Welcome to Issue #25
"Putts get real difficult the day they hand out the money.”
Lee Trevino
What’s on my mind this week
I got my pre-sale link for Ryder Cup tickets and now I just need to rob a bank, who’ll be jumping in Poppies Pond on Sunday, will Lydia Ko top the ladies money list, Furyk to lead US in Adare, PGA Tour to start calling out slow players, The Cadillac trophy is a work of art, Zurich team event always a standout for me in the calendar, Anthony Kim’s secret..10hrs practice a day for 100 days – I’ll start tomorrow.
In the news
Why it matters: In the same week the Tour confirmed Hawaii's removal from the 2027 schedule, it laid off 56 staff and closed 73 open roles. The clearest signal yet that a fundamental restructuring is underway.
Our Take: Read these two decisions together and a single strategic logic emerges. Dropping Hawaii removes a tournament that had become increasingly difficult to justify on a purely commercial basis, thin galleries, negligible corporate footprint, January broadcast slots competing with NFL playoffs. Laying off 4% of a 1,300-person workforce, based on recommendations from FTI Consulting brought in at the end of 2025, is part strategic reset, part overdue efficiency exercise. The distinction matters: with PIF co-investment stalled and SSG's remaining $1.5 billion not guaranteed, there is real financial pressure sitting alongside the philosophical ambition. Rolapp is applying a consistent filter, does this serve the Tour's commercial future, or does it exist because it always has, and simultaneously creating 30 new senior roles to replace what's being cut. The clubhouse era of PGA Tour management is being dismantled.
Why it matters: General admission tickets for the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor are priced at €499 per day which is a record for a European venue, and nearly double what fans paid in Rome four years ago.
Our Take: The organisers will point to Bethpage Black last year at $750 a day, making Adare Manor look almost reasonable by comparison. That framing tells you everything about where the Ryder Cup now sits in the commercial hierarchy of sport. With fixed capacity and genuinely global demand, the commercial model is shifting from volume to yield, fewer fans paying more, with a higher proportion of revenue tied to hospitality and corporate spend. Pricing is being used to optimise yield per attendee, not maximise attendance, and on those terms the doubling since Rome is not inflation; it's deliberate repositioning of the Ryder Cup as a scarcity asset. Justin Rose's caddie called it extortionate on Instagram. The organisers' response, pointing to 20,000 grandstand seats and a SuperValu community day, suggests they know the optics are difficult. The expectation internally will be that demand absorbs the increase. The gap between the game's rhetoric about growing participation and the reality of €499 daily tickets, however, is widening with every Ryder Cup cycle. As of this morning, 60,000 people were queuing for tickets within hours of the Irish-only portal opening. The market has answered the question.
Why it matters: KSL Capital Partners is acquiring Invited Clubs, North America's largest private golf operator, for $2.6 billion, creating a combined portfolio of over 170 clubs and reshaping the private club landscape.
Our Take: This is a reunion with a purpose and a score to settle. KSL originally built ClubCorp, took it public in 2013, and sold its stake gradually before Apollo took the company private in 2017, delivering shareholders a modest 22% return over four years. Now it's buying it back at 8x EBITDA, a multiple that reflects a business carrying real baggage: brand equity eroded by years of cost-cutting, an ill-fated $29 million BigShots write-off, and an acquisition freeze since 2022. The central question the deal hinges on is whether KSL can scale the combined 172-club platform without repeating the operational shortcuts that weakened it under Apollo. Headline participation has never been stronger, 48 million Americans played some form of golf last year, but the pressure is increasingly shifting to the supply side: ageing infrastructure, rising maintenance costs, and member expectations that have expanded well beyond the fairway. KSL knows this business better than almost anyone. The question is whether that familiarity is an advantage or a blind spot.
