Rory McIlroy wants to be the European Ryder Cup captain, just not anytime soon.
McIlroy is back in action this week for the first time since he helped lead Europe to a 15-13 win over the United States at Bethpage Black last month. Naturally, many have projected the idea that McIlroy eventually leads the European team as its captain in a future event. Based on everything he’s accomplished in the golf world and the fact that he’s played in the last eight Ryder Cups for Europe, he’d almost certainly be a great fit.
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But don’t expect McIlroy to be leading the way at Ireland’s Adare Manor in two years.
“Absolutely, I’d love to be a captain one day,” McIlroy said Wednesday ahead of the DP World Tour’s India Championship. “I feel very fortunate that I’ve had a front row seat playing under some of the best captains in history in the Ryder Cup … Hopefully one day in the future, but I’d say not until the mid-2030s, hopefully if I can keep playing well.”
While that’s a good decade away, that timeline tracks. McIlroy just wrapped up one of the best years of his career on the PGA Tour. He won the Masters in April, which made him just the sixth golfer in the sport’s history to complete the career grand slam, and he won two other times on Tour to bring his career wins total to 29. He’s been a constant presence at No. 2 in the Official World Golf Rankings, behind only Scottie Scheffler, and he helped Europe pick up its ninth win in the last 12 outings in the Ryder Cup. At just 36 years old, McIlroy should still have a lot of good golf ahead of him.
And being a playing captain — something that was brought into question this fall with Keegan Bradley, who opted to only captain the U.S. team in the end — is out of the question. He said that idea has been brought up, but he’s “shot it down straight away.”
“I just think the commitments that a captain has the week of [the Ryder Cup],” he said before the Ryder Cup. “You think about the extra media the captain has to do, you think about the extra meetings that the captains have to do with the vice captains … preparing your speech for the opening ceremony — just there’s a lot of things that people don’t see that the captain does the week of the Ryder Cup, especially now that the Ryder Cup has become so big.
“If you’d have said it 20 years ago, I’d say yeah, it was probably possible to do so. But how big of a spectacle and everything that’s on the line in a Ryder Cup now, I just think it would be a very difficult position to be in.”
So, based on his mid-2030s timeline, don’t expect a captain McIlroy to make an appearance at the Ryder Cup until maybe the 2033 stop at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, at best. The 2035 event at a to-be-determined location in Europe may be a better option.
