Vietnam Golf: Fast Infrastructure Growth, Slow Grassroots Participation

VIETNAM GOLF: FAST INFRASTRUCTURE GROWTH, SLOW GRASSROOTS PARTICIPATION 5:30 a.m., a practice range on the outskirts of Hai Phong. The mist has not lifted; the grass is still wet. A man in his fifties stands at bay seven, striking shot after shot with a 7-iron, each about 120 metres, steady as a machine. Behind him, the range is nearly empty. A dozen kilometres away, an 18-hole championship course keeps its lights on, charging a green fee equal to half a month's wage for a factory worker. Standing between those two images, I ask myself: which is the real face of Vietnamese golf? I have spent much of my time following the country's golf scene to find the answer, and what I found is not in the figures trumpeted on investment forums. It lies in the distance between two kinds of growth running at two entirely different speeds. Over the past fifteen years, the number of golf courses in Vietnam has grown at an astonishing rate. In the early 2010s the country had only a few dozen courses; today the figure has passed the hundred mark, stretching from the Red River Delta along the central coast to the southern provinces. Names such as BRG, Vinpearl, FLC and coastal resort complexes have turned golf from a pastime for a small circle into part of the tourism and real-estate development playbook. Along with the infrastructure came increasingly professional tournaments: legs of the Asian tour system, expanded amateur events, and a generation of young Vietnamese golfers beginning to appear on the regional map. On paper, this is a success story. But when I peel back each layer, the story has another side. The problem is this: Vietnamese golf is being measured by the yardstick of the course builder, not the player. The number of golf holes rises, the number of projects rises, the amount of investment rises — but the number of Vietnamese who actually play regularly rises far more slowly. This is the point I want to dissect. Let us start with the economics of a golf course. A standard 18-hole project swallows a vast tract of land, usually accompanied by a resort, villas and amenities. For the investor, value lies in the land bank and in the cash flow from real estate, not in the green fee. The green fee is only the tip; the root is the land. Once you understand this, the paradox appears: courses are built to maximise land value, while the ordinary player is a secondary variable in that equation. For years I believed the teaching that “golf is the sport of a rising middle class” — until I looked at the actual revenue structure of domestic courses. Most cash flow comes from members, high-end tourists and corporate events, not from a middle class playing steadily every week. An ordinary golfer who wants to play twice a month must spend an amount most Vietnamese cannot afford — and that is the forgotten truth behind the glossy headlines. Consider a green fee broken down. It contains the cost of maintaining the turf, staff wages, infrastructure depreciation, land rent and profit. At an internationally standard course, the year-round turf-maintenance cost alone swallows a huge sum, not to mention the irrigation system and technical team. That is why prices are hard to cut, and also why a mass-market golf model requires a different design — not merely a scaled-down copy of a premium course. Under a “two-speed” model, Vietnamese golf can be split into two almost separate markets. The first is premium golf: resort courses, members, international guests, commercial tournaments. This is where big money flows, where international brands set foot, where the infrastructure meets standards. But it is also a market with a finite capacity, because it depends on the number of people who can genuinely afford it. The second is mass golf: practice ranges, driving ranges, 9-hole courses, small self-organised communities. This is the soil that nurtures the golfers of tomorrow. Yet this soil lacks infrastructure, lacks proper training academies, and lacks a low-cost tournament system where newcomers can gain experience. The gap between these two markets is the gap most reports never measure. People count courses, count projects, count billions of dollars invested — but few count the number of regular players, the number of golfers under 18, or the number of graduates from domestic professional training programmes. And this is where every statistic can lie; my job is to catch it in the act. A figure of “hundreds of golf courses” sounds impressive, but it does not tell you which courses operate efficiently and which are merely names in a project file. A figure of “double-digit growth” sounds attractive, but it does not tell you whether that growth comes from new players or merely from raising prices for a circle of regulars. To see more clearly, look at the neighbours. South Korea once experienced a golf boom tied tightly to policy and corporate culture: golf became part of business communication, pulling in a wave of indoor urban ranges and youth training programmes. Japan has more than half a