US pro table tennis league blasts niche sport into spotlight

LAWRENCEVILLE – Do not call it the Marty Supreme effect – table tennis is a growing sport in the United States partly because it is driven by the 2025 film, but also because of a new professional league giving the parlour game an ultra-competitive edge.

Founded three years ago by tech entrepreneur Flint Lane, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT) is now home to several 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 Japanese Kotomi Omoda secure victory for the Portland Paddlers against the Florida Crocs.

Portland’s Nikhil Kumar, who competed at the Tokyo Olympics, told AFP he was “a little bit sceptical” when he first heard of MLTT.

Now that the league has been around for a few years, however, he said: “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 (are) stronger.”

The Olympic sport’s growing US fandom is evident in MLTT ticket sales, which are up 50 per cent compared to 2025, 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 spectator 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 still 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 start-up. “I’d love to play table tennis as a living.”

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

“But we’re not competing against them either,” he said, comparing it to Major League Soccer, the US football league that generates 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 2025, Table Tennis TV. It also created a ranking system, Spindex, with the hopes of making it a ratings scale similar to golf handicaps.

Looking at the bigger picture, USA Table Tennis, the non-profit 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 US, reported it had 160,000 registered users.

The numbers are growing because of MLTT.

“Having a well-funded, well-organised 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-chief executive 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 American champion Marty Reisman.

The film grossed almost US$100 million (S$129 million) in the US, becoming the top-grossing picture for independent film distributor A24.

It is yet another major boost for the sport.

“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.” AFP