Mollie Cahillane | mollie@bigswingmedia.news

As this week's event goes fully car-free in the Netherlands, the LPGA and LET are already selling partnerships and tickets for Valhalla 2028. The numbers behind that confidence — and where they come from — tell a more complicated story than a simple Ryder Cup comparison

Before this year’s Solheim Cup is even over, the LPGA and Ladies European Tour (LET) are selling sponsorships and tickets for the one two years away.

The 20th edition of the event is underway at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands, and it’s the first “car-free” Solheim Cup on record — roughly 4,000 bikes and 60-plus buses standing in for the usual acreage of parking lot, moving fans and staff around the Dutch countryside instead.

The LPGA and the LET already have partnership packages on sale for the 2028 edition at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky, two years out, and tickets for that event go on sale Sept. 14, the Monday immediately after this year’s competition wraps. Selling that far ahead — commercially and on the business side — is a confidence play: a property monetizing its next chapter before finishing this one.

But is that confidence earned? The women’s event naturally draws comparisons to its men’s equivalent, the Ryder Cup — is the Solheim Cup closing the commercial gap, and if so, on what terms?

The Ryder Cup runs under a single, durable partnership between the PGA of America and Ryder Cup Europe, carries seven global sponsors including BMW, Hilton and Capgemini, and has reported sponsorship revenue growth of 153% between 2018 and 2023. The Solheim Cup has historically leaned on two global partners — Rolex and PING, which have bankrolled the event since 1990 but kept their names off the trophy.

Outside sports-marketing commentary has drawn a clean line between the two. In a 2024 column for Landmark Media, ex-IMG marketing and comms strategist Sarah Gwynn argued that the Solheim Cup’s ownership — split, in her framing, across the Solheim family, the LET, the LPGA and a rotating cast of host national federations — is the real reason it hasn’t landed the kind of transformative sponsor Barclays became for the Women’s Super League. Investment, she argued, could help the event “break the cycle.” It’s a reasonable theory for managing fragmented governance, but it’s also not quite how the people who run the event describe it.

The Ownership Myth

According to a person intimately familiar with the Solheim Cup’s commercial operations, the “LPGA/LET/host nation” federation three-way split runs more caricature than reality. The event itself is run jointly by the LPGA and the LET, with the LET bringing in host national federations when the Cup is played outside the U.S. That’s described internally as standard practice, consistent with how the LET runs much of its own global schedule, which includes national opens and federation partnerships across multiple continents. When the Solheim Cup lands stateside, as it will in Valhalla in 2028, no federation is involved.

The commercial architecture follows that same geography-first logic. Global partners that carry across every edition regardless of host — Rolex, Skyscanner and PING, still tied to the Solheim family more than three decades in — are sold jointly by the LPGA and LET. Local and regional deals are handled by whichever side is hosting: the LET, working through IMG, sells locally when the Cup is in Europe; the LPGA takes the lead when it’s in the U.S.

That amounts to two organizations dividing labor by geography, quite a different structure than the three-way fragmentation critique assumes, and a valid counterargument to a Barclays/WSL comparison.

Show Us the Money

Both sides disclose less about the financials than most business reporters would like, but we’ve managed to dig up some numbers. The Ryder Cup’s NBC/USA Network media rights extension runs through 2033 without a public dollar figure attached, though the broader initial deal through 2031 was widely reported as a 15-year, $440 million agreement (with NBC paying $55 million to the PGA of America for the U.S. media rights to each Ryder Cup). The Solheim Cup has no public or reported standalone broadcast rights valuation at all; it’s bundled into the LPGA’s tour-wide domestic rights package, the same way the Ryder Cup is bundled into its own.

In 2024, the last Solheim Cup year, the LPGA brought in a record $252 million in revenue in 2024, a gain of nearly $44 million from 2023. In events alone, the LPGA brought in more than $163 million in tournament revenue in 2024, an increase of more than $40 million year-over-year. In 2024, the LPGA also brought in nearly $56 million from television and media as well as another $22.1 million from corporate sponsorships.

On sponsorship, Adidas and Trackman joined the Solheim Cup this cycle. The LPGA describes this year's partner count as comparable to last cycle's, though it said it doesn't have direct dollar comparisons in hand since the LET runs this edition's commercial side — and declined to offer even a range for what a Solheim Cup partnership costs. The source close to the commercial side described the Solheim Cup as one of the biggest properties the LPGA sells, and London-based data and analytics firm GlobalData estimated that total 2023 Solheim Cup (the last time the event was held in Europe) sponsorship revenue was $5.16 million, with an average annual sponsor deal coming in at $343,000 to $344,000.

The firm reported three deals were over $500,000 a year (Rolex, Reale Seguros and Visit Costa Del Sol — the latter two are local Spanish sponsors tied to that host cycle only) — plus BMW at an estimated $400,000 a year. Any Ryder Cup figures are a mix of one outlet citing actual financial filings, a former PGA of America president's recollections, and analyst or government estimates — nobody currently running either event has put a number on the record.

What has moved, clearly, is attention: the 2024 Sunday singles drew 657,000 average viewers on NBC, more than double the prior cycle. Ticket pricing and revenue for this year are being held until after the event; the closest available comparison is 2026 grounds passes starting around €125 against 2025 Ryder Cup daily tickets that topped $750 at Bethpage — but again, different currencies, different markets, and not really an apples-to-apples number even before you adjust for either.

Follow the Bigger Money

The growth probably isn't coming from a structural fix, which raises the big question: what's really driving it? The likely answer sits above either event: Deloitte's annual women's sports forecast put the category's global revenue over $3 billion for the first time in 2026 (up from $1 billion in 2024), with sponsorship doing most of the lifting ($1.35 billion, including partnerships and merchandising). The LPGA's own sponsor base has more than doubled since 2019, past 1,200 active partners tour-wide, with sponsors reportedly seeing returns as high as 400% in media value. Remember, women under 35 are the fastest-growing demo in golf, according to the NGF.

Whatever the exact numbers, the direction is the same one lifting the Solheim Cup: a rising tide in women's sports sponsorship that has less to do with how any one event divides its commercial rights and more to do with where investors have decided the growth actually is.

The Road to Valhalla

The calendar itself is one of the strongest assets for future Solheim Cups. After the Netherlands, the event heads to Valhalla, a venue that’s already hosted a Ryder Cup and multiple PGA Championships — and a bet that its atmosphere translates. Europe gets it back in 2030, host still unannounced, with a U.S. return following in 2032, and the LPGA says venue news is forthcoming.

Selling partnership packages for the next edition two years out, with tickets following the day this year’s competition ends, is either high confidence or good salesmanship, though probably a combination of both, and a clear sign the property isn’t worried about stagnating growth.

“The sky's the limit for this property,” said the commercial source. “It's the rare opportunity to get to be a part of a team, and it's a team sport for a week, and you just see [the athletes’] personalities shine. Similarly, what we see on the men's side when they host the Ryder Cup every year, the passion that comes out among the fans, we expect the first tee on Friday to just be rocking and an incredible atmosphere, and we believe we can continue to grow from here. There's incredible runway in front of us with the Solheim Cup. It’s one of the biggest events in women's golf, and one of the biggest events in golf.”