Welcome to Issue #11
"The greatest thing about tomorrow is, I will be better than I am today.”
Tiger Woods
What’s on our mind this week
‘Course closed’ - two words no golfer wants to see, Cadillac makes a smooth return to the PGA Tour in 2026, all I want for Christmas is a launch monitor, no tee time…no Q-School, Cool meets cool: Fred Couples x Malbon, Trump-Bryson bromance still a thing, YouTube giving golf its own lane…sort of, Rory is SPOTY for 2025.
In the news
Why it matters: Dauphin Highlands Golf Course in Pennsylvania sold for $45.6 million to Provident Realty for data centre development, roughly 10 times the recorded value of the 228-acre plot. Five other data centre builders submitted competing proposals, demonstrating systematic demand for golf course land near power infrastructure and fibre connectivity.
Our Take: AI infrastructure is consuming golf courses because they offer something data centres desperately need: large parcels near existing utility infrastructure in locations where residential opposition is minimal. Golf courses were built decades ago near power substations and major roads, exactly what hyperscale computing requires. The 10x valuation premium makes continued golf operations economically irrational for any course with data centre optionality. This isn't isolated. Struggling municipal and daily-fee courses near major metros with strong power grids are now worth more as real estate than as golf facilities. The challenge for golf is that courses being converted aren't premium private clubs, they're accessible public facilities serving recreational golfers. AI companies can outbid any golf operator because computing infrastructure generates exponentially higher returns per acre than green fees ever will.
Why it matters: Takomo Golf acquired Finnish putter company Otso Golf on December 15th, gaining proprietary low-torque putter technology and design capabilities. The acquisition represents a significant step toward Takomo's goal of becoming a full-bag company.
Our Take: DTC golf brands are entering their consolidation phase. Takomo disrupted iron pricing by selling sub-$500 sets directly to consumers, bypassing traditional retail markup. Now they're acquiring technology to complete their bag offering and compete with legacy brands across all categories. This mirrors every DTC evolution: disrupt on price, build customer base, acquire capabilities to expand product range, eventually challenge incumbents head-to-head. The putter market is particularly strategic because margins are highest, and brand loyalty is weakest. Golfers will experiment with putters far more readily than drivers or irons. Takomo's bet is that customers who trusted them for affordable irons will trust them for premium putters if the technology proves legitimate. Whether this works depends on execution, not concept. Otso's low-torque technology needs to perform credibly against Scotty Cameron and Odyssey, not just undercut on price.
Why it matters: New York Gaming Commission approved Bally's $4 billion casino-hotel development at Ferry Point Park in the Bronx on December 15th, a municipal golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus.
Our Take: Bally's paid Trump Organisation $60 million in 2023 for the course operating license through 2035, but the original purchase agreement included a clause requiring an additional $115 million payment if gaming approval came after the sale date. This is deal structure as an art form. Trump didn't just sell a golf course for $60m, he sold it with embedded regulatory optionality worth another $115m. He correctly bet that gaming approval was probable and structured the contract to capture that value even after exit. Bally's paid because $175m total is irrelevant against a $4bn casino development, and they needed control of the land regardless of price. The broader lesson is that golf courses in major metros increasingly function as land banks waiting for higher-value use approval. Ferry Point opened in 2015 after 15 years of delays and will operate as golf for roughly 10 years before casino conversion. The golf operations were never the point, they were placeholder revenue whilst waiting for political conditions to allow gaming development. Municipal golf served its purpose: keeping land productive until something more valuable became possible.
Pic from Takomo
Worth your time
Read: The Augusta Principles: Timeless Business Lessons from the World's Premier Golf Club This book provides a master class in leadership, excellence, and execution.
Watch: Nike Brilliant Christmas ad from Nike celebrating Scotty’s 4th straight Player of the Year award. How many ‘nods’ to Scotty’s year can you spot?
Listen: Changing The Business of Golf Podcast Jay Karen, CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA) and Golf.Inc named top 25 most powerful people in golf, shares his vision on the future of golf.
Follow: Scott Galloway New York Times bestselling author and co-host of the Pivot podcast. He is known for his direct, data-driven, and often provocative style of commentary and for his insights into business, technology, and branding.
Feature story
Entrepreneur, investor and mentor Ryan Howsam shares his Legends Tour vision
Ryan Howsam
Ryan Howsam isn't building a golf tour; he's building a customer acquisition platform disguised as one.
