Somebody in your group chat is going to say it this week. The Presidents Cup is just the Ryder Cup with worse commercials.
He is wrong, and it is going to take you about four minutes to prove it.
Both events are twelve men a side playing match play for a trophy and no paycheck. That is where the sameness stops. Different opponents, different number of matches, different math on Sunday, different reason for existing in the first place, and one very specific difference in how the captains set the matchups that makes the Presidents Cup quietly more fun to watch on a Wednesday afternoon.
Here is the whole thing, straight, before the first tee shot goes off at Medinah on Thursday.
The Short Answer, For People Who Are Already Bored
The Ryder Cup is the United States against Europe. The Presidents Cup is the United States against everybody else on earth who is not European.
The Ryder Cup happens in odd years. The Presidents Cup happens in even years. That is why there is one in 2026 and there is not the other, and it is why half of golf spent last week typing the wrong tournament into a search bar.
The Ryder Cup is older, louder, and meaner. The Presidents Cup is younger, friendlier, and far more lopsided. Everything else is detail, and the detail is the good part.
Who Actually Plays
The Ryder Cup started in 1927 at Worcester Country Club in Massachusetts, funded by an English seed merchant named Samuel Ryder who liked golf enough to buy it a trophy. For the first fifty years it was the United States against Great Britain and Ireland, and the United States won so routinely that the whole thing was in danger of becoming a ceremony instead of a contest. In 1979 they opened the other side up to all of continental Europe, and the event turned into what it is now.
The Presidents Cup started in 1994, and it started for a very practical reason. By the early nineties a huge share of the best players alive were not American and not European. Greg Norman, Nick Price, Vijay Singh, a young Ernie Els. All of them ineligible for the only team event that mattered, all of them stuck watching it on television every other September. So the PGA Tour built them a cup of their own.
That is still the qualification line today. If you are from Europe you play the Ryder Cup. If you are from anywhere else outside the United States, which means Australia, South Africa, Japan, Canada, Korea, Colombia, you are on the International team. The International flag has five gold stars on it, one for each continent that can send a player.
Both teams are twelve players. Both are built the same way this year, six who qualify automatically on points and six the captain picks himself. For 2026 that gave Brandt Snedeker a United States team led by Scottie Scheffler, with Cameron Young, Wyndham Clark, Sam Burns, Russell Henley and Collin Morikawa qualifying outright, and Xander Schauffele, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, Chris Gotterup, Jacob Bridgeman and Jackson Koivun added as picks. Geoff Ogilvy's International side qualified Adam Scott, Hideki Matsuyama, Ryan Fox, Min Woo Lee, Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim, then picked Sungjae Im, Corey Conners, Nick Taylor, Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Nico Echavarria and Ryo Hisatsune.
The Format Difference Nobody Explains Properly
This is the part that actually changes how the weekend feels, so it is worth thirty seconds.
The Ryder Cup is three days and 28 matches. Friday and Saturday each get four foursomes and four four-ball, morning and afternoon, which means only eight of the twelve players are out there in any given session and four guys sit. Sunday is twelve singles. A team needs 14.5 points out of 28 to win it.
The Presidents Cup is four days and 30 matches. Thursday is five four-ball. Friday is five foursomes. Saturday doubles up with four four-ball in the morning and four foursomes in the afternoon. Sunday is twelve singles, same as the Ryder Cup. A team needs 15.5 points out of 30.
Two things fall out of that. First, the Presidents Cup gives you an extra day of golf, which is the entire reason it is a better tournament to have on in the background at work. Second, because the Thursday and Friday sessions run five matches instead of four, ten of the twelve are playing, so fewer guys spend the day carrying a water bottle. Every player has to get into at least one match before Sunday singles. That used to be two matches until they relaxed it in 2019.
If you have ever wondered what foursomes and four-ball actually mean, here is the whole vocabulary lesson. Four-ball is what you already play on Saturday morning, everybody hits their own ball and the team takes the better score. Foursomes is alternate shot, one ball between two men, which is the most stressful format in golf and the reason partners stop speaking to each other by the sixth hole. You have played both. You just call them best ball and the thing you refuse to do.
What Happens On A Tie Is Not The Same
This one costs people money in bets every couple of years.
In the Ryder Cup, 14-14 does not mean a shared trophy. It means whoever won it last time keeps it. The defending team retains the cup on a tie, which is why a Ryder Cup holder can play for a draw and a challenger genuinely cannot.
In the Presidents Cup, 15-15 means exactly what it sounds like. The two teams share the cup outright. It has happened once, in 2003 at Fancourt in South Africa, when Tiger Woods and Ernie Els went to a sudden death playoff to settle it and ran out of daylight after three holes. Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, captaining against each other, agreed on the spot to call it even and split the thing. It is still the most civilized ending any golf tournament has ever had.
The Captains Draft In Public, And It Rules
Here is the difference almost nobody knows, and it is the best one.
Ryder Cup captains set their lineups blind. Each captain hands in his order to officials by a deadline, without knowing a thing about what the other side is doing, and the matchups get read out at the ceremony. You control your own order and you find out who you drew at the same time everybody else does.
Presidents Cup captains pick their matchups face to face, alternating, one at a time, in front of each other and in front of cameras. One captain sends out a player or a pair, the other captain answers, then it flips. It is a snake draft. Which means a Presidents Cup captain can look across the table and deliberately throw his hottest player straight at the other team's best guy, and everybody in the room watches him do it.
