How the Ryder Cup works: Foursomes, Fourballs, Singles Sunday

The Ryder Cup is golf's team match between Europe and the United States, played every other year on alternating sides of the Atlantic. Twelve players a side, three days of golf, twenty-eight matches, and the cup goes to whichever team reaches 14½ points first.

Compared to a regular golf tournament (where one hundred and fifty-six individuals play stroke play across four rounds), the Ryder Cup is a different sport. It is team match-play golf, decided in a small number of head-to-head contests rather than a leaderboard. The format is older than the modern PGA Tour, more emotional than almost any other tournament in golf, and consistently produces atmosphere that the individual majors don't.

The basic numbers

Twelve players per team. Two teams: Europe and the United States. Three days of matches: Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Twenty-eight matches total. Twenty-eight points available. To win the cup outright, a team needs 14½ points. If the score is 14-14 at the end, the holding team keeps the cup (which has been important in close finishes).

Each win is worth a point. A halved match (tied after eighteen holes) gives each side half a point. A loss is zero. Sunday singles aren't weighted any heavier than the team sessions; a Friday-morning point counts the same as a Sunday-afternoon one.

The Ryder Cup format, day by day

Friday and Saturday are the team-match days. Each of these days has eight matches: four foursomes in one session and four fourballs in the other. Some recent Ryder Cups have run foursomes in the morning and fourballs in the afternoon; some have run fourballs first. The home captain sets the session order for each day.

Foursomes (alternate-shot)

Foursomes (also called alternate-shot) puts two players on each team, sharing one ball. Player A tees off on the first hole; Player B hits the second shot; they alternate every shot until the hole is finished. The next hole reverses: Player B tees off, Player A plays the second shot. Both players play every hole; only one plays each individual shot. There is no second ball.

Fourballs (best-ball)

Fourballs (also called best-ball) puts two players on each team, each playing their own ball. All four golfers play every hole. The lower of the two scores on each team counts as the team's score for that hole. If Player A makes a four and Player B makes a five on the same hole, the team scores four. The opposing pair has its lower-scoring ball used.

Each session of foursomes or fourballs has four matches. Eight matches across the two sessions on Friday. Eight more on Saturday. That's sixteen matches and sixteen points decided across the first two days; the captain only fields eight of his twelve players in each session, so four players sit out each session.

Sunday singles

Sunday is singles day. All twelve players from each team play in one of the twelve singles matches: one European against one American, decided over eighteen holes of head-to-head match play. Twelve matches, twelve points available, every player on each team plays.

Total scoring across the weekend

First team to 14½ wins; 14-14 means the holder retains the cup.

How match play actually works

Stroke play (the format of most professional golf, including the Masters and the Open) rewards consistency: the player with the lowest total score over 72 holes wins the tournament. Match play, the Ryder Cup format, rewards holes won regardless of margin.

In match play, the winner of each hole is the player or pair who scores lower on that hole. A win on a single hole is a win; the margin (a one-shot win or a five-shot win on the same hole) is irrelevant. The match is decided on holes won, not strokes saved. A player who shoots seven-under-par over eighteen holes can lose a match to a player who shoots one-over, if the par-shooter happened to win more individual holes.

Matches are normally decided over eighteen holes. If a player or pair is so far ahead that the trailing side can no longer mathematically catch up, the match ends early. A match "6 and 5" means six holes ahead with five to play; the match ends after thirteen holes. A match "3 and 2" ends after sixteen holes. A match all-square after eighteen holes is a half (which awards each side a half-point).

The captains

Each side is led by a captain, almost always a former Ryder Cup player nominated by the European Tour (now DP World Tour) or the PGA of America. The captain does not play. The job is to pick the team, set the order of play, pair players for the foursomes and fourballs sessions, make tactical substitutions and run the room.

Six of the twelve players qualify automatically through points systems run by the European and American tours over a multi-year window. The other six are captain's picks. Those picks generate the loudest debate of every Ryder Cup build-up because they aren't constrained to the ranking; the captain picks for fit, form and pairing chemistry.

