The Pellucid Perspective - November 2019 - 2

The Old Course at St Andrews in Scotland is
considered the oldest golf course in the world
and commonly known as 'The Home of Golf.'

Snapshot Europe:
Slower "Golferexit" Than US
By Jim Koppenhaver

A

recent article caught my attention highlighting the findings from the 2019 KPMG Golf Advisory Practice's
Participation Report headlined, "Scotland loses another
7,500 registered golfers." Doing some quick math, I calculated
that comes out to about 3 days of losses in the US during each
of the recent years ('14-'16) when we dropped 1M+ golfers in
the NSGA surveys that we use for our State of the Industry
summary. Fortunately that rate of decline in the US has shallowed in '17 and '18 but the "Scottish panic" is but a drop in the
bucket compared to the adopted parent of golf (the US, given
that Scotland is the birthplace of golf ).
I thought it would be interesting and instructive however to
do a quick review of the Europe participation situation through
the eyes of an analyst vs. a journalist to see if the declines are
similar or different to the US and any key learnings. If this
piques your curiosity, I would recommend that you visit their site,
register and go through the "full Monty" of what they've captured, the headlines and methodology. What they've gamely attempted to do is capture annually, across the span of Europe's
diverse countries/markets, the golf member population. For reference, in Europe the majority of play is driven by memberships,
and doesn't include what they lovingly refer to as "nomads" who
are people who "play around" and pay fees per round at multiple
clubs during the year. For this quick tour of the Europe golf
member base, I've compiled the below table which will give us
the facts we need (for clarity and proper attribution, this is Pel-

2 The Pellucid PersPecTive

lucid's compilation of KPMG information but in the public domain, available to anyone who registers at their website):
'15
'18 #Chng %Chng Share Cum EUR
(Ks)
(Ks) '15-'18 '15-'18 of EUR
Share
661.8
645.2 -16.6 -2.5%
16%
16%
ENG
640.2
642.2
2.0
0.3%
16%
31%
GER
455.8
461.4
5.6
1.2%
11%
43%
SWE
407.6
412.7
5.1
1.3%
10%
53%
FRA
382.2
396.3
14.1
3.7%
10%
62%
NETH
277.8
269.5
-8.3 -3.0%
7%
69%
SPA
192.5
182.4 -10.1 -5.2%
4%
73%
IRE
199.2
180.3 -18.9 -9.5%
4%
78%
SCOT
ALL EUR 4,143.7 4,112.7 -30.0 -0.7%

In the above I'd call to your attention the following highlights:
*

*

England and Germany dominate the European golf
landscape as it relates to golfers, owning roughly 1/3 of
the continents' golfers with only a slight edge to the
Brits vs. Deutschland
The top 8 countries shown above represent the vast
majority of the golfer base. Not surprisingly, the larger
bedrock countries of the continent are represented but
the interesting exceptions are the Nordic countries'
representation in the Top 5 (Sweden & Netherlands)
which is somewhat counterintuitive given the climates
November 2019

PHOTO BY CSTRINGER / SHUTTERSTOCK

GOLF CONSUMER
BASE
https://www.golfbenchmark.com/
The Pellucid Perspective - November 2019

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