The Ryder Cup, golf’s pre-eminent team competition between Europe and the United States, has won the Rights Holder of the Year Award at the prestigious UK Sponsorship Awards.

The Ryder Cup won for its highly acclaimed 2023 match in Rome, which saw the roll-out of an ambitious partner programme that set new records across the board for the event’s 37 partners.

Running for the past 30 years, the UK Sponsorship Awards honour effectiveness and excellence across all sectors of the sponsorship, partnership and brand activation industries. The award ceremony was held on 26th March 2024 at the London Marriott Grosvenor Square. The 2023 Ryder Cup was nominated for Rights Hoder of the Year alongside AEG Global Partnerships and the Victoria & Albert Museum. The trophy was collected by Partnership Director’s Hannah Dodds and Alice Horler, Ryder Cup Country Manager for Italy, James White.

A Worldwide Partner Programme, allowing brands to sponsor both teams and multiple matches in one agreement, was rolled out for Rome and gave brands a truly global reach. A total of seven Worldwide Partners were part of the commercial family for the event: Aon, BMW, Capgemini, Citi, DP World, Hilton, and Rolex.

Partner product integration formed a key part of the sponsorship mix. For technology and logistics partners, the Ryder Cup provides the ultimate proving ground for their products with 18 fields of play to connect, as opposed to one stadium, and over 20,000 concurrent mobile devices used per day. Capgemini, Hewlett Packard Enterprises and CDW were core to the technology fabric of the event.

The event’s ambitious hospitality programme saw 57,000 hospitality guests hosted during event week in a 79,000 sqft Partner Pavilion, with additional bespoke satellite pavilions for Worldwide Partners. Creative branded content formed another key strand of the programme, with 13 original partner content strands achieving 20million impressions and 7million views across Ryder Cup digital channels.

Speaking about the award win, Ryder Cup Executive Director Guy Kinnings said: “The 2023 Ryder Cup has been acclaimed as one of the greatest ever staged, and this included running our most ambitious partner programme yet. We worked hard to develop an activation programme that provided opportunities throughout the two-year cycle, and not just Ryder Cup week. The feedback we had from partners was superb, with record satisfaction scores, and Rome proved a truly iconic backdrop. We’re excited by the opportunities that the 2025 match in New York will afford our partners.”