That is a genuinely different sport from a sealed envelope. It is fantasy football with a live microphone, and it is the single most underrated thing about the whole week.
So Why Do The Internationals Never Win
They almost never do, and there is no polite way to phrase the record.
Across fifteen Presidents Cups, the United States leads 13 wins to 1, with the one tie in 2003. Medinah this week makes sixteen. The International team has won exactly once, in 1998 at Royal Melbourne, where Peter Thomson's side beat the Americans 20.5 to 11.5 in front of a home crowd that has never once let anyone forget it.
The reasons are not mysterious. The United States draws from one country with the deepest professional golf pipeline on the planet and a team that mostly already knows each other. The International side is assembling twelve men from five continents, several of whom have never played a practice round together, a few of whom do not share a first language, and asking them to become a unit by Thursday morning. Europe has had fifty years and a genuine chip on its shoulder to build a Ryder Cup identity. The Internationals have been trying to build one since 1994 with a roster that turns over constantly.
It has gotten closer lately, which is the honest read. The 2019 edition in Melbourne went to the final holes. The Internationals have adopted a shield logo and a proper team identity and have started acting like a program instead of a pickup side. They are still 13-1-1 and they are still the underdog this week. But the gap is not what it was in 2000.
Nobody Gets Paid, Which Is The Actual Point
The Presidents Cup has never awarded a dollar of prize money. Not to the winners, not to the losers, not once since 1994. What it does instead is hand the net proceeds to charities that the players and captains nominate themselves, and the first ten stagings of the event alone moved more than 32 million dollars out that way.
That is the thing worth holding onto when somebody tells you the event does not matter. These are grown men with private planes playing four days of golf for a trophy they do not get to keep and a check they do not get to cash, and they will still be sick to their stomach standing over a four footer on Sunday afternoon. Match play does that. It is the only format in golf where you can lose a hole and not care, and lose the next one and want to walk into the lake.
Medinah Has Done This Before, And It Went Badly
One last thing that makes this year's venue a genuinely funny choice.
Medinah Country Club outside Chicago hosted the 2012 Ryder Cup. The United States led 10-6 going into Sunday with twelve singles left, which is the kind of lead that gets people planning the celebration. Europe then won eight of those singles matches, and Francesco Molinari halved the last match on the course with Tiger Woods to finish it 14.5 to 13.5. The European press named it the Miracle at Medinah on the spot. It stood as the last road win by either team in the Ryder Cup until Europe went and did it again at Bethpage Black last year, 15-13.
So the Americans are hosting a cup at the one course in the country where they have personally watched a four point Sunday lead evaporate. Sports are not subtle.
The Cheat Sheet
Everything above, compressed, for the group chat.
- Opponent. Ryder Cup is USA against Europe. Presidents Cup is USA against the rest of the world outside Europe.
- Years. Ryder Cup in odd years. Presidents Cup in even years. Both every two years.
- Age. Ryder Cup since 1927. Presidents Cup since 1994.
- Length. Ryder Cup is three days and 28 matches. Presidents Cup is four days and 30 matches.
- Winning number. 14.5 points wins the Ryder Cup. 15.5 wins the Presidents Cup.
- Tie. Ryder Cup goes to whoever held it. Presidents Cup gets shared.
- Matchups. Ryder Cup captains submit blind. Presidents Cup captains draft alternately, face to face.
- All-time. Presidents Cup is USA 13, International 1, with one tie. The Ryder Cup is a real rivalry and has been for forty years.
This Week And Next Year
The Presidents Cup runs Thursday September 24 through Sunday September 27 at Medinah Country Club in Medinah, Illinois. Four days, thirty matches, Snedeker against Ogilvy, twelve singles to close it out on Sunday.
The next Ryder Cup is at Adare Manor in County Limerick, Ireland, with the three competition days running September 17 to 19 of 2027. If you have ever thought about a golf trip to Ireland and wanted an excuse, that is the excuse, and you have a year to build the case at home.
Shirts For A Four Day Week Of Team Golf
Ours run $29.99, which is roughly a sleeve of balls, and this is the one week of the year where flying the flag on your chest is not even slightly subtle.
The USA Flag Golfer is the straightforward pick, one silhouette, one flag, nothing to explain. USA Flag Clubs & Stars and the American Flag Club do the same job with the clubs doing the work instead of the golfer. Tees And Irons Flag is the one people ask about, because it reads as a flag from across the room and as golf equipment from four feet away. Flag EKG is for the man whose heart rate is genuinely going to be a problem during Sunday singles.
If you would rather wear it than carry it, there is a USA Flag Clubs & Balls hat, the matching golf towel for the bag, and a hoodie in the same design for a Chicago-adjacent late September evening. And for the guy already thinking about Adare Manor, the Irish Flag Golf Towel is a year early and he will not care.
Worth saying plainly, since people mix this up constantly. These are t-shirts. Almost every course in America wants a collar on you at the first tee, so this is not the round shirt. It is the watch party shirt, the bar shirt, the shirt for the four hours on Sunday where you are yelling at a television about a four footer. If you need a collar for the actual round, that is what the polos are for.
The whole lineup lives in The Tee Box, with the newest designs in New Arrivals. We have been making shirts for golfers since 2025, and flag week is reliably the loudest week on the entire calendar.
Set the recording for Thursday. Four days of match play, nobody getting paid, and a course that has already seen one team blow it.
See you tomorrow.
Dan
Shanked Right
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