Ryder Cup tickets are more expensive than ever. The PGA of America explains why

Support and discussion about the Ryder Cup is often reserved for the weeks and months immediately before the event. In the example of the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, however, the upset is a full year ahead of schedule.

Subject: ticket prices and than they are more expensive than ever before.

As revealed this week, prices for Ryder Cup tickets – which are not yet available and are only accessible through a lottery in November – start at $255 for early week practice rounds and extend to a base of 749 dollars for the days of the competition.

Predictably, the response from golf fans on social media and in the press has been fierce. It’s not often that we see such a unified sticker punch label. But it’s not entirely surprising. Tickets for the last two Cups – one held outside Rome and the other outside Milwaukee, Wisc. – have mostly been in the $200-$250 range.

Prices increasing by a factor of three? Make sense!

Well, we have tried to do that. And we’re not positive we made it, but we spent Tuesday afternoon chatting with Ryder Cup Championship Director Bryan Karns, who has worked for the PGA of America for more than a decade. He has been based in New York for the past two years, preparing for the 2025 Cup, meeting with representatives of New York sports teams, transit systems and entertainment venues. Below are the highlights of our conversation, which speak to the awarding approach that the PGA of America believes in. More than anything, that last line is important. This is a number that the PGA of America believes. It’s not changing.

It’s also the box office price. Final price. It’s steeper than ever, but customers won’t pay a dollar more, and that was important to the PGA.

“We wanted to be transparent and say, instead of listing a lower price and then someone goes to checkout and it’s 70% more, it’s $140 in taxes and fees,” Karns said. “that is the box office price. I guess, in a way, we just felt, why would we do that?”

The $749 price point for weekend sessions will garner (and already has) the most significant response. Very few sporting events in the world charge that as a base price. What creates that price is a variety of internal and external factors. Let’s start with the exterior.

The PGA of America rates its events differently than the market. When the 2022 PGA Championship was hosted at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Okla., part of their market research included the price of an Oklahoma City Thunder playoff ticket, or the market for a major college football game that includes Oklahoma Sooners. (That championship was also the site of The Great Rage of Beer Prices.) Karns says the PGA spent a year working to decide how to price an event near New York City, one of the most expensive and populous cities in the world. From an operating cost perspective, New York City is infinitely more expensive than rural Wisconsin or suburban Minneapolis — “It costs a lot just to breathe the air,” Karns joked — but the PGA is trying to produce a price that fits between theirs. other mass sporting events. They believe they are one “Tier 1” event. that fits alongside the World Series or the NBA Finals in the larger sports landscape.

“We knew it was going to be critical to get this right and try to do something that we felt was on par with where we saw ourselves and where our position was in this world,” Karns said. “But at the same time, understanding that there are some nuances to Ryder Cup tickets. It’s a full day event versus three hours. It’s unseated, but a GA ticket gets you roped in, (compared to) if I bought standing room only at Yankee Stadium last night. So we try to factor them all out. And it’s never as simple as saying it’s apples to apples. But we got a lot of feedback and we got to this point where we felt, look, this is what we feel confident in.”

Among the things social media responses feel most confident about is that even with an inflated price, there will be no shortage of customers willing to pay it. Market forces are at work! this is Econ 101! This will happen over the next two months as the PGA lottery system randomly selects users in November and asks them for their credit card information. Most major golf tournaments do not go beyond 50,000 fans per day, but most tournaments are organized on an annual basis. They may have hit a balance of supply and demand at $749, but organizers feel it’s a unique sale.

“I think the overall price is just indicative of A) this market, B) where we position ourselves, where we feel like we are (in the larger sports landscape) and then demand,” Karns said. “I think when you get into a situation where the demand is that high, you know, you want to do your best to price it so you don’t create this massively inflated secondary market.”

Karns quickly acknowledged that secondary markets exist for all entertainment industries and are nearly impossible to avoid. But they are, for better or worse, the strongest evidence of what people are willing to pay. The higher the inflation of a given market, the more inspiration a governing body would have to move their prices in that direction. That doesn’t make it fair, nor does it make it fan-friendly, but it serves as a reminder: The Ryder Cup is big business and it’s being treated as such.

As for internal factors, Karns highlighted two. First, the PGA coffers. The nonprofit hasn’t been shy about the fact that the Cup helps it break its budget on a four-year wait schedule. (The same is true of what the European Cups mean financially for the DP World Tour.) In other words, the Cup makes a lot of money and helps fund the PGA of America’s mission for the next several years until the next Cup takes place. based in America. country (in 2029, outside of Minneapolis). That mission is clear: “To set and elevate the standards of the profession and to increase interest and participation in the game of golf,” according to the PGA’s website. The first half of that sentence applies to the PGA’s 30,000 members—the golf professionals who teach, run pro shops, etc. – while the second half belongs to the growing interest in sports in general. To that end, Karns is fully aware of the narrative that expensive tickets feel counterproductive to “raising the game,” but would rather consider that price point part of the top of a funnel.

“If you look at it through the lens of, hey, I’m here to serve the 30,000 PGA members across the United States and the programs that they want to grow or improve or initiate — that’s the job that’s in us — it’s to make sure that can happen because that’s, in my opinion, where the growing game really happens, on the front lines with PGA members.”

Accounting for which Cup earnings flow to the rest of the golf world is complex and not always so obvious, but is entirely up to the PGA. (The golfers who compete in this event, in particular, are not charged an appearance fee. They get $200,000 in donations to a charity of their choice.)

The second internal justification for a price increase is that the PGA basically hopes to put on the best and biggest event it has ever had. This would be a hassle-free event, from the transportation to Farmingdale, NY, where patrons park and board the buses – most of which will take place early in the morning – to the number of bathrooms on site. In other words, as many bathrooms are needed, there are no lines. And a concession system that works similarly.

Karns pointed to the 2018 PGA Championship at Bellerive as a high-water mark when it comes to overcrowding on the course and around the bathrooms and concessions. In response, the PGA has charged a higher price for tickets to its major championships since 2022, including food and soft drinks — just like the next Cup — so spectators can get it fast and go back to golf. The result, says Karns, is that concession lines have effectively been eliminated.

“They’re not feeling like they have to be loaded,” he says. “They grab what they need and we try to get people back to watching golf.”

Some event improvements will be obvious — Karns teased the idea that the Cup is looking to create a fan activation in New York City, something they’ve never done before — and others like infrastructure will blend into the background. They may not feel like upgrades at all, but Karns believes that in the end it will be an event that is in line with what people paid for.

“We want to make sure that when people buy a ticket to the Ryder Cup, they know that we’re going to be able to provide a special experience,” Karns said. “I mean, it’s kind of like the Disney model in a way, in that you’re going to walk away from here saying, ‘Yeah, it was worth it.’

In the end, it will be? Trials are still 11 months away.