Solheim Cup Explained: Format, Points and Team Selection
The Solheim Cup explained for British golf fans: the three-day format, the 28 points, how Europe and the United States pick twelve players, and its UK history.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Ryder Cup & Team Golf24 min read
- First played
- 1990
- Players a side
- 12
- Points available
- 28
- Points to win outright
- 14½
The Solheim Cup is the women's professional team match between Europe and the United States, the counterpart of the Ryder Cup. Twelve players a side contest 28 matches over three days: eight foursomes and eight fourballs across the first two days, and twelve singles on the third. Each match is worth a point. A side needs 14½ to win, and 14 is enough for the holders to keep the trophy. Europe's team is run through the Ladies European Tour, whose offices are at Buckinghamshire Golf Club in Denham, and the American side through the LPGA.
Suzann Pettersen stood over a putt of about seven feet on the 18th green at Gleneagles in September 2019 with the whole match depending on it. She had barely competed for two years, she had been a contested captain's pick, and the score was level at thirteen and a half each with hers the only match left on the course. She holed it, Europe won by a point, and she announced her retirement within the hour.
Twenty-eight points and what each side needs from them
Every number in the format follows from two decisions: twelve players, and three days.
Twelve players produce twelve singles matches, since everyone plays on the last day. The first two days are given over to pairs, four matches in a morning session and four in an afternoon one, which makes sixteen. Sixteen and twelve are 28.
An even total allows a tie, and the match has never had a tie-break. The side holding the cup therefore starts with a small advantage that does not appear on the scoreboard. It can finish level and go home with the trophy. The challenger has to win.
- 12Players in each team
- 28Matches played
- 14.5Points to win outright
- 14Points for the holders to retain
The format used since 2002, and in 1996 and 1998. Earlier matches had smaller teams and fewer points.
Nothing is carried over between contests except possession. There is no aggregate, no home-and-away leg, and the previous result matters only in deciding who needs 14 and who needs 14½.
At the end of the 2024 match the United States had won eleven of the nineteen contests and Europe seven, with one tied. That tally moves every two years, and the direction of travel is more revealing than the total: the Americans won seven of the first ten, and the sides have been close to level since.
The three days in order
| Session | Format | Matches | Players used per side | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Friday morning | Foursomes | 4 | 8 | 4 |
| Friday afternoon | Fourballs | 4 | 8 | 4 |
| Saturday morning | Foursomes | 4 | 8 | 4 |
| Saturday afternoon | Fourballs | 4 | 8 | 4 |
| Sunday | Singles | 12 | 12 | 12 |
By custom the foursomes are played in the morning and the fourballs in the afternoon. The order of the two formats is in the gift of the home side, as it is in the men's match, and a home captain who thought her team stronger at fourballs could ask to open with them.
Foursomes
Two players share one ball and hit alternate shots. One of the pair tees off on the odd-numbered holes and the other on the even, regardless of who holed the last putt. It is the more exposing of the two formats, because a poor shot is handed straight to a partner, and because a player may go twenty minutes without hitting a putt and then face one of six feet. The Rules of Golf deal with it in Rule 22.
Fourballs
Each of the four players plays her own ball throughout, and the lower score of each pair counts on every hole. This is the format that produces birdies. One partner can attack a flag knowing the other is safely on the green, and a player whose game has gone can be carried for a few holes. Rule 23 covers it.
Who sits out
Eight of the twelve are used in each pairs session, so four are left out every time. A captain is free to play someone in all four sessions or in none of them. In practice the strongest players go out four times, most of the team plays two or three, and one or two wait until Sunday. Playing all five matches in three days is hard physical work, particularly on a hilly course, and captains have become more willing to rest a leading player for one session.
- Thursday eveningThe captains submit their Friday morning pairings and the two lists are matched to give the first four games.
- Friday morningFour foursomes. Four players from each team sit out.
- Friday afternoonFour fourballs, with pairings handed in during the morning session. Eight points have been played for by the close.
- SaturdayThe same again: four foursomes, then four fourballs. Sixteen points decided.
- Saturday eveningEach captain lists all twelve players in order for the singles without seeing the other list.
- SundayTwelve singles, sent out at intervals. The match ends when one side reaches 14½ or the holders reach 14.
The standard sequence. The home side can ask for fourballs before foursomes, and bad weather has sometimes carried a session into the following morning.
How a match is scored and how the total builds
In the 2023 contest at Finca Cortesín in Andalusia, the United States won all four foursomes on the first morning, the first time a foursomes session had been swept in the event's history. By Saturday night the score was 8-8.
That swing is possible because of the way match play counts. Strokes are not added up. Each hole is won by the side that takes fewer shots on it, or halved if they take the same, and the match is over when one side is more holes ahead than there are holes left. A result of "3 and 2" means three up with two to play. A match that is level after eighteen holes is a half, worth half a point to each team, and nobody plays a nineteenth.
