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This year the Ryder Cup, one of the most prestigious golf tournaments in the world, will be held for the first time in Italy. From 29 September to 1 October, the Marco Simone Golf & Country Club in Guidonia Montecelio, a town twenty kilometers away from the center of Rome, will in fact host the 44th edition of the tournament in which traditionally a team with the best American players and a formed by the best Europeans.
The Ryder Cup has almost a century of history and is the only major sporting competition in which Europe competes together. The tournament takes place every two years and the one that will be played on the outskirts of Rome next autumn will be the second edition after Brexit, which however hasn’t changed the division of the teams: British golfers continue to be involved in the European selection.
It is an event well known internationally, more than it is in Italy, where golf remains confined to its niche of elitist sport. The Italian movement, however, hopes that with the organization of the tournament golf will gain greater popularity and gain new enthusiasts. Italy and Rome will also be able to measure their skills in organizing and managing a major event never hosted up to now, and possibly exploit the economic induced that will be generated.
For the city of Rome, the Ryder Cup in autumn will join a series of other major events, such as the last stage of the next Giro d’Italia and the European Athletics Championships in 2024, which, among other things, will serve to test its organizational skills in view of the assignment of the Universal Exposition (the Expo) of 2030, in which Rome is among the candidates.
Tens of thousands of spectators from all over the world are expected in Rome between September and October to follow the overall six days of the Ryder Cup. From Tuesday 26 to Thursday 28 September, training sessions open to the public and some preparation for the tournament, including the traditional team introduction ceremony and the youth challenge (the Junior Ryder Cup). From Friday 29 September to Sunday 1 October there will be the actual races.
The expected total audience is almost 300,000 spectators, with an average of around 50,000 admissions to the club each day. Tickets are sold out, some hospitality packages costing thousands of euros remain on sale. Furthermore, it is no longer possible to book rooms in various luxury hotels in Rome during the period in question.
The public that follows golf is generally wealthy and it has been calculated that the expenditure of tourism linked to the discipline is three times higher than the average for sports tourism. But the atmosphere created during the Ryder Cup also resembles that of a football stadium, with spectators distributed between the stands and the pitch, depending on the type of ticket purchased. Golfers also compete to add prestige to their selections, not to earn money. Unlike the other major professional tournaments that take place during the year, in fact, the Ryder Cup does not offer a cash prize, but only the victory itself.
(Alessandro Austini/Il Post)
The event takes its name from the English spice merchant Samuel Ryder, a golf enthusiast who in 1924 created a competition between Americans and English with a solid gold cup to reward them. That trophy was then donated to the American Golf Federation and in 1929 the first real edition was organized. Until 1977, an American and a British team competed for the cup, while from 1979 onwards, the rivals of the Americans (who almost always won) became an enlarged selection of the best players from all over Europe. Since then the competition has been hosted alternately on the two continents and the editions of the Ryder Cup organized in Europe have always been held in Great Britain, except on two occasions: in 1997 in Spain and in 2018 in France.
Due to the pandemic, the tournament scheduled for 2020 had been postponed to 2021, consequently the Ryder Cup awarded to Italy, which was originally supposed to be held in 2022, has been postponed to this year.
Each of the two teams participating in the challenge — Team USA and Team Europe — is made up of 12 golfers and has a captain: usually he is an expert player still active and on his way to the final stage of his career. The captain has the role of coach and therefore does not participate in the competitions, as well as the vice-captains who support him as technical collaborators. A part of the players called up is automatically selected on the basis of the rankings updated after the last tournaments played, while the places left available to complete the teams are assigned by the captains, who decide which players to grant wild card (an invitation to the tournament). This year, for example, both teams will have six players chosen on the basis of results and six more invited as wild card.
At the Ryder Cup in Guidonia Montecelio the captain of the Americans will be Zach Johnson, who has already taken part in five editions of the competition as a player and was the vice-captain in the last two. The European team will be led by the Englishman Luke Donald, former number one in the world rankings, winner of four Ryder Cups and vice-captain in 2018 and 2021.