Pic from Ryder Cup
Worth your time
Watch: Matt Fitzpatrick introducing himself to Scottie Before their playoff hole at last weeks RBC Heritage event, Fitzpatrick lightens the mood with a handshake
Follow: Sportsball cool Instagram account. Sports Education with Data 📈
Listen: Under The Number Podcast with Grass League Co-Founder Pete Wilson
Feature Story
The R&A's 22 million golfer target: Ambitious strategy or conversion problem nobody's solving?
Pic from R&A
The R&A unveiled its five-year global strategy this week with a headline that demands attention: attract 22 million additional golfers by 2031. Alongside that, the organisation is targeting more than five billion fan interactions across its championship portfolio, over £25 billion in social value creation, and £1.5 billion in direct economic impact from its events alone.
These are not aspirational numbers. They are measurable commitments made publicly by a governing body that has historically preferred cautious institutional language to hard targets. That shift alone tells you something has changed.
The numbers are real
New R&A research shows that 112.2 million adults and juniors are now playing golf worldwide, excluding the USA and Mexico, an increase of 4.2 million golfers year-on-year. That is the strongest platform the sport has had in modern history.
The breakdown is instructive. Adult participation stands at 65 million, up one million on 2024. Junior participation has climbed to 47.1 million, an increase of 3.2 million in a single year. Junior growth outpacing adult growth by three to one suggests the sport is genuinely attracting a next generation rather than cycling through its existing base.
Off-course formats are accelerating, with 68.3 million adults and juniors now engaging through driving ranges, simulators and adventure golf. For the R&A, this represents a recruitment pipeline they intend to own.
Three pillars, one commercial logic
The strategy is built on three themes: Unite, Inspire and Lead.
Unite refers to governance, the R&A's role in maintaining rules, equipment standards and handicapping systems globally. It is the least commercially visible pillar, but arguably the most foundational. Without consistent governance, you cannot build a consistent product.
Inspire is where the commercial engine sits. The Open will continue to evolve as one of the world's leading sporting events, with the AIG Women's Open positioned as a premier event in women's sport. The women's game is no longer treated as a secondary priority. It is a strategic growth asset.
Lead covers development. The R&A will work with national federations to open the sport to underrepresented audiences, particularly women and juniors, whilst championing environmental sustainability and strengthening high-performance pathways in developing territories. The strategy includes building more than 200 strategic partnerships and using technology and data to support federations, moving beyond cheque-writing into knowledge transfer.
The retention problem buried in the strategy
Here is the tension nobody at St Andrews wanted to lead with. Participation numbers are growing. Conversion is not keeping pace.
Research from the National Golf Foundation, published alongside the R&A's data this week, found that only one in four beginners becomes a committed golfer, the segment that drives the majority of rounds and spending. Inflow into the sport has run approximately 30% higher since 2020 than it did in the preceding five years. But if the majority of that inflow is not converting into retained players, the headline growth numbers flatter the underlying business reality.
Mark Darbon, Chief Executive of The R&A, acknowledged the challenge directly. The goal is not simply to grow the numbers. It is to turn casual engagement into lasting participation. That distinction is where the real commercial work lies.
Getting someone to try golf has never been easier. Topgolf exists. Simulators are everywhere. Adventure golf attracts families. But trial is not retention. A customer who plays twice and quits is not a golfer. They are a lost acquisition cost.
What the R&A is actually building
Strip back the language and this is a governing body repositioning itself as a growth platform. The R&A is building a participation business, a data infrastructure, a media property and a development network, all simultaneously.
The economic logic is straightforward. Championship revenue funds development investment. Development investment grows the golfer base. A larger golfer base generates greater championship audiences and commercial returns. The R&A has committed to investing £200 million over ten years, a reinvestment model that gives national federations confidence in a long-term relationship rather than cycle-by-cycle funding.
The new strategy sharpens that model with clearer targets, stronger emphasis on digital engagement and data, and explicit commitment to alternative formats. Indoor simulator golf and adventure golf are no longer treated as threats to traditional participation. They are entry points the R&A intends to lead.
