What you may or may not know about golf!
Most golfers consider golf as a great recreational activity and most golfers also know that golf is Big Business.
How big can be difficult to comprehend. I have been digging into some facts about how big.
Here is some data illustrating how big.
The data is collected via the internet. Especially from The National Golf Federations home page, Statista.com, Wikipedia and more. Statistics from Europe and the rest of the world are presented on the internet sources by country and therefore difficult to put together. Therefore the following data are covering the US only.
So here you are
On US golf courses, the rounds of golf played annually is estimated to be 377,200,000 rounds.
These rounds are played on approximately 16,000 different golf courses.
That is, if equally distributed, 23,375 rounds per course.
There are about 24 million “traditional” or regular playing golfers in the United States.
If each golfer is using average 4 hours playing a round of golf, it means that US golfers in total are spending about 1,508,800,000 hours on the golf course.
That means that each golfer are spending about 63 hours a year on a golf course.
The “median-price” (close to average) for a round of golf based on the playing fee on these 16,000 courses is $49.
With 377 million rounds of golf, green fee revenue runs up to a total of $18,482,800,000 per year.
It means on average each golfer is then spending about $770 on green fees per year.
If the green fee was shared equally among the 16,000 golf courses each course would have an annual green fee revenue of about $17,998,750
Just to put it into a perspective: A round on Pebble Beach Golf Links for a non-resort guest costs $550, only $220 less than a golfer spends on green fee per year.
The other side
The revenue made by equipment producers in the US, that is producers of golf clubs and balls only, is estimated to be $2.9 billion. This figure include sales outside the US market.
In 2017 the number of golfers in the world was estimated to 32 million. It means that each golfer on average are spending around $91 per year on clubs and balls.
An estimated 1.2 billion balls are manufactured every year in the US. And 300 million of these are estimated to be lost in the US alone.
For simplicity: the average price of a box of 12 golf balls is about $24. Then US golfers are therefore spending 300 million x 2 = $600 million alone on lost balls.
With 24 million golfers in the US in means that on average each golfer have spent about $25 in lost balls or 12.5 balls.
August 2020, (in spite of or due to corona) was a record setting month for the golf equipment business in the US. In that month retail revenue was estimated to $331 million.
In spite of the facts that the average green fee revenue for a golf course is about $18 million per year, in according to the National Golf Federation the majority of golf courses are not making any profit, but are struggling to balance their accounts.
It is even worse for President Donald Trump. As of December 2016, Trump owned 17 golf courses in the United States and abroad. Over nearly two decades (as he reported in his 2000–2018 tax filings), these golf courses had combined losses of $315.6 million.
The question now is; why is it that so many people are spending so much money and time on this activity?
Next question: what is it that makes us golfers spending that kind of money and time on golf? I mean why and what are the benefit. Think about it. I will be back.
Your comments, questions and recommendations are welcome!
Wow, interesting numbers!!
It is amazing that US golfers in total are spending about 1,508,800,000 hours on the golf course.
Let’s suppose they need an average of 90 strokes for a round and that each swing, including preparation, takes 30 seconds, so they are swinging during 2700 seconds, 45 minutes. In every 4 hour round they have 3 hours and 15 minutes to think about other things. So all golfers together have a thinking capacity of about 1,225,900,000 hours, which is almost 140,000 years. Humanity originated in this order of magnitude of time. Just think what fantastic ideas can be developed in that time: solutions for poverty, inequality, crime, health problems including Corona vaccines etc.
Dear Finn, my question now is, why is it that globally half of this thinking capacity, 70,000 years, is used to vote for Donald Trump later this year?