Mollie Cahillane | mollie@bigswingmedia.news

Ask Greg Norman whether Vietnam’s golf boom is the next LIV — another sport reshaped by a sovereign wealth fund with a point to prove — and you’ll get an answer before you even finish the question.

“No, no, no, no, no. [They’re] diametrically opposed,” Norman, who serves as Vietnam’s official Tourism Ambassador, told Big Swing Media. “One is not even close to being related to the other.”

It’s a fair question, since the Shark knows better than almost anyone what state-directed capital can do to a golf property, having spent years as commissioner of the tour built on Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Vietnam’s golf numbers, on their face, look like the kind of growth that comes with government backing: golf tourism revenue exceeded $1 billion in 2025, according to Vietnam’s National Tourism Administration (VNAT), up from $600 million in 2022. It makes up 8% to 10% of Vietnam’s total tourism revenue, and its trajectory is in line with the 200% increase in golf course development Norman said has followed since the market began rapidly expanding in 2014. 

But according to Norman and Chris Campbell, president of Greg Norman Golf Course Design (GNGCD) and Norman’s right-hand man, the money behind Vietnam’s build-out is a fairly ordinary (if unusually fast-moving) emerging-market growth story: local developers, foreign capital arriving as partners and a government that thinks golf is worth the paperwork. Today, Vietnam has around 80 courses, a significant gain from the 66 it had just two years ago in 2024. GNGCD alone has 14 courses under contract in Vietnam and four currently under construction — a pipeline that reflects just how fast the market is moving.

A region in flux

Vietnam’s golf demand surge didn’t spring from a vacuum — golf’s popularity has been accelerating unevenly throughout the region, and Korea shows both halves of that story at once.

It’s still, in Norman’s words, “number two in the world with golf popularity now… I think they’ve nipped Japan.” But size and momentum aren’t the same thing: according to the Korea Golf Course Business Association, nationwide rounds played peaked at 50.8 million in 2022, then declined three straight years — 47.72 million in 2023, 47.41 million in 2024 and 46.41 million in 2025 — even as the number of operating courses grew from 514 to 524 over the same span. A large, mature golfer base is cooling off at home just as rising costs push more of those golfers to look beyond Jeju Island for cheaper rounds abroad — precisely the demand Vietnam is poised to catch.

Japan, in Norman’s telling, is a market one stage further down the same curve. A 1980s golf boom in the country led to investment pouring into Australian course construction; now, many of those Japanese courses built 35 to 40 years ago need renovation, and GNGCD is all too happy to step up to the plate. 

Vietnam, by contrast, is still in the land-grab phase, but even within Southeast Asia it’s not the leader. “Thailand’s definitely got miles ahead of Vietnam just in terms of establishment with golf,” Campbell said, calling it the region’s clear frontrunner. 

Singapore, he said, has built the best blend of tourism and domestic play, helped by an outsized expat population anchored by its role as a financial and maritime hub. Vietnam’s status, in Campbell’s words, is “the newcomer on the scene” — closing the gap quickly, helped by its own expat wave, particularly Australians, which is positively affecting a lot of the golf courses the company builds and operates. 

Norman doesn’t see a ceiling on regional demand overall, pointing to Asia-Pacific’s roughly two-thirds share of world population and an aging, increasingly wealthy demographic with time and money for golf travel. “I don’t see it slowing down… outside of another pandemic or a [global financial crisis] or something like that.”

Follow the money

If the money isn’t coming from a sovereign wealth fund, then who’s backing the investment? Mostly, Campbell said, from Vietnam itself. 

"Most of the developments we've done are [with] Vietnam developers," he said. BRG [Banking, Real Estate and Golf] is the clearest example, with roughly a dozen courses to its name and, per Campbell, one of the country's largest development footprints. Foreign capital shows up, but as a partner rather than a controlling force: GNGCD's early BRG Da Nang project was financed through an Australian investment partnership, one of the first of its kind in the country. "We've seen Vietnam really create a lot of diversity in their investment platform from other countries," Campbell said, “and I think that's a big part of what's driving the growth today." 

