Squash enters the second half of the 2020s with the biggest structural change in its history confirmed and counting down: Olympic inclusion at Los Angeles 2028. Around that sit an Egyptian talent system nobody has worked out how to copy, a unified professional tour with equal prize money at the top, a broadcast product built on glass courts in landmark venues, and a stubborn participation problem in the countries that invented the game.
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The Olympic countdown to LA 2028
On October 16, 2023 the IOC session in Mumbai voted squash onto the Los Angeles 2028 programme, ending a campaign that had failed for the 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 Games. The confirmed programme is singles for men and women, with compact draws, which means national federations must now concentrate resources on one or two athletes rather than broad squads. The immediate effect has been financial: sports ministries and Olympic committees in dozens of countries fund only Olympic disciplines, so squash federations from India and Malaysia to Colombia and the United States have moved from self-funded obscurity to state support almost overnight. The secondary effect is competitive. Egypt would win most of the medals on current form, which has pushed rivals toward centralized high-performance programmes, and the four-year cycle has begun to reshape how players plan their seasons around a single fortnight.
Egypt's academy machine
By the mid-2020s Egyptians routinely occupied half or more of both the men's and women's world top tens, a concentration no country has achieved in any comparable individual sport. The system behind it is unusual: dense club networks in Cairo and Alexandria where hundreds of courts sit inside sporting clubs that families join for life, coaching lineages traced back to Amr Shabana and Ramy Ashour, and a junior circuit so competitive that winning a national age-group title is harder than winning a world junior title. The style it produces is distinct — early attacking, disguised holds, front-court aggression — and it has become the global template. The open question is sustainability, since the model depends on a middle-class club culture and on the professional tour offering enough prize money to justify the pipeline. Rivals have begun recruiting Egyptian coaches rather than trying to reinvent the method.
Equal prize money and one tour
The 2015 merger of the PSA and the Women's Squash Association created a single professional body running one calendar, one ranking system and one commercial operation, and the equalization of prize money at the sport's flagship events followed in the years after. Squash is now one of a small number of professional sports where the world championship pays men and women identically, and where the biggest tour events stage both draws in the same venue on the same show court. The practical consequence is broadcast: a combined event fills a week of programming and lets promoters sell one ticket for both. The commercial consequence is that women's squash is no longer a separate, thinner product, and the leading women — Nour El Sherbini, Nouran Gohar, Hania El Hammamy — are marketed on equal terms with the men.
Glass courts and landmark venues
The portable all-glass court solved squash's oldest broadcasting problem, that a sport played inside a white box is invisible from outside it. Promoters now erect courts wherever the backdrop sells: Vanderbilt Hall inside Grand Central Terminal, the Giza plateau beneath the Great Pyramid, harbourfronts, shopping centres and city squares. The effect on the sport's image has been transformative, converting squash from a club activity into a televisual event with crowds visible on all four sides. The trade-off is cost and logistics — a show court takes days to build and requires precise floor levelling and lighting — which limits how many top-tier events any calendar can support. It also concentrates the tour in a handful of wealthy markets, since the venues that make the pictures are rarely in the countries where the sport most needs to grow.
Refereeing technology and the 2019 rules
Squash spent decades being hard to watch because rallies stopped constantly for interference appeals decided by one official's judgment. The professional response has been structural: a three-referee system in which a central referee makes the call and two side referees vote, with the majority deciding, plus video review allowing players a limited number of challenges on factual calls such as the tin, the out line and the second bounce. The rewritten Rules of Singles Squash, introduced in 2019, went further by explicitly discouraging speculative let requests and directing referees toward no let when the interference was minimal. The measurable result is fewer stoppages and longer continuous play, which matters commercially as much as competitively — the sport's Olympic case rested partly on demonstrating that it now looks clean on television.
The facilities problem
Squash's participation story is split. In the United States, membership of the national body has grown strongly, driven by a large collegiate circuit, a booming junior scene and urban squash programmes such as SquashBusters in Boston and StreetSquash in Harlem, which combine coaching with academic support for students from low-income neighbourhoods and are now coordinated nationally. In Britain, where the 1970s boom filled sports centres with courts, the trend has run the other way for two decades, with courts converted to gym floors and studio space because a squash court serves two players while the same footprint can serve twenty. Because courts are expensive, single-purpose and need specific ceiling heights, lost facilities are almost never rebuilt. Olympic status is the strongest argument the sport has had in forty years for keeping them.
Data, coaching and physical preparation
Professional squash has adopted the analytics toolkit later than court sports with bigger budgets, but the tracking is now routine: video-tagged shot distributions showing where a player hits under pressure, distance covered and lunge counts per game, heart-rate and load monitoring across tournament weeks, and opponent-specific tendency reports. The physical side has changed most. The lunge loads knee and hip through a huge range thousands of times a match, and hamstring and knee injuries have ended or curtailed careers, Ramy Ashour's most famously. Modern programmes therefore centre on eccentric strength, hip mobility, ankle stability and calibrated tournament loads rather than the pure mileage of the Barrington era. The result is longer careers at the top: players in their thirties now routinely hold top-five rankings, which was rare in the 1980s.
New markets beyond the traditional powers
The sport's map is widening. Peru's Diego Elias became the first South American man to reach world number one, and Colombia has produced a strong junior pipeline behind him. Wales, New Zealand and Malaysia continue to punch above their population, and India, Hong Kong and Japan have invested heavily in junior programmes with the 2028 Games explicitly in mind. Gulf states have used tournament hosting as a route in, with Qatar staging world championships. The United States has the largest untapped upside: a big participation base, deep collegiate infrastructure and, from 2028, a home Olympics. Whether any of this dents Egyptian supremacy within one cycle is doubtful, but the tour draws of the mid-2020s already look less concentrated in the historic powers of Pakistan, Australia and England than at any point since 1950.
Outlook
The next five years will be defined by whether Olympic inclusion converts into participation. Squash has the demonstrable health case — top of the Forbes ranking in 2003, and still among the highest calorie-burning and most cardiovascularly demanding sports measured — and it now has the Olympic platform it chased for two decades. What it lacks is courts in the places where the audience is growing, and a court is a far larger commitment than a badminton net or a padel cage. The sport's commercial future probably depends less on television rights than on whether Olympic funding can reverse two decades of facility loss in Europe and build new capacity in Asia and the Americas.
Competitively, the interesting question is whether anyone can break Egypt. The country's advantage is systemic rather than accidental, resting on club density, coaching lineage and junior depth, and no rival has yet built an equivalent. The most likely disruptors are the countries with both money and an Olympic motive — the United States, hosting in 2028, and the Gulf states that have been buying tournaments for a decade. Beyond that, the sport's own rules remain in play: squash has changed its scoring, its tin height and its interference law within living memory, and each change swung the balance between the shot-maker and the retriever. If Egyptian attacking squash becomes too dominant, expect the rulebook to be the first place the rest of the world looks for an answer.
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