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Golf courses in Scotland will continue to close. 

As warnings from industry experts go, this is about as stark as it gets. 

The sport has been rocked in recent weeks by news that Hirsel, in the Scottish Borders town of Coldstream, and Torrance Park, near Motherwell, have locked their gates for good as the financial pressures of running a golf club became too much. 

And Chris Spencer, of the Scottish Golf & Club Managers Association, has told golfers to expect more.  

“The boom that came on the back of Covid is now well and truly gone,” he told bunkered.co.uk. “The economic pressures on people over the last 12 months or so have made people question, ‘Can I afford to pay my golf club subscriptions when I’m short of time and only looking to get out once a month?’ They just don’t get the value for it.”  

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Financial and time constraints of players, though, is just the start of the problem.  

“Costs within golf clubs are rising,” Spencer explained, “and I think a lot of golf club members don’t understand that.  

“My experience is that members don’t think that their club has the same pressures that they possibly have at home in terms of their gas and electric costs going up. Maybe they have some contents insurance going up, the cost of food and drink going up, the cost of petrol and diesel fluctuating left, right and centre. They might not have had a pay rise for a number of years.  

“Whereas if you look at that from a club perspective, especially on the staffing side, the minimum wage is going up by far more than inflation. So if minimum wages go up by, say, eight percent, but members average a five percent pay rise, where does that three percent balance come from?  

“So then clubs start digging into reserves. A private golf club has two main sources of income: members and visitors. Some members don’t like the visitors being there, but it’s the only way a lot of golf clubs can balance the books.  

“In an ideal world, member subscriptions would cover the day-to-day running costs of the club, with the visitor income being the extra that goes towards capital investments, improving facilities, and building up reserves.  

“But committees don’t like to put subs up more than they really feel they have to, and there will be a lot of golf club captains having very tough conversations with members to say, ‘This is what it has to happen if you want us to continue to invest in the facilities – and if we don’t, this is what happens.’  

“I’m aware of three golf clubs who have said, ‘Look, unless you help to bail us out, we might not be here.’ It is worrying times.”

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One such club is Kirkcaldy, an Old Tom Morris layout dating back to 1904, which is drawing up emergency plans to survive.

Brian Laing, the club’s captain, told Fife News: “Like many clubs across the country, Kirkcaldy is having to deal with significant rises in our operational costs, both across our course and within our clubhouse.

“We are proactively working with our membership to agree and implement changes in our operating model which will help us adapt and navigate through this period of significant rises.”

Spencer revealed a number of drastic measures clubs like Kirkcaldy have needed to take on in order to survive. 

“I know situations where the club manager has been let go because they can save a full-time salary,” he explained. “And they replace them with either a part-time secretary or by spreading the duties across the committee to save what might be 40 or 50,000 pounds a year. 

“Or maybe they close the clubhouse a couple of days a week.

“There is a lot of concern within the industry about how to get through this tough economic time.”


author headshot

Alex Perry is the Associate Editor of bunkered. A journalist for more than 20 years, he has been a golf industry stalwart for the majority of his career and, in a five-year spell at ESPN, covered every sporting event you can think of. He completed his own Grand Slam at the 2023 Masters, having fallen in love with the sport at his hometown club of Okehampton and on the links of nearby Bude & North Cornwall.

Associate Editor

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