It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a golf club. At least I imagine that is what Jane Austen would have said if she’d been writing social observations for a newspaper in 2024. Open Instagram at the weekend and you’ll find at least a dozen stories of boys you went to university with, losing their hair, swinging their arms somewhere in Hertfordshire and shouting things like “nice shot Hugo!”, “beautiful day” or, when things have gone wrong, “rats”. High-earners as young as their mid-twenties are now falling over themselves to spend their hard-earned cash not on smart shoes or high-end restaurants but on mallets and golf gloves. And Harry Styles is one of them — yes, really. The singer, who turned 30 this year, has reportedly joined the £92,000 a year Sunningdale Golf Club in Berkshire.
Where do those in the guilty party work to afford the status symbol du jour? Magic circle law firms like Clifford Chance, which recently announced it was raising trainee salaries to an eye-watering £150,000 per annum; or American rivals Kirkland and Ellis, who now award $50,000 bonuses for executive referrals alone. More still work in finance, where the median starting salary stands at £72,474 for the London area. It’s even higher at premium companies like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Lazard, where I found several of my sources for this piece.
It is them, the corporate newbies, who are cause for concern – the Benjamin Buttons of Mayfair and EC3; 25 going on 60. Why surrender their lives to golf? (And it is surrender – more on this later). Is it to get fit? It’s not exactly exerting. To look cool? Fat chance, unless your target audience is an OAP convention. To have fun? Tennis or football, I should think, offer more spice. I put all this to an engineer I know plays golf, who insists that it is indeed fun and that if you time your trip to Richmond Park Golf Club correctly (£20 for a tee mid-afternoon – make sure you hide the tinnies from staff), it is all worth it. By which he means “cheaper than a pub crawl”.
The golf course used to be where fashion went to die — but golf style has been reborn as a streetwear-adjacent riff on preppy style
Golf has exploded in popularity these past five years. The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews (R&A) reported in 2023 that the number of adult golfers playing worldwide had increased by 10 million since 2016. Research indicated there was already an upward trend pre-Covid, but lockdown boosted golf’s popularity considerably, with participation up 15 percent in 2023 from 34.5 million on-course players in R&A affiliated markets in 2020. The top five markets outside the US are in Japan (8.1 million adult players), Canada (5.6 million), South Korea (5.4 million) and the UK (3.4 million).
As with any trend, there’s money to be made. For a long time, the golf course was where fashion went to die; but under the watchful eyes of Manors Golf founders, Jojo Regan and Luke Davies, golf style has been reborn as a streetwear-adjacent riff on the preppy aesthetic inspired by Ralph Lauren. Their revenue is up 110 percent this year, with backers of the brand including the Tetra Pak heir, Magnus Rausing; Tom McFarland of Jungle; and the actor Nicholas Hoult. “Lots more people are playing golf, and a lot of that growth is being driven in the under 35 category,” Regan tells me. “As a sport is very, very competitive, and it gives the 26, 27 year-olds who used to play football but no longer have the muscular capacity to do so at a high level the opportunity to [spar] with their mates.”
Sorry, what? The average age of a Manchester City player is 26.4. What we are witnessing here is not the breakdown of muscular capacity but rather the breakdown of “age appropriate” logic: men in their twenties behaving like those in their fifties while those in their fifties do the hokey cokey at the office party. We are in an era where teenagers dress like their grandparents; doctors remodel our faces as if we’re made of play dough; and billionaires invest in longevity research in the hope that they will never die.
The story of golf’s popularity also tells another that is more sinister: about the gap between men and women in the workplace – one we thought was narrowing but, under the surface, isn’t. Camilla*, 26, is an analyst at one of the world’s most prestigious banks. Nearly all her male colleagues play golf– “with friends, colleagues and clients.” This is “a useful tool to schmooze a client” and “for internal networking”, she says –yet “there is no reason to think I wouldn’t be included if I too learnt how to play”. It’s more that male employees are at an advantage over women because “they are more likely to have played [golf] earlier in life,” Camilla explains.
Emily* works in Private Equity. Her company hosts a golf tournament each year for the team and top clients. “I’m not convinced anyone actually enjoys it,” she says. What draws people in is the allure. “It’s a big flex to brag about playing golf at the weekend because it’s a big reflection that you have your life together and your wife in order at home”. Moreover, it is “extremely unsocial” because it’s not “a casual hobby”. People “will dedicate their whole weekend to it – you have to actively opt into the golf lifestyle, and most women tend not to.” “I’ve never felt excluded from golf on the basis of my gender,” Emily goes on. “I actively self-exclude from it on a daily basis.”
Alice*, a former accountant, accepts more easily that people might “just enjoy golf”. “Most of the boys I worked with played golf on the weekends and went on golf holidays,” she says. What’s in it for the partners and the clients who play with them? “It’s about reclaiming that old boys’ club mentality,” says Katy*, a lawyer at a silver circle firm. On the surface, there’s never been a better time for women to be in corporate careers: and the relationship works both ways, with research showing that women overall make better investors and generate higher returns at financial firms (World Economic Forum). But the reality is more murky, and golf has survived as one of the untouchable weapons in the finance bro’s arsenal (today still, only 11 percent of FTSE 100 companies in the UK have female CEOs). “I do think [golf] meant I had some colleagues who spend more time with people more senior to me,” Alice says of her time in accounting. “And also noticed the male partners forged friendships through golf in a way the female partners didn’t.” “Golf also creates a huge advantage for British and American guys in particular,” Camilla adds. (And, going by the A&R’s research, those from South Korea, Japan and Canada too.)
The rise in golf’s popularity indicates a gap between men and women in the workplace — it is giving male employees a networking advantage
Should women simply join in? “You have to put a LOT of work in before it becomes remotely fun,” Emily says, “and I don’t think girls are as fussed [as boys].” It’s worth noting Emily is herself very sporty. “I exercise every day and play competitive netball and volley,” she tells me. When I asked a friend in her mid-forties – who’s enjoyed a highly successful career – how her generation perceives golf, her answer is: “as staggeringly naff”. She paints a dismal picture of “middle managers trying to ‘network’ on the golf courses of Surrey and Costa del Sol” and describes the whole thing as “too depressing for words”.
Perhaps golf’s most convincing attempt at a rebrand came in 2007 when Disney Channel took us to Lava Springs, the fictional country club owned by Sharpay and Ryan’s parents in High School Musical 2. It made golf glamorous and camp –everything it should want to be, and should be in 2024. Perhaps dialling up the sport’s staid elitism, as per the narrative espoused by its defenders, has been the wrong call. Golf and tragedy are indeed different things, though the words are, for better or worse, still used synonymously.
* Names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
