PPA Tour introduces new World Pickleball Rankings system
The PPA Tour on Wednesday announced the launch of the World Pickleball Rankings, a first-of-its-kind system designed to identify the best overall pro pickleball players in the world.
The new ranking system will debut in the 2026-27 season and bring every PPA Tour event around the world under one unified, global leaderboard. According to a news release, the change is meant to give players, fans and media a single, definitive answer to the question: Who is the best pickleball player in the world?
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The World Pickleball Rankings will be a composite measure of a player’s performance across all three divisions — gender doubles, mixed doubles and singles. A player’s overall score will be weighted (gender doubles at 50%, mixed doubles at 35% and singles at 15%) and drawn from their 14 best results over the trailing 52 weeks.
The system rewards complete players, according to the release — “The ones who show up and compete everywhere, in every format.”
“Greatness isn’t one-dimensional,” PPA Tour CEO and Founder Connor Pardoe said. “The World Pickleball Rankings is about clarity and credibility — one number and one global standard, that tells the story of who the best players in the world truly are. As pickleball grows into a truly global sport, our athletes deserve a ranking that matches that ambition and rewards greatness across every discipline, everywhere they play.”
Every PPA Tour event, whether it’s a Challenger event, international stop or a U.S. PPA Tour event, will feed into the same leaderboard, with points scaled to the size of each event. The announcement comes on the heels of the launch of PPA Tour Europe, a new circuit that will feature 20 pro pickleball events across 9 European countries in 2026 and 2027. The tour now has international events in several regions — PPA Canada, PPA Asia, PPA Australia and PPA Europe — that will be part of the World Pickleball Rankings.
The points leaderboard will also determine event entries, byes for the top-ranked players and teams and qualification for the season-ending PPA Finals, where the top eight men and top eight women will compete across all three disciplines to be crowned PPA Finals Champion.
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