Ryder Cup Expecting Record Revenue After Ticket Price Controversy

ORLANDO — General-admission tickets to the 2025 Ryder Cup just outside New York City cost a record $750. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the PGA of America, which operates the biennial team golf event when it’s played in the U.S., is anticipating record revenue for a Ryder Cup.

“Every metric we use, it’s been the most,” Ryder Cup championship director Bryan Karns told Front Office Sports at the PGA Show in Orlando. “That’s where the New York element really showed up.”

The Ryder Cup will be played at the famous Bethpage Black Golf Course, which has previously hosted the PGA Championship and U.S. Open, Sept. 26–28, in Farmingdale, N.Y. Practice-round tickets, which started at $250, are sold out, too. The only inventory left is some single-day corporate hospitality options.

There will be enough fans to pack a football stadium on peak days, with organizers expecting somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people on-site, including tournament staff. Doing some simple math, that should easily see ticket revenue surpassing $100 million.

While there were more than 500,000 registrants for the random selection process to buy tickets, it’s not just fans driving the demand. Karns says there will be at least 4,000 volunteers at Bethpage Black, and that there was a 30,000-person waitlist to volunteer, which itself costs $350 (to cover a uniform and food). “That continues to be one of the most eye-popping things to me,” he says.

At the 2021 Ryder Cup in Wisconsin, European fans were hard to find, since many couldn’t travel to the U.S. due to ongoing COVID-19 restrictions. But that should change in September, as Karns says 10–15% of original ticket buyers are from overseas.

Whether spectators are cheering for Team USA or Team Europe, Karns believes the high ticket prices, which led to weeks of debate among fans and media members, will be “worth every penny.”

“There was four or five months of work that we had put in,” Karns says. “At the end of the day, it played out like we thought it would. I don’t think that anybody sits there and says, ‘Yeah, we want to charge X amount,’ or that we can’t certainly empathize if someone says that’s an excessive price. But it wasn’t something we pulled out of thin air. We spent a lot of time thinking about it.”

Karns cites Ryder Cup tickets’ value as a big reason for the initial high price. “If the secondary market is saying that it’s going to be $1,100 or $1,200 for this ticket—that’s what it’s going to get—then the lower you price that ticket, the more you’re incentivizing bots and secondary people, and you’re taking it out of the hands of the people that really want to go.”

There’s also the need and opportunity for the organization to capitalize on a big revenue driver that comes around only once every four years. “We’ve got a mission to fund our association, to the responsibility of the members to deliver dollars for programming and things that are going to fund the next four years of the PGA of America,” Karns says. “We felt like it was appropriate.”