While most professional tours focus narrowly on tournaments and prize money, the owner of the Legends Golf Tour is attacking the industry from a radically different angle, using elite senior golf as the centrepiece of what he believes will become a billion-dollar ecosystem spanning property, retail, media, and experiences.
"The aim is to build a billion-dollar ecosystem of asset value around golf with the legends right in the centre of it," Howsam told me from Dubai last week. "I think that's where we're different to everywhere else, because if you take the other tours, they are membership tours. They're not really thinking about how they take advantage of the money that's spent in the golf ecosystem."
Five years after transforming the European Senior Tour into the rebranded Legends Tour, Howsam's vision is coming into focus.
Howsam is the founder and CEO of Staysure Group, one of Europe’s largest travel insurance providers, which he built from a start-up into a billion-pound business. A Sheffield-born entrepreneur rather than a career tour executive, he has invested heavily in transforming the Legends Tour, an undertaking that requires navigating golf’s famously conservative politics while simultaneously building multiple commercial verticals around the sport. The tour ran 18 events in 2025 and expects to hit at least 20 in 2026. But tournaments are just the hook. Behind the scenes, Howsam is acquiring retail chains, pursuing golf resort properties, and building media infrastructure that would make traditional tours blush.
From sponsor to owner
The Legends Tour exists because Howsam refused to take no for an answer. His insurance company, Staysure, initially sponsored the European Senior Tour, creating a ‘playing-in’ tournament format that allowed amateurs to compete alongside professionals. "That went down really well, and I said to David Maclaren, head of the Tour at that time, what do you think are the chances of going from sponsorship to ownership of this thing?" Howsam explained. "Because the tour wasn’t really marketing it in the way in which I thought it could be marketed."
Tour officials told him it was highly unlikely. The tour was an asset of the membership organisation, not something that could be sold. Undeterred, Howsam spent months crafting a proposal with acting CEO at the time, Phil Harrison, who is now Chief Advisor and Global Ambassador. "I managed to get that through a vote with the board of the tour and managed to become the majority owner at that point," he said.
His pitch centred on a simple insight: the money in golf in the regular market is really, really significant. If he could pursue the ecosystem of golf beyond just the tour side and use the tour as a shop window to that ecosystem, he could build a commercial model that made sense.
The tour's roster reflects its European roots: Ian Woosnam, Thomas Bjorn, Colin Montgomery, Padraig Harrington, and Bernhard Langer headline a field of 60–70 players who've aged out of the DP World Tour but aren't ready to retire. The Legends Tour positions itself as a competitive bridge for players, European and Global, transitioning out of the main tours rather than an end-of-career exhibition circuit.
The tour operates across England, Portugal, Cambodia, Mauritius, and Beijing, to name just a few, with roughly 80% of events staged outside the UK. It's a deliberate geographic strategy targeting markets where professional golf has limited live presence but strong participation and travel demand.
Tournament management falls to Managing Director David Adams, "He came into the commercial side of the business, redid how we're doing some of the marketing and TV assets," Howsam said. "He just did such a brilliant job and recently became managing director."
The operation runs lean, with around 20 full-time staff handling everything from tournament operations to in-house broadcast production. "We do everything," Howsam said of the broadcast capabilities.
Commercials: The ecosystem play
When Howsam took over, the tour had effectively no marketing budget. "One of the questions I asked in the process was, well, what's the marketing that happens at the event level? And there was none," he said. "You can imagine you've got players like Woosnam and Montgomery playing and it wasn't marketed. That was just the basic way."
Today, the tour is not yet profitable, but Howsam insists that was never the expectation. "The answer to the question is no, we're not profitable. But we weren't expected to be profitable the first couple of years," he said. " Whilst both the PGA and DP World models have significant asset values, generating a profit is extremely difficult. So much money is going into paying the players that the underlying profit ends up being taken away."
His target is profitability by 2027 at the tour level. Around 45% of individual events already break even on a standalone basis, but fixed overheads remain the constraint. Staff, infrastructure, broadcast capability, and marketing investment do not scale linearly with event count, making volume essential to the underlying economics.
Most players compete solely for prize money, though a small number receive compensation for ambassadorial duties tied to hosting, promotion, and partner activity. "All the players that are playing on the tour don't get paid to play on the tour. We do have some ambassadors, and those ambassadors we would pay, but that is not just playing, they're doing an ambassadorial role for us," Howsam said. Colin Montgomery, who hosted the Staysure PGA Seniors Championship, exemplifies this model.
