Is Royal Lytham & St Annes Still On The Open Rota?

The last time that Royal Lytham & St Annes staged The Open was back in 2012. There was a hope that the club might get the nod for the 2026 Open but that has now gone down the coast to Royal Birkdale.

Lytham will celebrate the centenary of their first Open in 1926, when Bobby Jones won the first of his three Claret Jugs, and therefore 1926 had been pencilled in as a possible return to Lytham for the game's oldest Major. 

Next year Royal Troon will celebrate the centenary of their first Open in 1923 – it will be a year late due to the postponement of the 2020 Open with the pandemic – and so it was thought that the same might happen with Lytham.

Lytham has long been part of the fabric of The Open, hosting the Championship 11 times. Ahead of it are St Andrews (30), Prestwick (24), Muirfield (16), Royal St George's (15) and Royal Liverpool which will move to 13 next week. In three years Royal Birkdale will move level with Lytham when they host the 2026 Open.

Other than the 26-year gap between Lytham's first and second Opens this is now the longest blank run that the Fylde club has had and, of the other clubs on the 'rota', only the Donald Trump-owned Turnberry have been waiting longer. 

Of course we've had Royal Portrush added to the roster in recent years, we will be back there for the second time in six years in 2025, and there has been talk of Lytham dropping off the list. Next week's hosts Royal Liverpool will have now staged the Championship twice since Els lifted the Claret Jug.

In February 2019 when Hoylake was announced the R&A's chief executive Martin Slumbers said: “Royal Lytham is a fantastic course and in terms of infrastructure is right up there. We get around 200,000 spectators in the week but it’s a squeeze and the TV compound is five acres of land. That’s where Lytham gets a bit tight but it can be done. Hoylake is a bit easier in that regard.

“We are lucky to have three great courses in that part of the world and choosing between them is never easy."

Figures wise Royal Birkdale attracted a total attendance of 235,000, when Jordan Spieth won there in 2017, and that eclipsed the 230,000 benchmark set by Royal Liverpool when Tiger Woods was victorious in 2006. These are the two highest figures for any Open away from St Andrews.

The 2012 Open at Lytham brought in over 180,000 but there does seem to be some light ahead for the club, according to the local newspaper.

“Royal Lytham and St Annes is an important venue and remains very much part of our thinking for The Open, alongside other venues that stage the Championship. We consider a wide range of factors when we decide on future venues and there are many reasons why we select a particular venue at a particular time. We look forward to returning to the Fylde coast again in future,” an R&A spokesman told The Gazette.

The big sticking point for Lytham is that lack of space and the need to fit in a world-class driving range along with all the other elements that make up a modern Open, such as the tented village and various hospitality suites. You only need to see how spread out things are at St Andrews to appreciate quite what a scale The Open now operates at.

As things stand we are at Troon next year, Portrush in 2025 and then Birkdale the following year. If we are to keep going with the five-year cycle for St Andrews then we will be back there in 2027 and then we might finally return to Muirfield who will have served their time after finally admitting women members into the club in 2019 – they last hosted The Open in 2014.

So the earliest likely return for Lytham might be 2028 or 2029 – in the meantime we might well see another Senior or Women's Open here before. Last year the Amateur Championship visited here and of course we have the Lytham Trophy every year.

In terms of the course Lytham measures 7,118 yards off the back plates, with a par of 70, but the course is a world-class links, famed for its pot bunkers and rolling terrain. We've seen Seve Ballesteros win twice here and Tony Jacklin made the long-awaited British breakthrough here in 1969.

Unlike any other course on the Open rota it begins with a par 3, with the railway line to the right of the opening hole, and the finish is an exacting one as demonstrated by Adam Scott's four successive bogeys to lose by one to Els.