O Captain! My Captain!

Any team, any business, will not perform to its potential until the cloth sits around the right bicep. The choice of a captain for the Ryder Cup proves this in spades.

The Albachiara Journal is an eclectic collection of our opinion and perspective, from our travels and encounters.

Captaincy and the Ryder Cup have always been synonymous, and when that competition comes around every second year, one gets to contemplate both at the same time.

We are about to get a really plum case study this month.

This Sunday Column today believes that it will be a truly dramatic match-up, and not at all in the uplifting way people think and hope.

Some have now got a taste for humiliating Europe.

It is becoming evermore difficult to regularly write about our sector, and avoid mentioning political grandstanding and power plays. If you don’t believe this premise, think better. Sport does not live in the happy little island it did even 20 years ago.

Money, demographics and geopolitics.

This sadly is where we are, and the Ryder Cup is about to become The Hunger Games.

Because it is the only example of high-profile professional athletes competing as a team under the European flag of blue with stars. Golf, on reflection, is actually a unique proxy for a united Europe, and maybe the only positive symbol (even outside sport) of everything people hoped the whole project would be.

The EU, previously known as the Common Market, the EEC, has just never delivered what the visionaries all planned for: namely, the "United States of Europe". A failure encapsulated perfectly in the complete lack of authority and gravitas of its current unelected “captain”, Ursula Von der Leyen.

She counts for absolutely nothing when the chips are down, and most certainly isn’t a Thatcher or a Merkel. Indeed, in these last 10 years, since the host of "The Apprentice" won the US presidency, we have seen all too well the dramatic decline of the old Continent in general, and her Brussels bureaucracy in particular.

Some people now want to ram that point home. And the Ryder Cup is now “the mark”.

The caption accompanying this viral meme was: “How it started, how it’s continuing”. The optics are utterly humiliating.

Whilst the countries of Europe have never really got on, at least in the past they each had a proper, credible leader to represent their tribe on occasions like this. Their successors today, who we all saw kiss the ring in the Oval Office last month, are a pallid, pathetic shadow, and that’s being very generous. You wouldn’t have given this lot a fiver to get the milk, rolls and a newspaper in our day.

Europe and its leadership have never been weaker, and everyone knows it. Trump, Modi, Putin, Saudi, the Chinese. It’s the chatter of the intelligentsia in dining rooms from Vienna to Vladivostok, Washington to Warsaw.

The take-away from everyone? Europe is done, with absolutely no leadership.

A pertinent op-ed example is here:

Trump now wants to rub it in, huge, and that is really what this Ryder Cup is all about.

One guy wins, the other schmuck loses.

If globalisation is reversing, as it is, we are now in the game of winners and losers where, for America to be great again, others need to decline. It’s just arithmetic.

Exactly this is the wider context of what is to come in Bethpage, NY, and Trump won’t miss the opportunity, especially as golf is his sport. Worryingly, he is also renowned to be a bit haphazard on what he believes to be “truth” on the course. They have written books about his “cheating”.

Sigh!

Does anyone think that leopards change their spots? Is he all of a sudden going to find Jesus in golfing honour and etiquette?

More likely he will instead take great pleasure in figuratively stepping all over the putting line of the Europeans. And giving his team every mulligan possible.

America will accept nothing but a win.

The USA, like the EU, has very few moments when its elite athletes play as a team under the star-spangled banner. Almost none outside of some relays in the Olympics. All their main team sports are domestic and insular to the max, and there are precious few opportunities for the nation to get behind Uncle Sam, as a united tribe.

The Ryder Cup is, therefore, pretty special, and the 45th edition will undoubtedly be used with gusto by this Administration to further the MAGA brand. Trump will attend on the Friday start, with the rhetoric and vitriol already not so encouraging.

This isn’t going to be pleasant, or elegant, or dignified. Certainly not sporting. Brace yourselves.

We are going to Bethpage to kick their fucking ass.

- Keegan Bradley, US Ryder Cup Captain, 2025.

The tone and specific language of this article (and video) give us the steer on the ordeal awaiting our players on American soil. It is a chilling read.

Home advantage is going to really matter.

The last five editions of the Samuel Ryder trophy have been won very handily by the hosting team. In fact, it seems that playing on your own green turf, in front of your own fans, is now becoming a major advantage.

Some may say that this just reflects the lower standards of fairness and etiquette along all fairways these days. Fan heckling/abuse, especially in America, has been on a rising trend, with patrons gleefully cheering missed fairways and putts. The betting markets have played a role in all this also. In fact, the general raucousness of golf, often now encouraged for commercial reasons, has taken the game to places unimaginable by the old custodians of the Augusta National and The Royal and Ancient.

Here, the aptly named golfer Sam Ryder, in Arizona, gives us a foretaste of our near future this month.

This would be bad enough, but it could be a lot lot worse, and not for good reasons.

Keegan Bradley is Franz Ferdinand.

Bradley may be an excellent golfer, but he is deep down a bit of a nutter. He doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder; he has the whole Grand Canyon.

“Underestimated all his life”, never one of the cool frat kids of Jordan, Zach and Justin, walks a bit funny, never respected, even as a major-winner. Keegan is just an angry man, no matter how hard he tries to hide it. To use the modern term; he is truly “pumped!”.

