“I don’t know what the f— we’re doing so badly.”
Those words belonged to Solheim Cup assistant captain Mel Reid, in a recent interview with Golf Channel’s Kira K. Dixon — and they were about a troubling trend. The television ratings of the Solheim Cup 2026 in the United States were almost half of what they had been for the last European Solheim Cupjust three years earlier.
Reid’s comments, which appeared on the couple Silence please! podcastunderlined the biggest problem facing the Solheim Cup, and women’s golf more broadly: Without TV support, the sport cannot hope to continue to grow its revenues, and without greater revenues, the sport cannot continue to grow at the rate it would like.
“(The Solheim Cup) is literally one of the biggest sporting events we’ve attended all year, men or women,” Reid said. “This is where I feel frustrated because I feel that the players provide the entertainment, the players provide everything that we ask of them.”
For years, critics of the LPGA suggested the explanation behind it The squalor of women’s golf TV viewing was entertainment. The underlying problem with all of women’s golf, the argument went, was that the tournaments and the players weren’t very interesting. Bland tournaments and players meant that fans were not incentivized to watch. And no fans meant that broadcast partners had no financial incentive to put tournaments on television. Less hours on TV meant less money from TV partners. Less money from TV partners meant less money from sponsors. Less money from sponsors meant lower salaries, marketing budgets, fan outreach programs and eventually smaller women’s golf.
This argument was entirely logical, but the Solheim Cup threw it straight out the window. The Solheim Cup was entertainment His players – especially Carlota Ciganda and Jennifer Kupcho – they were exciting The tournament was a source of incredible drama and intrigue for several days in a row in the world of golf. Yet TV ratings weren’t just poor, they were moving in the wrong direction by orders of magnitude.
“Even our budgets, what we can do with the team room, what we can do with the locker room, and the golf course, it’s wild for me that it’s such a significant change (from men),” Reid siad. “Why is that? Why aren’t we closing in on that gap for a product that is, in my opinion, sensational?”
The truth is that Reid’s questions elude easy answers, although it is not particularly difficult to discover some of the weaknesses in the approach of the Solheim Cup, especially in terms of attracting a large American sports audience. For one thing, the Solheim Cup is scheduled for the first Sunday of the NFL season and the second Saturday of the college football season — a weekend that borders on a national holiday for a large portion of the American sports audience. For another, the marketing efforts behind the Cup were microscopic next to the planet-blotting goal of the Ryder Cup. For another, the US team was light on superstar talent outside of Nelly Korda and equally light on the kind of great stories and controversies that help maintain the dialogue of the sport. And no, it probably did not help that the Solheim Cup elected to abandon its cadence in 2023 – when it appeared a week before the men’s Ryder Cup in Rome, allowing easy synergies between the men’s and women’s games and reaching the audience at a time when team golf was at the forefront for many fans.
But the Cup was everything critics said it wouldn’t be. It was fascinating. Has been tensed. Both sides played on their ability to talk trash, punches, punches, punches. The good guys were pesky underdogs, and the bad guys were an established dynasty. The ingredients were there to make a fascinating TV stew, and it just… didn’t get done.
For Reid and the rest of women’s golf, it’s a question that will linger well into the quiet part of the golf calendar. When the Solheim Cup returns to Europe again in 2030, the sport would be wise to have an answer.
“The fact that I was a viewer for the f-ing Solheim Cup is really heartbreaking for me,” Reid said. “I feel like we’re going backwards again.”
