The tournament director of the 2025 Ryder Cup is defending the organization’s pricing for the popular event in the wake of widespread criticism from golf fans.
There will be a lottery for tickets for the September 2025 event at Bethpage State Park’s Black Course and registration is open now. Listed within an FAQ section on the ticketing process are prices: $255.27 for Tuesday and Wednesday practice days, $423.64 for a Thursday practice day including a junior exhibition, celebrity event and opening ceremony, and $749.51 for Friday, Saturday and Sunday match days. Prices include fees and taxes as well as unlimited select food and non-alcoholic beverages.
The Ryder Cup is played in the United States every four years and the 2021 edition at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin (moved back one year due to the COVID-19 pandemic) sold tickets for tournament days that ran $185 before taxes and fees and did not include an unlimited food option.
“We view ourselves as a Tier 1 event that's on par with a World Series, or with an NBA Finals Game 7,” said Bryan Karns, championship director for the PGA of America, in an interview with SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio. “That was a part of it.”
Karns said that the organization worked with an outside firm to study pricing across different sports and teams. He cited prices with the Boston Bruins, Boston Celtics and Lambeau Field as factors into how the upcoming Ryder Cup ultimately set its prices.
“We're able to tap into data from all these different venues. We're able to see, ‘what do people pay?'" Karns said. “Our position in this landscape—where do we view ourselves? I think that’s the reality. There are people who have the Ryder Cup on their bucket list in the same way that someone would have a Yankees opening game World Series on their bucket list. Ultimately, we felt like that's where we are. The demand is at an all-time high for this event, so we wanted to make sure we priced it appropriately.”
In doing so, Karns said in an interview with golf.com, the PGA of America also looked to avoid creating “a massively inflated secondary market”—essentially taking secondary market profits for themselves by setting a higher price.
The PGA of America is an organization comprised of 30,000 golf professionals and is largely funded by revenues from the Ryder Cup and PGA Championship.
Bethpage Black, one of the toughest courses in the nation yet a municipal facility with greens fees under $100 every day for New York residents, first hosted major golf with the 2002 U.S. Open, which Tiger Woods won. Ticket demand was extraordinarily high and Bethpage became a coveted pro venue, hosting the U.S. Open again in 2009, a PGA Tour stop in 2012 and 2016 and the 2019 PGA Championship.
In a one-year-out press conference last week in New York City, U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley and his European counterpart Luke Donald praised New York’s passionate golf fans and that they expected the partisan crowds (a fixture of the Ryder Cup for the last 30 years) to make themselves heard.
Many have, but rather than golf shots it's for the price of the tickets.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Ryder Cup Director Defends Controversial Ticket Prices for 2025 Event at Bethpage Black.