Global Gladiators on Grass: How the 2025 Ryder Cup Became the World’s Most Expensive Distraction

The 2025 Ryder Cup will tee off next September on Long Island’s Bethpage Black, that charming municipal brute where the rough is thicker than a Moscow winter and the locals greet visitors with a warmth normally reserved for parking tickets. For one week the planet will pretend golf is life-or-death, which is adorable considering several wars, a climate that now offers beachfront property in Siberia, and a global debt pile roughly the size of Jupiter. Still, Europe versus the United States in match play is apparently the distraction we all agreed to care about when the apocalypse gets too depressing.

This will be the first Ryder Cup held on U.S. soil since the pandemic-era 2020 edition was postponed to 2021, and only the second since 2016. In those intervening years the world has renegotiated its supply chains, reordered its alliances, and discovered that artificial intelligence can now write a limerick about your swing flaws in twelve languages. Yet the biennial flag-waving remains reassuringly medieval: two tribes, one patch of grass, 28 points, and enough corporate hospitality to bankroll a medium-sized coup. Rolex, BMW, and United Airlines are “Official Partners,” because nothing says gentlemanly competition like a Swiss watch conglomerate that could bail out Argentina.

The squads themselves are already assembling like NATO summits with better tailoring. Europe’s captain, Thomas Bjørn, has been spotted in Abu Dhabi counting Saudi-backed appearance fees the way a Swiss banker counts gold bars, while U.S. skipper Zach Johnson has traded his Iowa cornfield humility for Netflix-documentary swagger. Both men must navigate the new Official World Golf Ranking—re-jiggered faster than a Buenos Aires exchange rate—whose points algorithm is understood by exactly four people, three of whom are under NDA. LIV Golf defectors remain eligible provided they crawl back through the correct bureaucratic pet door, a compromise as elegant as a ceasefire negotiated by toddlers.

Internationally, the Ryder Cup is the rare Western export that hasn’t yet been slapped with retaliatory tariffs. Asian broadcasters pay hefty rights fees to beam dawn-delay coverage of Americans heckling Europeans for missing three-footers, while Latin American streaming services splice in dramatic telenovela music whenever Rory McIlroy glares at a cameraman. Viewers in Lagos watch on pay-per-view bundles that also include Champions League football, WWE SmackDown, and a Nigerian cooking show—proof that the global attention economy is basically a digital tapas bar where everything competes with everything else. Even Chinese state television has begun airing highlight packages, presumably to remind citizens that capitalism’s decline still features impeccable lawn care.

Beneath the pomp lies the usual subtext: soft power dressed in pastel. Washington lobbyists will glad-hand EU commissioners in hospitality chalets, whispering that transatlantic solidarity is best sealed over gin-and-tronic fiscal policy. Meanwhile, the European Tour’s head of sustainability will boast that the event is “net-zero,” an achievement roughly as credible as a Russian election, achieved by planting trees in countries whose names most players can’t spell. Fans flying in from 37 nations will offset their emissions by ticking a box that costs less than a concession-stand Michelob Ultra, the carbon equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a forest fire.

Of course, the real stakes are emotional, which is to say trivial, which is to say priceless. Should Europe retain the cup, continental newspapers will trumpet the victory as evidence that Enlightenment values still produce superior short-iron play. If the U.S. reclaims it, Fox News will run chyrons about redemptive American grit while conveniently forgetting that half the team now live in Florida for tax purposes. Either way, both sides will declare moral victory, the stock market will yawn, and by Monday the world will return to its regularly scheduled doomscroll.

In the grand ledger of human folly, the 2025 Ryder Cup will be recorded as a harmless line item: a three-day carnival where the only casualties are egos and the occasional Titleist. That, perhaps, is its quiet achievement—reminding us that even in 2025, when reality feels like satire written by a committee of nihilists, we can still manufacture a conflict so beautifully pointless that everyone wins by pretending it matters. Fore!