The Open Championship is one of the oldest and most prestigious events in sport. The links. The Claret Jug. The weather. The crowds stretching across the course.
But behind that image sits one of golf’s most important event businesses.
Royal Birkdale will welcome a record 300,000 fans this week. Across ticketing, hospitality, sponsorship, broadcasting and retail, the Open generates roughly 80% of the £156 million annual income earned by the R&A, the governing body that runs the Championship and supports the development of golf around the world.
This makes the Open far more than a four-day tournament. It is the financial engine funding the R&A’s work throughout the rest of the year, including grassroots programmes, municipal courses, women’s and girls’ golf, sustainability research and efforts to widen access to the sport.
The need to fund this work has pushed the Open to keep growing. More spectators require larger hospitality areas, new infrastructure and redesigned movement around venues built long before modern championship crowds.
At Royal Birkdale, this has meant changes to parts of the course that had remained largely untouched for decades.
The same growth that strengthens the R&A’s wider work is therefore beginning to alter the event generating the money.
365247 Sports gows into the business and the money behind The Open, how the Championship became the R&A’s financial engine, and what its continued growth could change…