century of history, with thousands of courses and a vast middle-class playing population. Thailand turned golf into a tourism industry with competitive prices and a dense amateur tournament system. What all three have in common is that they built the ecosystem before celebrating the results. Vietnam is doing the opposite: celebrating results before building the ecosystem. The absurdity lies in taking the number of courses as the measure of success while forgetting that the course is only the shell. When I sketch a portrait of a typical Vietnamese golfer based on watching rounds and ranges, the picture is fairly clear. The ordinary player usually starts late, mostly after thirty, through work networking. They learn golf as a social skill, play for a few months and quit, because there is no pathway, no community, and not enough time or money. Meanwhile, young players — the group most in need of nurturing to create a successor generation — face an almost absolute cost barrier. In Hai Phong, where I live and watch closely, the picture is even clearer. The city has a few practice ranges and a few golf courses, but most players I meet are well-off or corporate guests. A handful of talented youngsters are sponsored by centres, but their number is far too small to form a wave. Children's golf classes exist, yet tuition remains the barrier that keeps them mostly serving the children of families already inside the ecosystem. On the media side, golf remains a sport hard to reach for ordinary audiences. Golf coverage tends to target people who understand the rules and can afford to follow it, while most Vietnamese audiences are used to football, where the rules are simple and emotions spread easily. A sport that wants to grow needs an audience; a sport with players but no audience will struggle to generate social appeal. Vietnamese golf is short on both ends: ordinary players and ordinary spectators. On the professional side, the path from amateur to professional remains rugged. The cost of competing in international events is huge, while income from domestic events is limited. Many young talents are forced to take the safe route of a job, playing golf as a hobby instead of pursuing elite sport. This is the greatest loss that growth figures cannot reflect. This leads to a structural consequence: Vietnamese golf may have many courses but lacks an ecosystem. A course is an object; an ecosystem is a process. A true golf ecosystem needs academies training children, cheap urban practice facilities, open amateur tournaments, internationally certified coaches, and above all, a cost low enough that young people dare to step in. Without these things, courses are just green oases in a land with no players. I once stood at the starting line of a track event, fell at the 350-metre mark with a cramp, and learned that failure is not at the final stretch but in how you prepared for the whole race. Vietnamese golf is sprinting at the opening stretch — building courses, launching projects, running tournaments — but I am not sure it has prepared enough for the long road ahead. The fall of 2026 did not stop me — it changed the direction of the whole track. Sometimes a young industry also needs a fall to reconsider its direction. The irony is that those who chant “Vietnam will become a golf power” often skip the most basic question: what is a golf power measured by? If measured by courses and projects, Vietnam is on the way to success. If measured by players per capita, by young golfers good enough to compete on the continental stage, by the number of serious training academies, then we are still very far from the finish. The absurdity lies here: people celebrate infrastructure growth as if it were sporting growth, while the two are not the same in nature. Another counter-intuitive view: many assume that the more courses are built, the more prices will fall through competition, opening an era of golf for the masses. But running a golf course is not like running a supermarket. The costs of turf maintenance, irrigation, staffing and upkeep are fixed and very high; deep discounting means lower quality or losses. Competition cannot lower the cost barrier unless the course model changes — for instance, a minimalist 9-hole course, an urban range, or a model with policy support. In other words, more courses do not mean more players. And this is the biggest trap: an industry growing fast in infrastructure but slow in real players will eventually face oversupply — beautiful but empty fairways, deserted courses in peak season. I would rather tell this hard-to-hear story than paint a rosy picture of a market I have watched long enough to know how fragile it is. Vietnamese golf stands at the crossroads many other sports have passed through: choosing growth to count, or growth to play. The road ahead does not lie in billion-dollar projects, but in a more humble question — how can a ten-year-old child in the city pick up a club for the first time without being the child of a tycoon. When the answer to that question is clear, Vietnamese golf will truly step into a new round.