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The days leading up to the Ryder Cup are notorious for being slow and boring on the media side of things, so it should be no surprise that a major topic of discussion on Monday and Tuesday has been the topic of players being paid to play. Why is it happening now? What makes it a hot topic in 2025? Let’s dive in, Q&A style, and cover the basics of this thorny issue.
Give me the basics first: What changed this year?
For the first time ever, the American players are being paid directly for their participation in the Ryder Cup. They’ll make a total of $500,000, with $300,000 of that money going to a charity of their choice, and $200,000 going to them as a “stipend.”
Hasn’t the charity component been a part of this for a long time?
Yes. Starting in 1999, the PGA of America, which runs the event on the U.S. side, began giving the American players $200,000 to a charity of their choice. That number remained the same all the way up through the last Ryder Cup in Rome.
OK, so why did it change now?
Now you’re asking the right questions, my friend. And this is where it gets complicated. Let’s start with Patrick Cantlay and his hat.
Oh yes, I remember this. He wouldn’t wear a hat in Rome, right? Did that have something to do with money?
Well, that’s what was reported. On Saturday in Rome, Sky Sport’s Jamie Weir fired off this tweet:
Understand from several sources that the US team room is fractured, a split led predominantly by Patrick Cantlay.
Cantlay believes players should be paid to participate in the Ryder Cup, and is demonstrating his frustration at not being paid by refusing to wear a team cap.— Jamie Weir (@jamiecweir) September 30, 2023
It became a massive story, even more so because the actual Cup wasn’t that competitive. That afternoon, in a match that would become infamous when Cantlay holed a winning putt on 18 and his opponent Rory McIlroy later went wild on Bones Mackay in the parking lot, fans gave it to Cantlay, waving their hats in the hair and chanting things like “hats off to your bank account!” to the tune of “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys.
However, Cantlay and the entire U.S. team has steadfastly denied that there was any fracture in the team room, or that Cantlay was protesting not being paid. That continued right up until this Tuesday, when Cantlay said, “Like I’ve said a million times, the hat didn’t fit last year, and this year we worked with them to make sure we had one, and we got one, so we’re good.”
Are Americans like Cantlay telling the truth? Was Weir’s story wrong?
All we can say is what’s happened since. As Joel Beall noted in his story about the players being paid this year, Xander Schauffele’s father Stefan said pretty quickly after the Ryder Cup that a “meaningful conversation” was happening, and there were even reports that Schauffele himself was “threatened with dismissal” over the player benefit agreement that year.
And then, of course, there was obviously a push from the American side to be paid more, and it came to fruition at Bethpage. As U.S. captain Keegan Bradley put it this week, “they wanted to bring the Ryder Cup into the present day.”
So we can’t say with any certainty what was happening with Cantlay and his hat, but it’s definitely the case that players wanted to be paid, and advocated strongly enough that the PGA of America made it happen when presumably they would have been content with the status quo in the absence of that pressure, and keeping the extra $3.6 million they now have to part with.
Had this ever happened before?
Here’s what Tiger Woods said about efforts to make it happen in 1999, just before the PGA of America began allocating $200,000 in charity money:
“Well, I would have to say that going back to my playing days, we had the same conversation back in ’99 and it was … we didn’t want to get paid, we wanted to give more money to charity, and the media turned it around against us and said we want to get paid…the Ryder Cup itself makes so much money, why can’t we allocate it to various charities? And what’s wrong with each player, 12 players getting a million dollars and the ability to divvy [it] out to amazing charities that they’re involved in that they can help out?”
What are the arguments for and against the players being paid?
We’ll try to do this in as few words as possible, while acknowledging the fact that we’re dealing in pretty broad strokes here:
—The argument against players being paid is that they should be happy and proud to represent their country in such a historic event, that they’re already rich and asking for more money is being greedy and ungrateful. Brandel Chamblee effectively represented this side on the Golf Channel, saying, “Asking to be paid for the privilege of representing your country is just antithetical to the honour of it.”
—The argument for players being paid that the prestige of this event is entirely dependent on their participation, the PGA of America makes tens of millions of dollars in profit, and based on the principle that people should be fairly compensated for their labour, it borders on ridiculous to expect star athletes to pay for free. The money flows in because of them, so why should they be the only ones who aren’t paid?
(For what it’s worth, I fall into the latter camp.)
Charity seems to be a big part of this whole narrative. What are the Americans doing with the money?
Not only is charity a big part of it, but there seems to be a push to almost shame the Americans into saying they’re giving it all to charity.
“I think for everyone it’s a personal decision,” Keegan Bradley said on Monday. “A lot of guys aren’t comfortable sharing what they’re going to do with their money, but we’re going to donate.”
On Tuesday, Cantlay and Schauffele confirmed they’d be donating all the money to charity, and Scottie Scheffler seemed to imply as much. None of them are being specific, but it does seem to be a loose consensus that even the $200,000 “stipend” will be headed to charitable causes, which effectively means that for most players, the “payment” associated with the Ryder Cup simply went from $200,000 to charity to $500,000.
Even the way the players talk about it, you can tell they feel compelled to frame it not as making money they rightfully earn, but as a chance to give back. Schauffele himself called it “an opportunity to do some good” and “to impact some of the local communities and charities here.”
We keep talking about the Americans. What about the Europeans?
Ah, well! The European players do not make any money from the Ryder Cup, and Luke Donald told Sky Sports this week that they actively rejected the idea. Here’s his quote:
“This [payment] came up and I wanted to get ahead of it and talk to the 12 guys in Rome when it looked like the US were going to do something different with payments…every one of them was just like ‘we don’t want to get paid – this isn’t a week to get paid’. We have such a strong purpose in this team and what we play for…to be honest, we reinvest some of that money back into the experience of these guys. I feel like if you have those experiences that you remember for the rest of your life, that’s worth more than a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the back of your pocket…for me, I was very proud of the guys. The ideals of how this Ryder Cup was set up back in the 1920s by Samuel Ryder and I think he would have been proud too.”
Ooh, that seems like a shot across the bow of the Americans at best, and a direct criticism at worst, no?
Yes, it’s clear Donald and his charges don’t approve of the Americans asking for money, and the directness of this quote also makes it seem like he wants them to know it.
How do we feel about this finger-wagging superiority from our European friends?
Well, a lot depends how you feel about the debate in general. If, like me, you think it’s only logical for players to be compensated fairly, Donald’s quote feels a bit sanctimonious. If you think there’s an aura around the Ryder Cup and that it’s gauche to want to be paid (even while the governing bodies are making big money), then you probably agree with him.
Does anything make the European situation different on a practical level?
There is the fact that the DP World Tour, the PGA of America’s organisational counterpart on the European side, has historically depended for its survival on Ryder Cup profits in a way the PGA of America does not, so in one sense, you could look at the European refusal to accept money as its own kind of charity, directed at their tour. The “strategic alliance” between the PGA Tour and DP World Tour has somewhat mitigated this reality for the Europeans, but the precedent has long been set.
There’s also this—Donald said that they “reinvest some of that money back into the experience of these guys,” and while the specifics of how that money funnels back to the Euro experience aren’t clear, you could fairly interpret that as a kind of payment.
Where is this going from here?
Probably nowhere. The money may go up incrementally on the American side as the years go on, but it feels like this story has reached a natural conclusion. The Americans are satisfied now that they’re being paid, and the Europeans have somewhat painted themselves into a principled corner from which it would be hard to escape. There’s enough juice to this story to produce some strong opinions over the next few days, but even those look likely to fade in intensity now that a new status quo, on both sides, has been established.
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Main Image: Jamie Squire
