Despite the 91% increase in ticket prices from 2023, the tickets for the 2027 edition of the Ryder Cup sold out in just an hour. How could it not? This once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience will return to Ireland for the first time since 2006 and mark the 100th anniversary edition of the event at Adare Manor. That naturally makes more and more fans want to witness the rarity in person, but…. the pricing remains the sore point. While enough has been said (read: protested against) about it already, the Ryder Cup CEO has now stepped in with his argument for the pricing. 

“We’ve got very competitive price points for juniors, for people earlier in the week,” Kinnings told Ben Parsons of Today’s Golfer. “We’ve got a community day. You’re never going to please everyone, but the fact that the match day tickets in the Irish-exclusive window sold out in an hour, and the rest of them sold out within four hours, I think shows that hopefully we were going about it the right way.”

The match day tickets for the 2027 Ryder Cup began at $585 or €499. While that is cheaper than the huge $750 the PGA charged for the 2025 Ryder Cup in New York, it is still a massive jump. In 2023, the tickets were sold at $300 or €260 for the event in Rome. The price has almost doubled.

Fans hated the high prices for the 2025 Ryder Cup, but Irish spectators were still very excited for the Adare Manor release. According to the Ryder Cup website, more than 150,000 people pre-registered to buy tickets on a first-come, first-served basis. The window opened at 11 A.M. on April 24, 2026, and by noon, the tickets were already sold out. Practice-day and weekly ticket packages were reportedly gone within four hours as around 60,000 fans queued online at one point during the sale. Those who missed the opportunity to purchase them will have another shot in the General Window on June 3, 2026.

This is bad news for fans who hoped a boycott would drop the price. The fast sellout proves that people will still pay a lot, no matter the complaints. Irish fans defied critics by paying the premium rates for 2027 tickets.

Criticism from netizens gets disproven by the Irish locals

No one really took the pricing for Adare Manor well at first. European Ryder Cups had long carried the reputation of being more accessible than their American counterparts, which is why the sharp increase shocked many fans.

The internet reacted exactly as expected. Fans questioned whether the Ryder Cup was becoming too commercialized, while others compared the new rates to previous European editions. Comments ranged from, “Has the Ryder Cup been ruined by greed?” to fans recalling paying around €40 or €50 for practice rounds during the 2018 Ryder Cup in France.

The criticism did not just come from fans online either. Justin Rose’s longtime caddie Mark Fulcher called the prices “extortionate” on Instagram and wrote that sports were beginning to “bleed true fans dry.” Ryder Cup veteran Ian Poulter also agreed with Fulcher’s frustration, calling it “a sad day” for loyal golf supporters.

But despite the outrage, demand never really slowed. With 150,000 pre-registrations and tens of thousands entering the queue simultaneously, the Irish-exclusive sale closed rapidly after tickets sold out.

Kinnings defended the pricing by pointing to both the scale of the modern Ryder Cup and the added costs attached to hosting what organizers hope will be the biggest edition yet. He also stressed that Ryder Cup Europe reinvests its revenue back into the tour and the event itself rather than operating purely for profit.

“We did a lot of analysis,” Kinnings said. “The Ryder Cup can be mentioned as one of the great sporting events in the world. If you go and do the analysis of prices at those other big events, we know we’re reasonable.”

Kinnings also highlighted the lower-priced options attached to the week, including €89 practice-round tickets for Tuesday and Wednesday, €20 junior tickets, and the ‘SuperValu Community Day’ initiative for Irish residents. Ryder Cup Europe is reportedly expecting nearly one-third of the projected 250,000 spectators to come from the island of Ireland.

At least for now, the speed of the sellout has given organizers a strong response to the criticism, even if the debate around affordability is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.