A league table for padel and tennis, where sides are one or two

The three things that are different

Count games, not sets, and only within a format

If your group plays a fixed format every time, one set to six, or eight games, or twenty minutes, then games won is a usable difference column and it behaves the way goal difference does in football.

If the format varies, it is not comparable and should not be totalled. A player who won 6 to 1 in a short set and a player who won 6 to 4 in a long one did not do the same thing.

The safe default for a mixed group is to record the result and ignore the margin. Win, draw where the format allows one, loss. It is less information and all of it is true.

The Americano, which is what most padel groups actually want

An Americano is the format built for exactly this problem. Everybody plays with everybody, partners change every round, and the table is individual.

Eight players, seven rounds, and by the end each person has partnered every other person once. Points are individual and usually counted as games won rather than matches won, because with rotating partners a match result says as much about your partner as about you.

It is the single best answer to "we have eight people and two hours". It needs no fixture list agreed in advance, everybody plays every round, and the winner is unambiguous.

The Mexicano, and why groups switch to it

A Mexicano is the same idea with one change: the pairings for the next round are decided by the current standings rather than by a fixed rotation. First plays with fourth against second and third, and so on down the table.

The effect is that matches stay close for longer, because the strongest player keeps getting the weakest available partner. In a group with a wide range of ability this is the difference between an afternoon of close games and an afternoon where four people are waiting for it to end.

The cost is that somebody has to compute the pairings between rounds, and everybody has to wait while they do.

Singles is a different problem again

Tennis singles has no partner effect at all, which makes the table cleaner and the scheduling harder. Eight players is four courts or four rounds, and there is no way to have everybody playing at once on one court.

For a small group, a ladder works better than a league. Everybody has a position, you challenge somebody one or two places above you, and a win swaps the positions. There is no season and no fixture list, and it survives people disappearing for a month.

For a larger group with real court time, a league table across a fixed season is fine, as long as the number of matches per person is roughly equal. If it is not, the total is measuring availability rather than tennis.

What Sunday Super League does with all this

The table is per player and always has been, which is the assumption court sports need. A padel session where you partner three different people produces three individual results, not one team result.

Points are the league's own three numbers for a win, a draw and a loss, so a group that wants to count matches rather than games sets them and stops thinking about it. A group that wants a draw to be impossible sets the draw value and never records one.

It does not generate an Americano rotation and does not compute Mexicano pairings between rounds. Those are on paper, and the app records what happened afterwards.

The team balancing suggestion is built for larger sides and is less useful at two. With four players it has three possible pairings and will tell you which is closest, which is sometimes worth knowing and is not a difficult calculation to do yourself.

A season that fits the sport

Court sports are more weather dependent and more cancellation prone than an indoor five a side booking, so a season defined by dates will contain a lot of nothing.

Define it by matches instead. Twenty rounds, or until everybody has played fifteen, whichever comes first. The season ends when the football has actually happened rather than when the calendar says it should have.

Use an individual table, count games only when the format is fixed, and run an Americano rotation on paper rather than trying to make a fixture list survive eight people.