Pic from Legends Tour
Revenue comes from multiple sources working in concert. Sponsorships form the backbone, with partners including Rolex and a recent deal with Revolut. Tourist boards contribute when the tour visits their regions, viewing the events as destination marketing platforms rather than pure sporting fixtures. ‘Playing-in’ tournament experiences, where amateurs pay several thousand dollars to compete alongside legends, consistently sell out months in advance.
"These players are accessible in a way that PGA Tour stars aren't. That has real commercial value," Howsam said. The tour has also launched a limited membership programme allowing enthusiasts to play multiple times per year with priority access. With only 50 memberships available, uptake has been strong.
Crucially, Howsam is not attempting to maximise tournament-level profitability in isolation. Instead, the tour is designed to function as a marketing engine and customer acquisition channel for a broader set of golf-related businesses.
"There is one central place globally for golf resort property," Howsam explained. "The starting point is that we want to host our tournament at resort property destinations, where the properties are the top resorts, but then we'll market resorts that maybe we're not having things at. So, imagine like a Zoopla for golf real estate with the legends front and centre of the promotion of that.
He is currently in final due diligence on a golf resort with planning permission for approximately 600 properties. "If that comes off, that will be a Legends resort," he said. Separately, the business is acquiring a retail chain, though Howsam declined to name it publicly. "We've got a deal that's going to, we think, get us to, in 12 to 18 months, having between 70 and 100 retail stores.
The intent is integration rather than diversification for its own sake. "We're using the tour centrally to then promote these various areas and then those retail stores will have a multi- faceted approach," he said.
The economic logic represents a fundamental rethinking of how golf tours create value. "The tours are not valued on EBITDA, they're valued on multiples of their revenues," Howsam noted. "Even though I've invested heavily in this, the asset is worth more than the investment that I've made."
His ambition extends beyond tour operations alone. "If you look at the ecosystem of money that's going into golf in all different ways now, the investment into golf is significant," he said. "We're in a unique position with the tour and the players to promote products and services across that ecosystem in a way that other ventures simply can't."
Growth strategy: Marketing, people, and content
Ask Howsam where capital is flowing most aggressively, and the answer is immediate: people and marketing.
"The investment that I've had to make in people, but secondly, the amount of money that we've spent on marketing to get the outside world to go, this is something that's going somewhere. That's not been cheap," he said. "Eyeballs are expensive."
When he took over, the tour had virtually no media presence. Today, it operates as a content business in its own right. Broadcast production is handled entirely in-house, with distribution through Sky Sports and international partners, but linear television is only one component of the strategy.
"We've completely changed the media side of it. The highlights show is night and day compared to where it was and that's evolving again," Howsam said. "The amount of eyeballs the tour is now getting is gigantic compared to where it was."
The next phase launches in January with a documentary series filmed earlier in the year. "That's a four-part series. We'll start on YouTube, it’s almost like a Drive to Survive style," he explained. "It'll show you the inner workings of the tour and what really goes on."
The series features storylines designed to appeal beyond traditional golf audiences, including players fighting to retain status and late bloomers breaking through. One example is David Shacklady, who arrived on tour from working as a UPS van driver and went on to win. Howsam believes these narratives will resonate more strongly than conventional highlight packages.
"The TV show is not just going to be chopped up into social," he said. "The way that we are filming now, the highlights are going to be more entertainment-led than golf-led because that's how audiences are engaging."
Tourist boards have emerged as an unexpectedly powerful revenue stream. "The tourism side wasn't something that I really appreciated how much the tourist boards would want to promote the regions they're in," Howsam said. Leveraging Staysure's database of affluent travellers, the tour can offer destination exposure that traditional golf events struggle to match.
Event expansion follows a measured cadence. "There's nailed on about 18 events next year, but there's more that might come off. So, I'd be surprised if we didn't have 20 plus," Howsam said. Priority markets include Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and potentially South America.
Even North America is not off-limits. While PGA Tour Champions dominates the region, Howsam sees scope for selective expansion and collaboration rather than direct competition. "If we want to put an event on in North America, we can and we will," he said. "It's highly likely we'll end up in the US, just to give us a footprint there."
Future vision: The senior ‘Ryder Cup’ and beyond
Looking five years ahead, Howsam defines success in both financial and sporting terms. "Success looks like significantly increasing the prize funds. If you take the total prize money they're playing for, including majors, it's the thick end of $20 million. Taking that up to $30–40 million would be a big win for the players," he said.
