The best squash players in the world will play for their sport’s biggest title in central Auckland in February 2028, four months before squash makes its Olympic debut in Los Angeles.
Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston announced on 8 September 2026 that New Zealand had secured the 2028 PSA Squash World Championships, backed by a $1 million investment from the Government’s Major Events Fund. The tournament will be played on a glass court at the New Zealand International Convention Centre from 19 to 27 February 2028.
“The World Championships are one of the most prestigious events in world squash. I’m proud for New Zealand to host players and crowds from around the world at the New Zealand International Convention Centre in February 2028,” Upston said in the release.
“Securing the PSA Squash World Championships is a fantastic win for New Zealand, for Auckland and for the future of squash in this country, and this excitingly comes just months before squash makes its Olympic debut at the Los Angeles 2028 Games.”
What makes the timing more than a nice coincidence is the Olympic qualifying maths. Squash arrives at the Los Angeles Games with a small draw, 16 men and 16 women in each singles event. Eight of those places in each draw go to the highest ranked players on the PSA world rankings as they stand on 22 May 2028, the New Zealand Herald reported. A world championship played in Auckland in February falls inside that window. Players chasing a first Olympic squash medal will be doing part of their qualifying work in front of a New Zealand crowd.
For Paul Coll, who in March 2022 became the first New Zealand man to reach world number one, that is the whole point. Coll has built a career in European and Egyptian arenas, and has three British Open titles from 2021, 2022 and 2026, but he has never won a world championship.
“I’ve spent most of my career playing in front of crowds on the other side of the world,” Coll told the Herald.
“To have the world championships in New Zealand, in the same year squash finally gets to the Olympics, is unreal. I want as many Kiwis as possible in that arena while I give it everything I have to become world champion at home.”
The Auckland event will not run on its own. It will be staged alongside the first World Club Championships, a new competition for club players from around the world, and the two tournaments together are expected to be the largest squash event ever held. Nearly 40 courts across Auckland clubs will be in use, all of them within about half an hour of the championship glass court in the city.
That second tournament is the part Squash New Zealand chief executive Martin Dowson keeps returning to. He described the pairing as the biggest thing to happen to the sport in New Zealand in his lifetime.
“We are a small country with a deep squash history. To bring the world championships here, in the year squash finally reaches the Olympics, is going to be extremely special,” Dowson told RNZ.
“What will make it even more special is the World Club Championships running at the same time,” he told the Herald. “You will have a club team from Whangārei playing in the morning and the world number one on the glass court that night.”
That description gets at something particular about squash in this country. It is a club game before it is anything else, played in cold sheds behind rugby grounds and in small town halls, and the people who run those clubs are the same volunteers who have kept it going through decades when the sport had almost no television presence at all. A world club championship gives them a draw of their own rather than a spectator seat.
The depth Dowson refers to is real and it is mostly historical. Dame Susan Devoy won the world open four times in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ross Norman took the 1986 world title by beating Jahangir Khan, ending an unbeaten run of 555 consecutive matches that had stood since 1981 and is still recognised by Guinness World Records as the longest winning streak by any athlete in top level professional sport. New Zealand has staged a world individual final once before, in 1987, when Devoy beat England’s Lisa Opie in three games to win her second world title in Auckland. Nobody at that tournament could have expected the wait for the next one to run to 41 years.
Auckland Council is a partner in the bid through Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, alongside the Government’s Major Events Fund. Mayor Wayne Brown put a number on what the city expects to get back.
“With the championships expected to contribute around $2.5 million to regional GDP and nearly 20,000 visitor nights, there’s a real benefit for the region too,” Brown told the Herald.
“Auckland has fantastic venues, a proud history of hosting successful major events and passionate sporting communities.”
Set against the $1 million of public money from the Major Events Fund, and whatever Auckland Council contributes on top, a $2.5 million regional GDP figure is a modest return by the standards usually claimed for major events, and it is worth treating economic forecasts of this kind with some caution. The more durable argument is the one Upston made about what the sport does with the attention.
“Hosting the sport’s pinnacle event provides a unique opportunity for our players to compete against elite international talent on home soil. It’s exciting and it inspires the next generation of champions from our proud sporting nation,” she said.
Whether that happens depends less on the nine days in February than on what the clubs do with the eighteen months of build up. Squash has spent a long time as a sport New Zealanders were unusually good at and largely stopped watching. It now has a date, a venue, an Olympic hook and a world number two with an unfinished piece of business, which is more than it has had to work with in a very long time.
Will you be heading along to the world championships in Auckland in 2028, or do you have memories of playing squash at your local club years ago? Leave a comment below and tell us.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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