In fact, there is a credible debate that the US PGA has made a horrendous mistake with his appointment, offered out of guilt, and the price for their error will be felt well beyond the fairways and greens of Bethpage. The game itself may suffer.

MAGA, and the American thirst for revenge, is an explosive cocktail of volatility that is just looking for its Franz Ferdinand moment, and Bradley could be the very man. Whilst we all hope to keep the Ryder Cup only about match-play golf, about sport, this isn’t the way it is going to go. It will take on connotations much wider, much darker, and much more reminiscent of the Olympic Games and World Cups of the 1930s.

(Sharp intake of breath!)

Deep down, really deep down, I get a very bad feeling about what is going to happen in Bethpage, and it will be the biggest test yet for a man called Luke Donald. His leadership, his captaincy, and indeed his life legacy, will be defined before this month is out.

It will be great TV. The Hunger Games always are.

Captains aren’t appointed, they are elected.

In a dressing room, in a boardroom, a captain is chosen by the group, explicitly or implicitly, because it’s usually so obvious who it should be. Official titles don’t matter. Leadership absolutely does.

One of the unfortunate things that has crept into youth sport in the last 20 years is the idea that everybody has a turn at being team captain for the day. Parents at the game have then been obliged to watch the shy kid forced into a role that he/she doesn’t really want, and likely will never enjoy. For every hidden “introvert leader” that is uncovered by this practice, there are ten traumatised-for-life children, forced to endure and remember the cruel comments from their team-mates (and their parents) who know the truth. And don’t hold back.

Every true leader, instead, has that natural aura, that presence, and interestingly it can come in many different sauces. You can be reserved and cerebral like a Mike Brearley, and still be as effective as the snarling Roy Keane.

Talent is indeed not enough for leadership. If it were, Ian Botham would have led English cricket for years, and no one would have ever heard of Mike Brearley. No, some people just aren’t meant to lead, and it’s usually not their fault. They have been promoted to a role beyond their abilities and will never meet the expectations of it.

Bruno is not the captain we expect.

- Roy Keane.

It’s not about the armband, it’s about what you represent.

Many, especially in these softer and gentler times, don’t agree with Roy Keane. Some people even think that a captain doesn’t matter at all, and that winning just depends on the total skill quotient available to the team on the day. For them, no intangible value is added from the person leading you into battle, with their charisma and passion.

It’s an opinion, but likely from someone who has never sat at any big table. Or in any serious locker-room.

Assessing teams like this, by just adding up the combined “talents” of its members, is comparable to judging the greatness of poetry following the formula of J Evans Pritchard, PhD.

Excrement.

The truth that you learn in life, eventually, is that the captain of the ship is the only real USP of any organisation; in politics, business or sport. At the elite end, our species is capable of extraordinary things, but you always need that one special person to emerge and inspire. They can change everything.

Maradona, for many, is a far greater player than Messi or Ronaldo because of just that. Convincing eternal losers like Napoli that he would take them to victories that they had never, ever envisaged; telling his teammates that they weren’t inferior. That they should believe.

All this stuff is really important, also way beyond sport. Listen to The Special One talk about his legendary Porto captain, recently passed away.

Remember that Jose was a very very young coach back then, with no footballing pedigree. A dressing-room of men eat people like that alive, unless someone tells them not to.

Jorge said what needed to be said before Mourinho even arrived, because he was a proper captain, and Mourinho cries today because he knows what he owes Jorge Costa.

It’s not about the armband, it’s about what you represent.

- Jose Mourinho.

The Elder Wand.

Giving someone the armband, a simple piece of cloth, means absolutely nothing in itself. Like the Elder Wand, it doesn't really work until it finds its rightful owner.

The leader is the one who sets the culture, and, to quote Peter Drucker, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Every single time.

This is why Manchester United is definitively doomed whilst owned by its current shareholders. Any team, any business, will not perform to its potential until the captain cloth sits around the right bicep. You can take that to the bank, and it is what all those captain-for-a-day youth coaches are missing.

The choice of a captain for the Ryder Cup has proven this in spades time and again, and will have a major impact on who actually wins on the Sunday evening. Nick Faldo was one of the greatest, most talented, golfers that Europe has ever produced, but he was a selfish individual and a horrendous captain. When he lost, heavily, no one was even surprised. Read here.

This job is really about motivating twelve golfers to think for three days more about their mates than their own individual score, and this goes completely against their muscle memory. The Americans, often with a more talented team, lose regularly because they just can’t get past this.

The right captain can shift that needle, getting heads where they need to be. Because this battle, the Ryder Cup, is really a mental test.

To continue reading this article, please click here:

If you like this work, find out more about the Albachiara content, across the AreYouNotEntertained? Podcast, and the industry book 👇.

Embark on a gripping journey through the intertwined worlds of sports, media, and finance in "Sport's Perfect Storm."

Authored by Roger Mitchell, this illuminating book unveils the challenges these industries face amidst a hurricane of change. Learn how to navigate the turbulent seas of uncertainty, ensuring not just survival but sustainable success.

This book is recommended reading for those starting out, as well as also being a serious manual for experienced corporate finance people, especially those looking to invest in sport.

To secure your Limited Edition copy now, unveil hidden risks, and sail towards a future of informed decision-making, click below 👇