Beyond prize money, his focus is on engagement, scale, and sustainability. "I will be quite surprised if within five years we've not created a billion-dollar value ecosystem in golf," he said.
Relations with PGA Tour Champions have remained largely constructive. Players such as Ernie Els, Miguel Ángel Jiménez, and Colin Montgomery hold dual status. "You've got a number of players that hold dual status on both tours," Howsam said. "They'll play some events with us, but they'll primarily be based in the US. The relationship is collaborative."
One initiative encapsulates his longer-term ambition: a Ryder Cup-style senior team event targeted for 2028. "We won't be able to call it the Ryder Cup, but there will be something akin to that," he said. "The same premise, the same teams: UK and Ireland versus the States."
At the same time, Legends Tour has become one of the few senior circuits globally offering an open qualification pathway following structural changes elsewhere. Howsam believes this could attract increased interest from international players seeking competitive access later in their careers.
Integrating LIV Golf players remains politically complex. Some high-profile names would be natural additions, but unresolved fines and existing partnerships complicate matters. "Unless they pay those fines, they won't be able to play," Howsam said. "We would love them to play, we'd love them to be on."
Balancing opportunity with diplomacy is a recurring theme. "This is where it's difficult," he said. "DP World is a partner, and if we went against them, it wouldn't be right. But it's frustrating because there is clearly an opportunity there."
Despite the complexity, Howsam insists the project is not a vanity exercise. "It's not a passion project in the sense that I want to lose money," he said. "I want to build something that makes commercial sense. I'm not really looking to sell."
Industry perspectives: Fragmentation and opportunity
Howsam does not expect the PGA Tour–LIV divide to resolve itself. "I don't think it will get unified," he said flatly.
Instead, he sees disruption as exposing deeper structural weaknesses. "If I was running DP World or the PGA Tour, I would have been building out a commercial business that wasn't just reliant on golf," he said. "Going back to sponsors again and again is difficult."
The issue, in his view, is governance. "They are members organisations, and we are not," he explained. "Their sole focus is looking after members. But does that create a long-term sustainable business model? Not in my opinion."
Media consumption trends reinforce his thesis. "You've got content creators on YouTube doing really well," he said. "Imagine if you could turn these players, with their stories and tuition, into something that drives consistent engagement."
As the broader golf industry fragments across apparel, equipment, simulators, and experience-led formats, Howsam believes the opportunity lies in integration. "It's about knitting it together intelligently, so it becomes a flywheel," he said. "And we've got the tour right at the centre of that."
As our call wrapped, Howsam remained focused on execution rather than rhetoric. The documentary launches in January. Retail acquisitions are progressing through due diligence. Resort development discussions continue. Twenty plus events are pencilled in for 2026.
Whether he ultimately delivers a billion-dollar ecosystem remains an open question. But laying out a multi-vertical strategy with the confidence of someone who has already done the maths, it's clear Howsam is not treating the Legends Tour as a conventional golf business.
He's treating it as a platform. And in an industry long accused of leaving money on the table, that may prove to be the smartest play of all.
One thing from history
Jack Nicklaus at 46: Defying every business rule
Pic from Sky Sports
The 1986 Masters was supposed to be Jack Nicklaus's farewell tour. At 46, he hadn't won a major in six years. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called his game "rusted." A friend taped the clipping to his Augusta rental fridge. The market had written him off.
Then came Sunday's back nine.
Nicklaus played the final nine in 30 strokes, unleashing an eagle at 15, a near-ace at 16, and an 18-foot birdie at 17 that produced Verne Lundquist's immortal call: "Maybe… Yes, sir!" His final-round 65 secured a sixth Masters title and 18th major - records that still stand nearly 40 years later.
The win became one of the most replayed moments in golf history, proving in sports, emotion and narrative can be as valuable as youth and raw athleticism. The business implications were profound. Nicklaus showed that legacy athletes retain enormous commercial value well beyond their competitive prime, a lesson the golf industry has monetised ever since through the Champions Tour and nostalgia marketing. His victory challenged a youth-obsessed economy and reminded executives that greatness doesn't always expire on schedule.
Next week
We’re taking a little break for the Christmas holidays and will be back to normal newsletter schedule from Friday 16th January.
In the meantime, follow us on our social channels for golf business updates.
Thank you for reading this year - we truly appreciate your support. Wishing you all the best for the remainder of 2025.
Have a good week. Until 2026,
David