Playing up: padel, neoliberal leisure, and the production of middle-class distinction in urban Indonesia

This research note examines the rapid growth of padel in urban Indonesia as a case of neoliberal leisure consumption. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of 15 media and industry texts published between 2024 and 2025, the study reads its material through two compatible lenses: Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and Foucault’s account of governmentality, including the technologies of the self and the self-surveillance associated with the panoptic gaze. It analyses how padel is discursively constructed not merely as a sport but as a leisure lifestyle that produces class-differentiated urban subjects. Three interconnected mechanisms are identified: padel as a technology of the self through which players take up leisure as a site of self-optimization; a pricing structure that sorts participants by class while being framed as inclusive; and what we term communitarian panopticism, a mode of leisure-based self-surveillance oriented toward social belonging rather than individual body-monitoring. The class being produced is specific rather than generic: an urban professional middle class, older and more affluent than the younger working-class public associated with futsal, marks itself off through where, how, and with whom it plays.