While I’m bound to be biased, sat draped in my European flag with blue and yellow face paint on and stars on my bed sheets, I am a big fan of each member of Team Europe.
Rory McIlroy is a career grand slam winner and the most loved golfer in the world. Tommy Fleetwood is immensely popular and has great hair. Justin Rose is a timeless machine, and Tyrrell Hatton is hysterical.
Viktor Hovland is also hysterical, Jon Rahm is exciting and a points-scoring unit, and Shane Lowry is good fun. Sepp Straka is one of the nicest players I’ve spoken to, Matt Fitzpatrick is the quintessential dry Englishman I can get behind, and Rasmus Hojgaard is as cool as his brother.
Bob MacIntyre is entertaining and always good for a quote, and Ludvig Aberg is tall, dark, handsome and quite good at golf. It would be a pleasure to be in the European team room at Bethpage this week, just to sit and gaze at the humans circulating the space.
But who is your favourite European Ryder Cup player? Which one are you rooting for the most this week, and which one do you support the most in regular tour events?
Ahead of the Ryder Cup, NCG ran a survey which yielded over 2,000 responses. We thank you for this, and one of the questions we posed was, “Who is your favourite current European Ryder Cup player?”
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Revealing your favourite European Ryder Cup players…
Receiving over 46% of the vote was Tommy Fleetwood. He is my favourite golfer, and many of our readers feel the same way.
Hailing from Southport, Fleetwood has been popular since he started to become the player he is now in 2017, when he won the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship.
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He won later that season in France, then won the same event in Abu Dhabi in 2018. This helped him qualify for his first Ryder Cup start in 2018, where he formed an unbeaten partnership with Francesco Molinari at Le Golf National in Paris.
Fleetwood is an endearing and down-to-earth character, with both an infectious personality and an aesthetically pleasing swing to boot. He and his caddie Ian Finnis are immediately recognisable on the golf course, and fans on both sides of the Atlantic rejoiced when he won the Tour Championship in August.
Before we digested these survey results, the suspicion was, to me anyway, that McIlroy would be your favourite European player. He really isn’t far behind, with just under 39% of the vote.
The Northern Irishman’s popularity was never more obvious than when he made an eagle on the very last hole of the recent Irish Open at the K Club, which sparked a deafening cheer from his home crowd and scenes that perhaps no other player can produce.
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He beat Joakim Lagergren in the subsequent playoff, capping off a fine individual year in which he has won the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the Players Championship and the Masters as well. An away Ryder Cup win in New York, which he experienced with Europe in 2012 but in Chicago, would provide thick icing to this cake of 2025.
Fleetwood and McIlroy were the frontrunners in the survey, as you can see in the graph above.
In a distant third place with 3.4% of the vote was Rahm, the two-time major champion who has now been trusted with sending Europe off in the first match of the Ryder Cup in each of his four appearances.
For fans who enjoy watching golf’s established tours, Rahm lost some eyeballs on his career when leaving for the Saudi-funded LIV Golf League at the start of 2024.
However, while his sanctions for playing in LIV events remain under appeal, both he and Hatton can renew their partnership, which proved extremely fruitful at the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome. Rahm is a passionate and fiery Spaniard, who invokes the spirit of Ryder Cup legend Seve Ballesteros when he competes.
In an even further distant fourth place with 2.6% of the vote was Hovland, who also has an engrossing, laid-back personality.
The young Norwegian gave us an insight into his thoughts in this Ryder Cup week, when a reporter asked him how he would cope with the opposing US fans at Bethpage:
“They won’t really come close to the thoughts that I have in my own head. So I think I’ll just laugh it off for the most part.”
Hovland is a previous winner of the FedEx Cup and the Memorial Tournament on the PGA Tour, and like Fleetwood, European fans will him on at all four majors each season in the hope that they finally cross the line.
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What do you make of this list of your favourite Ryder Cup players? Who are your favourite European Ryder Cup players? Tell us on X!
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