Donald confirmed as European vice-captains the Italian Edoardo Molinari and the Dane Thomas Bjorn. Instead, they aim to participate in the role of players Francesco Molinari, brother of Edoardo, and Guido Migliozzi, who won the French Open last September. The American captain Johnson has instead appointed Davis Love III and Steve Stricker as deputy, but would also like to bring Tiger Woods, considered the strongest golfer ever, to Italy. The most probable hypothesis at the moment is that Woods could participate in the role of vice-captain and not as a player, but it will depend on the results he will be able to obtain in recent months, after returning to play last year following the serious accident in car had in 2021.
The Ryder Cup features three days of competition and a total of 28 meetings. The Americans have won 28 times out of 43 tournaments played so far, including the last one, and are also considered favorites for the match in Guidonia.
The Marco Simone Golf & Country Club was built around an ancient castle which in the 1970s was bought as a home by the stylist Laura Biagiotti. In 1989 the latter decided to transform the meadows surrounding the castle into a golf course which still today allows you to see the dome of St. Peter’s basilica in the distance: this suggestive detail also contributed to the selection of the club as the venue for the Ryder Cup The facility has already hosted several high-level tournaments and is now managed by Lavinia Biagiotti Cigna, the designer’s daughter. The course was changed three years ago and works are underway for the assembly of the grandstands, which will also be used in the next Italian Open scheduled for May, a sort of general rehearsal for the Ryder Cup.
(Alessandro Austini/Il Post)
The decision to assign the event to Italy was taken in 2015 and Rome’s candidacy beat the competition from Barcelona, Berlin and Vienna. The organization of the event is led by the Ryder Cup Europe, a company that holds the rights to the editions hosted on the continent, while the sports manager and former coach of the Italian national volleyball team Gian Paolo Montali has been appointed general manager of the organization. Montali and his collaborators have the task of preparing the structure and making the area used for the tournament suitable, while the Ryder Cup Europe will take care of the management of the event.
The main roads that connect the center of Rome with the club are the Nomentana and the Tiburtina. Thanks to an agreement between the organizers and the Italian government, a series of public works have been planned to improve the viability of the area, which is often busy during peak hours and would risk becoming blocked on race days due to the influx of spectators . In particular, there is a need to fix the roads that are already used by about 25,000 people every day.
The works are in progress and the aim is to conclude them between May and June. Some local roads will be redone in the area around the Marco Simone, improving the quality of the asphalt, the lighting and, in some cases, doubling the carriageways. A series of roundabouts and junctions and seven new car parks capable of accommodating a total of around 15,000 vehicles will also be created or arranged. During the Ryder Cup it will not be possible to reach the club directly by private transport but a shuttle bus service will be set up which will connect the car parks to the Marco Simone.
In parallel, other works are continuing which were started by the municipality of Rome as early as 2008 for the enlargement of the Tiburtina and the neighboring streets. These construction sites had been halted several times over the years, but the current administration has promised to complete them before the event begins.
The Ryder Cup 2023 project has a total cost of approximately 229 million euros, all advanced by the State, and is developed over twelve years: from 2016 to 2027. In addition to the main tournament, the project includes 97 other events, including 12 editions of the Italian Open. The government granted the organizers an initial public loan of 60 million euros, but in order to award the tournament to Italy, the Ryder Cup Europe demanded that a bank guarantee be presented by the government for an additional 97 million euros to guarantee expenses. According to the project, this money should be fully covered by the proceeds from the sale of television rights and other income generated by all the events organized over the course of these twelve years.
To the initial 157 million euros of public investments, a further 72 million were added later, allocated to carry out the road reconstruction works. As regards this second part of the funds, 50 million were financed by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, while 22 million were made available by the Lazio Region.
According to estimates, the State will collect 109 million euros from taxes deriving from the activities of the Ryder Cup. The consultancy firm KPMG Advisory has also forecast an overall economic induced of around half a billion euros, but the real accounts cannot be done before a few years.