The government's role has been procedural rather than financial, according to Campbell — but no less consequential. A dedicated vetting and permitting division out of Hanoi has spent five to seven years refining how it evaluates projects, and it shows: "Almost every golf course that's been built in the last 10 years in Vietnam is of extremely high quality. You would be hard-pressed to find another country in the world that is producing the quality of golf that Vietnam is today."

Norman and Campbell's relationship with Vietnam dates back to 2005 — "you're going back 21 years," as Norman puts it — and the early years were spent convincing officials, up to the prime minister, that golf was an economic development tool rather than a rich person's amenity. "This has a forward-reaching effect from employment to economics to hospitality to education," Norman said. "It took multiple, multiple sessions with high-ranking officials... to get them to understand this blueprint opportunity."

One overlooked beneficiary of that shift: golf's equipment and maintenance supply chain. "The OEMs, like the Toros and the Jacobsens of the world, and those Rain Birds of the world" have found a market they "probably never even thought about 25 years ago," Norman said — alongside cart makers like E-Z-GO and Yamaha.

The one constraint anyone named is the real estate cycle that so much golf development there is bundled with — not land or labor, which Norman said are cheap and abundant in Vietnam. "There has been some fluctuation in the real estate market," Campbell said. "We've seen it affect the golf business as it does everywhere in the world... how long that's going to sustain is anybody's guess." It's a caveat worth remembering the next time someone cites the Vietnam government and industry stakeholders’ 200-courses-by-2030 target as a foregone conclusion.

Both men consider that target realistic. "I think it's very feasible," Norman said, pointing to the track record since 2014. Campbell credits the government's vetting apparatus directly: consistent oversight, he argues, is what's allowed volume and quality to rise together rather than trading off against each other, helped along by a growing domestic golfer base. Nearly every first-tier course now carries an academy, and cities like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang have solid membership rolls, giving courses a revenue base that doesn't evaporate in the off-season or during the next external shock.

What’s next: tournaments, a bigger wildcard and the rise of China

Two Asian Tour events have already been played at GNGCD courses in Vietnam, and Norman facilitated a significant investment into the Asian Tour to help promote the region’s growth. Campbell wouldn’t be surprised to eventually see a DP World Tour — or even a PGA Tour — event in the country. 

Norman, characteristically, has a bigger ask: that the strategic alliance between the Asian Tour, the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour treats Asia-Pacific’s growth as a genuine opportunity rather than a satellite market, given what he’s personally witnessed playing and promoting golf across the region since the late 1970s. 

“I just hope through the lens of this tri-party agreement, they do recognize that opportunity, and they do bring further growth, development opportunities through bringing the best players in the world there,” said Norman. “I will go to my grave supporting that, defending that, and instilling the values that are in there, because it is there. I've seen it, no matter whenever I played anywhere, I saw the enthusiasm for golf over the decades, and it hasn't waned one bit.”

The bigger swing factor for the region, though, is China. Beijing has maintained a moratorium on new golf course construction for years, a policy Norman watched take hold after early involvement in Chinese golf development that ran from Hainan Island to Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou (he later served as an advisory coach to China's Olympic golf team for the 2016 Rio Games). Now, he said, there are "rumblings" — embassy conversations, calls from senior government officials in the region — that the door could crack open again, spurred partly by what other countries, Vietnam foremost among them, have proven is possible. "That'll only light up the golfing world," Norman said, "from manufacturing to OEMs to everything across the board, as China opens up again."   

We’re not going to attempt to predict that timeline, but it does serve as a measurement to the scope of what’s underway. Other countries in similar latitudes, per Norman, are already studying Vietnam as a case study in what a golf-friendly economy can build in roughly a decade, once a government decides golf counts as infrastructure.