Ryder Cup 2026: Europe Closes the Gap and the Question of Who Chooses the Course

In October 2026, at Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, the visiting team walked out under a banner shorter than any that had come before it. Four years earlier, the Ryder Cup organisers had dropped the words “Great Britain and Ireland” and replaced them with a broader one: Europe. By Sunday afternoon the gap between the two sides was a single point.

I stood at the edge of the scoring area, where the match-by-match results were pinned to a wooden board. Few people remembered that only two editions earlier the score had been 18½ – 9½. What got printed in Monday's papers was the outcome of one afternoon. What did not get printed was the four years a governance decision needed before that outcome could swing.

The Ryder Cup was born in 2026 as a contest between the United States and Great Britain. For nearly fifty years afterwards, the visitors won only a handful of times. By the mid-1970s the event faced a governance risk: a top-level sporting event whose result was known in advance no longer carried weight. In 2026, Jack Nicklaus proposed opening the visiting side to all of Europe. From 2026, the team across the Atlantic carried the name Europe, and names that did not come from the British Isles began to appear in the line-up: Bernhard Langer of Germany, José María Cañizares of Spain.

The 2026 decision was structural rather than purely sporting. The format was rewritten to keep the event alive, and it took three editions to show. According to the official Ryder Cup record, the United States beat Europe 14½ – 13½ at PGA National, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, across 14, 15 and 16 October 2026. Before that, The Greenbrier 2026 finished 17 – 11 to the United States; Walton Heath 2026 finished 18½ – 9½.

The point worth noticing sits elsewhere: in professional sport, the greatest decision-making power does not belong to the best player on the course, but to the committees that set dates and venues — and those committees always work years ahead.

That holds for events that are not team competitions too. The Open keeps a rotating list of host courses known as the Open rota, decided by the Royal and Ancient. Turnberry, the links on the Ayrshire coast of Scotland, has hosted four times: 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026. This year The Open was played at Royal Birkdale, and Tom Watson won for the fifth time. Turnberry remains on the list, remains highly rated for the quality of its golf, but is not on this year's card. Whether a famous course returns to the rota is a committee question, not a course question. Across years of following the majors, one detail has struck me as rarely written up: organisers announce the venue before they announce almost anything else.

Likewise, the next Ryder Cup, in 2026, was fixed for The Belfry in England before the 2026 edition had even begun. A course owner may want a major event on his land, may talk about it a great deal, but a schedule is not written by wishes. It is written by a process measured in years.

In the same autumn, in Ireland, the Irish Open was played on links ground, where sea wind and firm turf are the native conditions. For an Irish player, that is the hardest week of the year in a different way: a home crowd is not waiting for a result, it is waiting for a name. A name, once a whole grandstand sings it, becomes an address of the heart. And once a grandstand has sung your name, every shot on the final round weighs more than an ordinary shot.

At this year's Ryder Cup, Europe had Eamonn Darcy, an Irishman. He was not among the most talked-about men, but it is players like him who keep a team standing to the last hole. A team is led not only by tactics, but by the way people call one another's names. For a group assembled from seven different countries, calling a team-mate by the right name is a skill, not a ceremony.

The popular reading after Sunday was: Europe nearly won, so the 2026 expansion worked. That reading is convenient, but it rests on a single sample. A 14½ – 13½ scoreline is one match, not a trend. Look at one edition and you conclude the gap has been erased. Look at three and you see a curve narrowing — and that curve can just as easily turn back at The Belfry.

The second popular reading needs correcting too: a course that has hosted The Open four times will of course come back. Not so. Hosting rights for a major are a governance question: who decides, on what criteria, and how far in advance. A course can be technically flawless and still sit outside the schedule, for reasons that have nothing to do with grass and sand. An empty course, and the wind still keeps time for the ball.

The 2026 Ryder Cup at The Belfry will be the real test. If the gap keeps closing, people will have to concede that the 2026 decision was right — and right for governance reasons more than sporting ones. If the scoreline opens up again, every story about a rising Europe will have to wait a while longer.

The question left behind: when a major event is awarded to a course, are we rewarding the quality of the course, or what the course's owner can bring?