Tony Jacklin's four-Cup European run from 1983 to 1989 set the modern template for the role. Bernhard Langer (2004), Ian Woosnam (2006), Colin Montgomerie (2010), José María Olazábal (2012), Paul McGinley (2014), Darren Clarke (2016), Thomas Bjørn (2018), Pádraig Harrington (2021) and Luke Donald (2023 and 2025) have all followed. On the American side, Tom Watson captained in 1993 and 2014, Paul Azinger in 2008, Davis Love III in 2012 and 2016, Steve Stricker in 2021, Zach Johnson in 2023 and Keegan Bradley in 2025.

The cup's origin: Samuel Ryder

Samuel Ryder was an English businessman who made his fortune selling penny packets of garden seeds by mail order in the early 20th century. He took up golf in his fifties for his health, became a serious amateur, and from around 1923 funded informal team matches between Britain and the United States.

Ryder donated the trophy, a small gold cup with a figurine of his fellow professional golfer Abe Mitchell on the lid, for the first official Ryder Cup match in 1927 at Worcester Country Club in Massachusetts. The United States won that first match 9½-2½. Ryder did not travel to the United States for the 1927 match because of illness; he first presented the trophy in person at the 1929 return match at Moortown, Leeds (which Britain won 7-5). The tournament was contested between Great Britain and the United States from 1927 until the 1970s, when it was clear that the talent pool of British golf alone could not produce a competitive team. The competition was opened to Irish golfers in 1973 (becoming Great Britain & Ireland vs the USA) and to all European golfers from 1979 onwards, with Spanish golfers Seve Ballesteros and Antonio Garrido playing in the first European team that year.

Why Sunday singles is the day everyone watches

Sunday singles is the day Ryder Cups are decided. Going into Sunday, both sides have played sixteen matches; sixteen points have been awarded. The Sunday singles brings twelve more points: enough that any deficit of less than 8 points can be overturned, and enough that any lead of less than 5 points is not safe.

The atmosphere on Sunday at a Ryder Cup, particularly at the closing holes, is denser than at any other golf tournament in the year. The home team's gallery roars on every win; the visiting team's gallery is small and travels in groups behind their players. Both teams stay on the course in green-side viewing positions as the later matches finish; the captain decides the order of singles play (highest-ranked players are usually placed in the middle of the order, where they can rally the team).

The famous Sunday afternoons keep coming back. Brookline 1999: the USA were 10-6 down going into singles and won 14½-13½, with celebrations spilling onto the 17th green before the last putt had stopped rolling. Medinah 2012: Europe pulled off the mirror image, the same scoreline in the same direction. Whistling Straits 2021: a 19-9 USA win, the largest margin of the modern era, with Pádraig Harrington captaining a beaten Europe.

The 2025 Bethpage Black result

The 2025 match was at Bethpage Black on Long Island, New York. The United States hosted; Europe defended. Luke Donald captained Europe for the second time in a row; Keegan Bradley captained the USA.

Europe arrived as the holders, having won 16½-11½ at Marco Simone in Rome in 2023. The 2025 match produced one of the closest Ryder Cup results of recent years; the result is on the official PGA records.

The 2027 Ryder Cup will be held at Adare Manor in County Limerick, Ireland, the first Ryder Cup in Ireland since the K Club in 2006. The 2029 match goes back to the United States at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Minnesota.

A short summary

So: twelve players a side, three days of golf, twenty-eight matches, fourteen and a half points to win. Friday and Saturday split between foursomes and fourballs, four matches a session; Sunday is twelve straight singles. Half the team qualifies automatically, half are captain's picks. The captain doesn't play. And almost every Ryder Cup gets settled on Sunday afternoon.

Samuel Ryder donated the trophy in 1927. Europe was added to the British and Irish side in 1979. The format has been broadly stable for a century. The atmosphere isn't.