A members club running a global event: the oddest arrangement in sport

An unusual owner

Most major sporting events are run by federations, by commercial promoters or by bodies created specifically to organise them. A private members club running an event of global scale is an anomaly that survives from a period when clubs organised everything. The club created the championship for its own members and simply never relinquished control as the event outgrew the original purpose.

That continuity is the source of the event's distinctiveness, since the decisions are made by an institution with no obligation to grow. An organisation that does not have to expand can make choices that a commercial owner would find impossible to justify.

Why the ownership structure matters

A club answerable to its members can take decisions with a horizon measured in decades rather than in reporting periods. Investments in land, in facilities and in surfaces that produce no immediate return are straightforward under that structure and difficult under most others. The absence of external shareholders removes the pressure to maximise revenue from every available surface and every available minute.

That is why the event carries far less visible advertising than comparable competitions and has not sold naming rights to anything significant. The restraint is an ownership consequence rather than a moral position, which is worth stating plainly.

The costs of the arrangement

A private club is not accountable to the wider sport, and its decisions can be criticised without any mechanism existing to challenge them. Membership is limited and its criteria are not public, which makes the institution opaque in a way that attracts consistent criticism. Revenue distribution is at the club's discretion, and while substantial sums go into the sport, the decisions about how are not made openly.

Defenders point to the results, which is an argument about outcomes rather than about process and does not satisfy anybody focused on the latter. The tension between effective stewardship and unaccountable control runs through many sporting institutions and is unusually visible here.

What a federation-run event looks like instead

Events run by national federations must balance the championship against every other obligation the federation carries, including grassroots funding and domestic competition. That produces different priorities, often involving greater commercial exploitation of the event because the revenue is needed elsewhere. It also produces greater accountability, since a federation has members, elections and a duty to explain what it has done with the money.

Neither model is obviously better, and the sport contains examples of both operating successfully alongside each other. Comparing them is the clearest way to see how much of an event's character comes from its ownership rather than its sport.

Why the arrangement persists

Nobody has the standing to change it, since the club owns the land, the name and the event outright rather than by delegation. The sport's governing bodies benefit from the event's success and have no incentive to pick a fight they would be unlikely to win. Players benefit from the prize money and the prestige, which removes the most plausible source of pressure for structural change.

An arrangement that suits everybody with the power to alter it will not be altered, whatever its theoretical peculiarities. It survives as a working example of how sport looked before federations and companies took over the organising of it.