PadelPulsePulse ScorePadelPulsePulse ScoreThe Pulse Score is our independent 0–100 rating of every padel club — rebuilt from verifiable facts on every update, with the methodology published in full below.
The Pulse Score is Padel Pulse’s independent 0–100 rating of every club. Independence is the moat, and the score is where it is either proven or lost. A club cannot buy points and cannot click its way to them. There is no paid placement, ever. The weighting is the same for every club, published below, and applied identically in Bangkok and in Madrid.
Five principles hold the score honest:
The headline split is fixed: Reviews 40 · Facility 25 · Operational Quality & Transparency 20 · Activity 5 · External 5 · Recency 5. Spin the wheel above, or read the pillars here.
What players actually say. The Google rating is Bayesian-shrunk toward the hub mean so a 5.0 from three reviews can’t outrank a 4.7 from two hundred, then blended with verified Padel Pulse player reviews.
The physical product, assessed from evidence: court quality (surface condition classed from photos), infrastructure (court count and lighting), amenities, crossover sports, and climate fit.
Verified, complete information — a 12-item completeness checklist, review responsiveness (real data only) and update recency. Not an administrative badge.
Signs of a living community: verified-review velocity over 90 days, contributor confirmations and follower count. Shown as “not yet measured” until real signals exist.
Independent corroboration beyond Padel Pulse: secondary directories, national federation registers and tour-venue records. 25 points per independent listing, capped at 100.
How fresh the club’s facts are. Days since any source last refreshed them: ≤30d 100 · ≤90d 80 · ≤180d 55 · older 25.
The Reviews pillar blends two signals. With no verified Padel Pulse reviews, the score is 100% the (shrunk) Google rating. As verified player reviews accumulate, the blend slides linearly to a cap of 70% verified / 30% Google, reached at 20 verified reviews — so player-written, verified opinion gradually takes the lead without ever discarding the Google signal.
Part of the Facility pillar rewards a roof mix that suits the hub’s climate. A club’s climate score is the courts-weighted average of the points below, by each court’s setting. Each hub’s climate profile is fixed; the table is the same for every club.
| Hub climate profile | Indoor | Covered | Open-air |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tropical (rain + heat: SG, KL, Jakarta, Manila, BKK) | 95 | 80 | 35 |
| Hot-dry summer (Madrid, Dubai) | 90 | 85 | 50 |
| Temperate-wet (UK, NL, Paris) | 90 | 75 | 45 |
| Mild (coastal ES/PT, Sydney) | 80 | 80 | 70 |
Roof classes. Indoor — inside an enclosed, climate-controllable building. Covered — a solid weatherproof roof or canopy with one or more sides open (playable in rain). Open-air — no solid roof; shade netting or a pergola counts as open-air. A club’s display label is derived from its court mix, always shown with the breakdown (e.g. “6 courts: 4 indoor · 2 open-air”).
Within Operational Quality & Transparency, the 12-item completeness checklist scores each item’s credit scaled by where the fact came from. Claiming a club is an administrative act — it does not move the score on its own. What claiming enables — verified, confirmed, complete information — is what scores.
The club claimed its listing and confirmed the fact. Full credit.
An independent contributor confirmed the fact.
Drawn from public sources, not yet confirmed by anyone. An unclaimed club with a perfect crawl reaches roughly 70% of these points.
Full marks require claiming and confirming the data. Claiming’s instant reward is the badge and edit rights; the score reward follows the effort.
If a pillar (or sub-component) has no real signal, it is excluded and its weight is redistributed pro-rata across the measured pillars. The breakdown shows “Not yet measured” for that pillar instead of a fabricated bar. A typical unclaimed, crawled club at launch is scored on Reviews + Facility + External + Recency, with Operational Quality & Transparency partially measured and Activity excluded.
The club has fewer than five verified player reviews. Its score uses the full weighting; it simply sharpens as verified reviews come in.
The club has not cleared the minimum data floor — at least a Google rating and one researched fact source. Scout-only (Identified-tier) clubs show this instead of a zero breakdown or a rank.
Bands are absolute, not per-hub percentiles — a “Strong” in Bangkok means the same as a “Strong” in Madrid. They are reviewed quarterly against distribution drift.
| Band | Pulse Score |
|---|---|
| Exceptional | 79+ |
| Strong | 74–78 |
| Good | 69–73 |
| Mixed | 64–68 |
| Below average | under 64 |
Anchored against the full June 2026 re-rating distribution (1,500+ rated clubs across 37 hubs). Exceptional is intentionally rare — around 2% of clubs worldwide.
A paid tier does not move the score. The tools simply make these actions easier — the points still have to be earned.
Every stored score is stamped with the methodology version that produced it. Changes are listed here. Rubric-table changes bump the minor version; pillar or weight changes bump the major version.
Facts-not-judgments rebuild. AI extracts facts only; all points come from published, deterministic rubrics. Bayesian-shrunk Google rating replaces step multipliers; the claimed-club bonus is removed in favour of source multipliers on the completeness checklist (×1.0 / ×0.85 / ×0.7); pillars with no signal are excluded and their weight redistributed pro-rata; “Not yet rated” for clubs below the data floor; roof taxonomy (indoor / covered / open-air) and the climate-fit table added; independent blind second extraction and consistency checks run on every rebuild.
Prior weighting. Six pillars at 40 / 25 / 20 / 5 / 5 / 5 with step-multiplier review counts, a binary claimed-club bonus and neutral defaults for unmeasured pillars — all superseded by v2.0.0.