disciplines, not one
The trigger was the pace of development in AI. Understanding the racquet sports ecosystem and exploiting data with modern AI methods turned out to be two different professions. They need different people, different tools and different working cultures. Combining them in one organisation produces mediocrity in both.
The Racquet Sports Institute therefore concentrates on what it was founded for: the sports — tennis, pickleball, padel, badminton and squash — their market and their data. Its team has spent decades inside this industry, planning, building, operating and advising racquet facilities. That experience is what makes the data readable in the first place.
Why the facility is the centre of the market
Racquet sports are growing because they are social — nobody plays alone. That growth rests on one physical precondition: without courts, there are no players.
The economic weight of the ecosystem therefore sits where the game is played. Roughly 80 percent of the sector's value is generated at the facilities themselves; the professional tennis circuit is the only significant exception. The facility is the point of sale of racquet sports.
It is also where the largest decisions are made: how many courts, which mix of sports, which pricing and membership model, which location, which utilisation is realistic. Today those decisions are frequently based on individual experience, supplier claims, or whatever the operator down the road happens to be doing.
What the Institute does
The Institute sources, verifies and curates the data of the ecosystem — the data that feeds a database of facilities, covering offerings, pricing and legal structures. It works neutrally, publishes its methodology, and builds on evidence rather than the opinion of individuals.
That is the foundation. It is not yet the answer.
What RacqI adds
The more valuable questions emerge when ecosystem data is set against information from outside the sport: climate records, leisure spending, demographic and economic indicators from sources such as Eurostat and the World Bank.
How many indoor courts does a site need given its number of rainy days? What pricing structure is sustainable at a given regional leisure budget? Questions like these cannot be answered from within the sport alone.
Relating datasets that were never designed to be read together is a technological task, not a sporting one. It sits with RacqI – Racquet Sports Intelligence. What emerges is a data basis that does not currently exist in the racquet sports ecosystem.
Separate teams, one result
The separation is organisational, not conceptual. The interface between the two organisations is defined, and the work continues to be delivered as a whole. Specialisation is meant to raise quality, not to divide responsibility.
“Understanding this sport and building AI systems are two different professions. Asking one team to do both means accepting that it will do neither particularly well. We were not willing to accept that.”
Two organisations, two web sites
The restructuring is visible from the outside as well. Both organisations are now live with their own websites, each built for its own audience: racquetsports.institute for research, market data and benchmarks; racqi.cloud for applied intelligence and data services.
The RacqI app is currently in pre-beta. Early access can be requested through racqi.cloud, with the official launch scheduled for 1 October 2026.
An independent research body for the racquet sports ecosystem. It exists to close an information gap in a sector that is growing fast and documenting itself badly — collecting, verifying and curating market data on facilities worldwide, and turning it into benchmarks, studies and best practices. One principle governs the work: evidence over opinion. The Institute represents no manufacturer, no franchise and no federation, and publishes its methodology alongside its findings.
info@racquetsports.instituteRacqI turns that knowledge into answers. Where the Institute compiles benchmarks and frameworks, the RacqI app connects them to the wider data landscape — more than 170,000 venues, climate records, demographic and leisure-spending data, thousands of verified sources — and applies AI to questions specific to one site, one market, one business case. The Institute describes what the market looks like. The RacqI app works out what it means for yours.
info@racqi.cloud