Sawt Falasteen - US pro table tennis league blasts niche sport into spotlight

Founded three years ago by tech entrepreneur Flint Lane, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT) is now home to several ping pong players in the global top 100, including Amy Wang and Lily Zhang, who represented Team USA at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

At a weekend MLTT match in Princeton, New Jersey, about 100 spectators watched Kotomi Omoda secure victory for the Portland Paddlers against the Florida Crocs.

Nikhil Kumar, who also plays for the Paddlers and competed in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, told AFP he was "a little bit skeptical" when he first heard of Major League Table Tennis.

Now that the league has been around for a few years, however, "there's been a lot of progression for us in terms of the level of the play and the players that are coming to play stronger," he said.

The Olympic sport's growing US fandom is evident in MLTT ticket sales, which are up 50 percent compared to last year, according to founder Lane.

"I don't know if I would be a season ticket holder, but I'm killing a Saturday afternoon," Richard Kurland, a spectators at the match, told AFP.

"It's something different. I'll have stories to tell my friends for the next few weeks, some photos. I would definitely come back."

Despite the league's professional status, MLTT players hold day jobs to support themselves.

"I hope one day that it could be enough," said Kumar, who works as an engineer at a New York tech startup. "I'd love to play table tennis as a living."

- 'A good boost' -

Lane told AFP that MLTT ranks among the top professional leagues in the world, though it still trails the Chinese, Japanese, French and German leagues.

"But we're not competing against them either," Lane said, comparing it to Major League Soccer, the US football league that generate billions of dollars without being among the top leagues globally.

To grow the American audience for the sport, MLTT launched its own streaming channel in September, Table Tennis TV. It also created a ranking system, Spindex, with the hopes of making it a ratings scale similar to golf handicaps.

USA Table Tennis, the nonprofit governing body for the sport in America, had around 14,000 members as of late 2025.

PingPod, a chain of table tennis venues in the United States, reported it had 160,000 registered users.

"Having a well-funded, well-organized professional league in the United States is a good tailwind, a good boost for the sport, both in terms of participation and spectatorship," PingPod co-CEO David Silberman told AFP.

The sport also came to recent prominence in popular culture with the release of the Oscar-nominated film "Marty Supreme," which saw famed actor Timothee Chalamet portray table tennis player Marty Mauser in 1950s New York, based loosely on real-life player Marty Reisman.

The film grossed almost $100 million in the United States, becoming the top-grossing picture for independent film distributor A24.

"The buzz about Marty Supreme, the way that I talk about table tennis at work, or at the store in public, is completely different with the movie," said table tennis fan Revan Raguindin, who supports the Princeton Revolution MLTT team.

"I think there's so much more recognition of the sport this way, and I am really grateful for it."

E.AbuRizq--SF-PST