The Solheim Cup’s bewildering TV ratings elude easy answers

“I don’t know what the f— we’re doing so wrong.”

Those words belonged to Solheim Cup assistant captain Mel Reid, in a recent interview with Golf Channel’s Kira K. Dixon — and they were addressing a concerning trend. The Solheim Cup’s 2026 television ratings in the United States were nearly half of what they’d been for the last European Solheim Cup, just three years earlier.

Reid’ comments, which appeared on the pair’s Quiet Please! podcast, underscored the bigger issue facing the Solheim Cup, and women’s golf more broadly: Without TV support, the sport cannot hope to continue growing its revenues, and without bigger revenues, the sport cannot continue to grow at the rate that it would like to.

“[The Solheim Cup] is literally one of the greatest sporting events that we get to witness all year, men or women,” Reid said. “This is where I get frustrated because I do feel like the players are delivering the entertainment, the players are delivering everything that we’re asking them for.”

For years, critics of the LPGA suggested the explanation behind women’s golf’s paltry TV viewership was entertainment. The issue underlying all of women’s golf, the argument went, was that the tournaments and players just weren’t very interesting. Bland tournaments and players meant that fans weren’t incentivized to watch. And no fans meant 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 paychecks, marketing budgets, fan outreach programs and, eventually, a smaller women’s golf.

This argument was entirely logical, but the Solheim Cup tossed it directly out the window. The Solheim Cup was entertaining. Its players — particularly Carlota Ciganda and Jennifer Kupcho — were thrilling. The tournament was a source of incredible drama and intrigue for multiple days in a row in the golf world. And yet the 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 to me that it is such a significant change [from the men],” Reid siad. “Why is that? Why are we not closing in that gap for a product that is, in my opinion, sensational?”

The truth is that Reid’s questions elude easy answers, even it’s not particularly hard to spot some of the weaknesses in the Solheim Cup’s approach specifically as it related to attracting a major American sports audience. For one thing, the Solheim Cup was scheduled for the first Sunday of NFL season and second Saturday of college football season — a weekend bordering on a national holiday for large chunks of the American sports-watching audience. For another, marketing efforts behind the Cup were microscopic next to the planet-blotting scope of the Ryder Cup. For another, the U.S. team was light on superstar talent outside of Nelly Korda and equally light on the kind of big stories and controversies that help to keep the sport’s dialogue going. And no, it probably didn’t help that the Solheim Cup elected to ditch its cadence in 2023 — when it appeared one week before the men’s Ryder Cup in Rome, allowing for easy synergies between the men’s and women’s games and reaching the audience during a time when team golf was at the forefront for many fans.

But the Cup was all the things the critics said it wouldn’t be. It was fascinating. It was tense. Both sides were playing up their trash-talking, fist-pumping, spine-tingling ability. 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.

For Reid and for the rest of women’s golf, it’s a question that will linger well into the quiet portion of the golf calendar. By the time the Solheim Cup returns to Europe again in 2030, the sport would be wise to have an answer.

“The fact that’s what the viewership was for the f—ing Solheim Cup is actually really heartbreaking to me,” Reid said. “I feel like we’re going backwards again.”