Pic from R&A
The execution challenge
The five-year window runs to 2031. The metrics that will tell the real story are not the headline golfer numbers. Those will almost certainly rise given the tailwinds. The sharper question is whether the R&A can move the retention rate.
Can it build the infrastructure, partnerships and participant experience to turn the one-in-four conversion into something closer to one-in-two? That requires solving problems the R&A does not directly control: expensive equipment, slow play, five-hour time commitments, intimidating course cultures, inconsistent accessibility for women and juniors.
Governing bodies can fund initiatives. They cannot force clubs to change membership policies, operators to redesign business models, or manufacturers to lower equipment prices. The R&A's strategy is correct in identifying retention as the critical problem. Whether it has the leverage to solve it is a different question.
What this means for the industry
For operators, brands and investors, the R&A's strategy validates what many have already bet on. Off-course formats are not cannibalising traditional golf. They are the front door.
The challenge is what happens after acquisition. A golfer who tries the sport via Topgolf and immediately encounters $500 in equipment costs, $60 green fees and four-and-a-half-hour rounds is unlikely to return. The industry has solved the discovery problem. It has not solved the onboarding problem.
The R&A's commitment to data and technology infrastructure is particularly significant. National federations often lack resources or expertise to build sophisticated player development systems. If the R&A can centralise that capability and make it accessible globally, it shifts the development model from capital-intensive to knowledge-intensive. That scales more efficiently.
For championship properties, the emphasis on the AIG Women's Open as a strategic asset signals where the R&A sees growth. Women's sport is attracting audiences, sponsorship and media investment at rates men's sport is not. The R&A is positioning The Open and the AIG Women's Open as a dual championship portfolio rather than primary and secondary properties.
The verdict
The strategy is right. The ambition is credible. The 22 million target is achievable if the tailwinds continue. But the real test is retention. If the R&A and its partners can shift the conversion rate from one-in-four to something meaningfully higher, the strategy works. If they cannot, the participation boom risks being a headline the industry mistakes for a foundation.
The R&A has committed to measurable targets publicly. That accountability is welcome. Now the question is whether the industry can build the infrastructure to turn those targets into sustainable growth rather than just bigger churn numbers.
The next five years will tell us whether golf's governing bodies can lead the sport into genuine long-term expansion or whether they are simply riding a wave they cannot control. The strategy is published. Execution is everything.
One thing from history
The ball Harry Vardon couldn’t stop
Pic from Golf Monthly
In February 1900, the greatest golfer in the world stepped off a boat in New York and changed sport forever. Not by winning. Harry Vardon had just signed a deal with Spalding that nobody had quite seen before: his name on a golf ball, a year-long tour of America to promote it, money for every match. The world's first athlete endorsement contract.
Spalding sent him across the country by Pullman rail car, match after match against the club pro and local amateur playing their better ball against Vardon alone. He won nearly all of them, took the US Open along the way, and pocketed more money than most golfers saw in a decade. The Vardon Flyer was flying off shelves.
He was not the future of golf.
Two years earlier, in an Akron rubber factory, an amateur named Coburn Haskell had been killing time by winding rubber thread around a small core. When he bounced it, the thing nearly hit the ceiling. He covered it, took it to a course, and watched it fly twenty yards past anything a guttie could manage. By 1902, Sandy Herd had won the British Open with one. Vardon's ball, the one with his name on it, was a museum piece.
Vardon's response was to write to the USGA and ask them to ban the Haskell. He was right that it would make courses obsolete. He was also, unmistakably, a man whose business interests were pulling his principles. The USGA didn't act. Neither did the R&A.
By 1903, the top five finishers at the Open Championship were all playing Haskells. Goodrich ran an ad that simply listed their names and added two words: Comment unnecessary.
Being first to a genuinely new idea is worth a great deal. Being first to a genuinely new idea while your name is on the technology it replaces is worth considerably less.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David