Table tennis just might be on the verge of breaking out as cool.
According to World Atlas, Table Tennis is the sixth most popular sport in the world with 850 million fans, just edging out basketball with 800 million fans. But it has long been an athletic afterthought in the United States. Part of this is an image problem, with table tennis historically portrayed in popular culture as either nerdy or wholly a recreational sport. Think basements, backyards, beer pong, and the engineering break room at a tech start up.
This tweet from Conan O’Brien during the 2012 Olympics captures the historical American perception of table tennis as “uncool”:
That all may be changing.
According to Google Search Trends, interest in the search term “table tennis” in the United States in the past two weeks has dwarfed anything seen in the past. Previous local spikes have happened around the olympics, but the current spike is 3-5 times the interest seen in previous olympic cycles.
While in past Olympic cycles interest in table tennis has typically leveled back down to historical averages, we believe this time could be different.
USA Table Tennis in the Press
People are attracted to sports with great performers that have personal narratives they connect to. Three members of Team USA, each of whom is a PingPod sponsored athlete, have made recent appearances in the mainstream media.
Kanak has been a great comeback story. Sports Illustrated profiled him prior to the Olympics in a piece titled A Missing Country Code on a Form Cost Kanak Jha 17 Months of His Career. Now, He’s Back at the Olympics and Kanak made history as the first American male to reach the round of 16 at the Paris Olympics.
Lily Zhang was profiled in the Wall Street Journal in a piece titled She’s a Four-Time Olympian. Her Parents Want Her to Get a Real Job. The WSJ article covers how hard it is for even the best of athletes to make a living playing table tennis in the United States. Lily made it to the round of 16 at the Paris Olympics.
Amy Wang was interviewed on Good Morning America for a segment titled A look at the popularity of table tennis and was profiled by a publication from her native New Jersey in a piece titled Amy Wang, N.J.’s pingpong prodigy, didn’t let Paris Olympics stop her brainy pursuits
USA Table Tennis Goes Viral
USA Table Tennis has been a social media darling at the Paris Olympics. The most viral post involves the USA Women’s Table Tennis team and members of the USA Men’s Basketball team. One video opens as 2-time NBA MVP and 4-time NBA Champion Steph Curry brings a group of women to meet his Team USA basketball teammate Anthony Edwards.
The three women — Olympic veteran Lily Zhang, and first time Olympians Rachel Sung and Amy Wang — are professionals who have played for years at the highest levels of table tennis.
Edwards, the 23-year-old guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves, and noted trash talker, let it be known that, should they play, he would not be shut out. “Eleven to zero?” he said, incredulously. “I don’t believe it. I’m scoring at least once.”
“There’s only one way to try it out,” Lily Zhang responded.
In another post, Steph Curry has the members of the USA Women’s Table Tennis team sign a ping pong ball for him:
Will we see a Lily Zhang vs Anthony Edwards match post Olympics? Stay tuned. If it happens, our money is on Lily!
Enter Major League Table Tennis (MLTT)
Another reason table tennis has been a second class sport in the United States is a lack of infrastructure. In Asia and Europe, where table tennis is most popular, professional leagues and full time training groups are the norm. Table tennis players from the United States have historically had to train and travel overseas to tournaments on their own to gain notoriety and exposure. Earning a living from playing table tennis professionally has been a struggle for players in the United States.
Enter Major League Table Tennis, the new U.S. Professional League founded in 2023. MLTT is the brainchild of entrepreneur and table tennis fanatic Flint Lane. MLTT writes that, “Flint has played table tennis since he was a kid but really caught the bug when his wife Kathy surprised him with a birthday gift of table tennis lessons with three time Olympian David Zhuang. After losing 11-0, 11-0 (and it really wasn’t even that close), Flint took up the sport seriously and is now “solidly mediocre”. Flint and Kathy own two table tennis clubs, Princeton Pong and Naples Pong.”
MLTT features 8 teams in cities across the United States, competing in an innovative co-ed team-based format including singles, doubles, and the signature Golden Game. MLTT games were available to stream on YouTube in its first season, and made an appearance on ESPN’s The Ocho.
It’s early days, but MLTT holds out the promise of legitimizing the sport of table tennis in the mainstream and creating greater financial rewards for owners and players alike. At PingPod, we are very optimistic about the future growth of MLTT. It takes a force of nature like Flint Lane putting his weight behind a fledgling league to see it take off. In most sports, media rights have been a prime driver of franchise values, so we will be watching those dynamics closely.
Table Tennis on the Big Screen
We first met movie director Josh Safdie, best known as the Director of Uncut Gems as an early PingPod customer. Over time, the PingPod team formed a relationship with Josh as it became clear that his interest in table tennis extended beyond playing the game to the creative realm. We connected Josh with multiple figures in the table tennis world as he worked on background for a film about table tennis pro Marty Reisman.
It appears that idea is becoming reality. Recently, Deadline confirmed that Timothée Chalamet In Final Talks To Produce, Star In Josh Safdie’s A24 Pic ‘Marty Supreme’. Multiple members of the PingPod community have responded to open casting calls for the movie. We are all pulling for our CTO Ilya Rivkin’s star turn in the role of “Miscellaneous Non Speaking.”
All jokes aside, one of the biggest names in Hollywood starring in a film about table tennis will go a long way to changing the perception of table tennis. We wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar dynamic to what happened with Chess when The Queen’s Gambit was released on Netflix. Here is the google search trend data for interest in chess:
Will we see a similar cultural reevaluation of table tennis? It may already be happening.
Hugh Jackman took time off from playing Wolverine to play at a PingPod:
EDM legend Steve Aoki warmed up for a New York show at the Downtown Brooklyn PingPod:
Maybe, just maybe, table tennis is already cool.
PingPod: the Home of Modern Table Tennis
Max, David, and Ernesto founded PingPod in 2019 based on the idea that there was latent demand for table tennis that was hard to profitably supply given the current state of technology. The founding idea was to replace high variable labor costs with a lower fixed technology cost, simultaneously lowering costs and increasing hours of operation by pursuing an autonomous operating model. They set out to build a network of small format autonomous pods to meet the hypothesized demand. Back in 2019, it was just that: a hypothesis.
Since then, PingPod has seen more than 100,000 customers create accounts. Maybe 1,000 of these were pros, serious players, and hardcore fanatics. The rest are casual players – many of whom played in a basement or backyard as a kid – who responded to the brand, accessibility, technology, and community.
Today, there are 20 PingPod locations across New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Chicago, the UK and the Philippines, and we have just opened up the opportunity to franchise PindPod.
Part of what makes PingPod cool is how we have infused the concept with technology that augments the experience. All PingPod’s feature digital scoreboards and video replay capabilities. The video replays, in particular, allow customers to share magic moments with their networks.
This replay of the seldom seen net edge x 2 has been viewed 1.6 million times!
We are proud of the role PingPod has played in bringing table tennis out of the basement and into the public eye. Our goal is to elevate the game and be the home of modern table tennis. If you want to be part of the cultural moment, book a table!
This Time is Different
In past Olympic cycles, interest in table tennis has tended to cool off after the games end. 2024 may be different because MLTT and PingPod exist. Today, people in the United States who took an interest in Olympic table tennis or the associated headlines have a place to actually play the game if they live in or around one of the six major cities (and counting) where PingPod exists. With MLTT up and running, audiences now have an option to continue watching professionals compete right here in the United States. The fact that top NBA players are taking note and a movie starring an A-list movie star is in production suggests this cultural moment may last.
