Sport and tourism

Golf, the Ryder Cup project continues with the Italian Open at Argentario

From 26 to 29 June, the main tricolour golf event comes to Tuscany, a stage in the golf development plan that will end in 2027

by Marco Bellinazzo

22 June 2025

3' min read

Key points

Great Golf in Tuscany
The Ryder Cup project
The Ryder event budget

3' min read

The 82nd edition of the Italian Open, part of the 2025 DP World Tour calendar, will be played from 26 to 29 June at the Argentario Golf Club in Grosseto. It will be the second time in Tuscany 42 years after German Bernhard Langer's victory at Florence's Ugolino Golf Club in 1983. The tournament will have a prize pool of $3 million and has been included among the "European Swing" events.

Great Golf in Tuscany

'We are proud to have obtained the organisation of the 82nd edition of the Italian Golf Open in Tuscany,' emphasised Regional Council President Eugenio Giani. 'This is a great event that generates sports tourism, with the presence of great champions.

Giani took the opportunity to thank Franco Chimenti, 'a man of great prestige in the sporting world who recently passed away, for many years president of the Italian Golf Federation, who so much wanted this edition of the Italian Open to be held at the Argentario Golf Club and in Tuscany'.

'In the wake of the Rome 2023 strategy,' he added, 'when our country organised the Ryder Cup, in order to keep the international appeal of golf in Italy high, it was decided to organise the 2024 edition of the Italian Open in Emilia-Romagna and this year's edition in Tuscany. Tuscany plays an important role at the national level, with the federation deciding to spend four million euro of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan funds to build the federal centre in Cavriglia, where a sports park that will regenerate the entire area is being created. At Argentario there is this beautiful structure that is being implemented in view of the Italian Open and for this, as the region of Tuscany, we have made 500 thousand euro available as a special contribution'.

The Ryder Cup Project

In fact, the 2023 Ryder Cup Project was born with a view to sustainability with a total cost of 157 million over a 12-year period, from 2016 to 2027, linked to 37 major events distributed across the country. Against a Government loan of 60 million (plus 97 million in surety), the business plan foresees a fiscal return for the State of 109 million. The agreement with the advisor Infront, for the concession of marketing and television rights, is worth 41 million, while another 56 million will come from the increase in the number of members, from further revenues from sponsors, suppliers and television rights.

Kpmg in 2016, the year of the assignment of the US-European challenge to Italy, estimated the direct and indirect impacts resulting from the organisation of the 2023 Ryder Cup and related events in the period 2016-2027 at over EUR 500 million (to be exact, EUR 277.4 million for direct impacts and around EUR 236 million for indirect impacts).

The balance of the Ryder event

In 2023, the Italian Ryder Cup recorded a total of 271,191 spectators, with an average of 45,865 per day over the six (of which only three were competition matches) that characterised the event. The balance of the Italian Ryder Cup, held in Rome in 2023, was defined as 'extraordinary' by Franco Chimenti, then President of the Italian Golf Federation, thanks also to record numbers relating to an economic induced activity of 262 million euro, of which 72 million were spent by spectators for consumption.

Hosting the Ryder Cup obviously had costs and little immediate return as the sale of TV rights and international sponsorship was centralised. Revenues from which the organising country is excluded, as well as from ticket sales. However, as Chimenti (who passed away in October last year) made clear in 2o24, it was a long-term investment, producing infrastructural improvements in the capital area that hosted the event and a legacy for golf and sports tourism in the Peninsula.

"We invested in the future, despite the fact that we knew that the demands of Ryder Cup Europe were high," explained the former federal number one. Federgolf supported part of the necessary investments with its own funds. When all is said and done, the expenditure was significantly lower than that envisaged in the bid budget: 138 million euro against the 159 million hypothesised. It was said that we would call on the EUR 97 million state guarantee provided for the organisation, yet we did not call in a single euro. By 2027, when the Ryder Cup project comes to an end, the federal accounts will be consistent with the approved budget plans'.