Two consequences follow. A disaster costs one hole and no more, so a player can take eight on a par four and be only one down. And putts can be conceded: an opponent may give a short putt, which then counts as holed, and once given it cannot be taken back or refused.
When a concession is not a concession
The concession rule produced the worst-tempered episode in the event's history. At St Leon-Rot in Germany in 2015, in a fourball carried over to Sunday morning, the American rookie Alison Lee picked up her ball a foot and a half from the 17th hole believing the putt had been given. It had not. Charley Hull and Suzann Pettersen claimed the hole, as the Rules entitled them to, and went on to win the match. Europe led 10-6 going into the singles. The Americans, by their own account furious, won the singles 8½ to 3½ and the cup by a point.
The tie of 2023
Back at Finca Cortesín, the Sunday singles were shared 6-6 as well, and the final score was 14-14, the first tie the Solheim Cup had produced. Two results late in the day made it. Caroline Hedwall of Sweden came from behind against Ally Ewing to win 2 up. Carlota Ciganda, the one Spaniard in the team, beat Nelly Korda 2 and 1 in front of a home gallery, and Europe reached fourteen.
Fourteen was all that was required. Europe had won in 2019 and 2021, and as holders kept the cup. The Americans left having not lost, with nothing to show for it. It is an unsatisfying rule, but a play-off at the end of 28 matches would hand the whole contest to two or four players chosen on the spot.
- Foursomes8
- Fourballs8
- Singles12
Points available in each format across the three days. Foursomes and fourballs are split evenly over Friday and Saturday.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Foursomes | 8 |
| Fourballs | 8 |
| Singles | 12 |
The singles carry the largest share, which is why a lead of two or even four points on Saturday night has been overturned more than once.
How Europe's Solheim Cup team is chosen
Europe has always used three routes into the team. The proportions have changed from match to match and are confirmed by the Ladies European Tour when each captain is appointed.
For the 2023 and 2024 matches the division was two, six and four. The leading two players on the LET's Solheim Cup points list qualified first. The next six places went to the highest-ranked eligible Europeans on the Rolex Women's World Golf Rankings who had not already qualified. The captain then chose four.
The LET points list
Points are earned by finishing position in tournaments on the Ladies European Tour during a qualifying period that runs for well over a year and closes a few weeks before the match. The list rewards golfers who play a full season in Europe. It is the one route open to a player who is not yet established in America, and it is the tour's means of making its own schedule count. Our guide to how the Ladies European Tour works sets out the season those points come from.
The world rankings places
Most of Europe's best players compete mainly on the LPGA Tour in the United States, where the fields are stronger and the purses larger, and appear on the LET a handful of times a year. They would rarely top a list built on LET results. The rankings places exist for them. Because the women's ranking weighs every tour by the strength of its fields, on principles similar to those in our explainer on how golf's world rankings award points, a European who is contending in LPGA events will be near the top of it wherever she plays.
The picks
The balance between the routes has shifted towards the rankings and the captain. Earlier teams took more players from the LET list: three in 2019, with five from the rankings and four picks. The 2021 team, selected after the pandemic had wiped out much of the qualifying schedule, had six picks. Pettersen herself was a pick in 2019 after a long absence for the birth of her son, which is as clear a case as exists of a captain choosing on judgement alone.
A player must also be a member of the Ladies European Tour to be selected. The requirement works exactly as its equivalent does in the men's game, where the membership rule is examined at length in our piece on how Europe's Ryder Cup twelve are picked: it ties the stars who live abroad to the home tour and gives that tour something to bargain with.
How the American team is chosen and who can play for which side
The United States relies far more on its own points list. Under the system in place since the 2021 match, seven players qualify from the LPGA's Solheim Cup points standings, two more come from the world rankings and the captain picks three. Before that it was eight, two and two.
American points are earned over two seasons for high finishes in LPGA tournaments. The majors are worth double, and results in the year of the match count for more than those from the year before, so that the list leans towards current form. Since almost every leading American plays the LPGA Tour full time, the list and the rankings usually agree, and the picks tend to be used for a rookie in form or an experienced partner.
| Route | Europe | United States |
|---|---|---|
| Tour points list | Two places, from LET results | Seven places, from LPGA results |
| World rankings | Six places | Two places |
| Captain's picks | Four | Three |
| Tour membership required | Ladies European Tour | LPGA |
| Body confirming the criteria | Ladies European Tour | LPGA |
The contrast says something about the two tours. The LPGA is where its players earn their living, so a list of LPGA results finds the best Americans without help. The LET is not where most of Europe's leading players spend their year, so its list can be trusted with only two places.
Eligibility
A player for Europe must be a European national. A player for the United States must be an American citizen, and the LPGA's criteria have at various times set conditions on how and when that citizenship was acquired, which the tour has revised more than once. Anyone unsure about a particular case should read the current criteria, because this is the part of the rules most often restated wrongly.
What matters more is who is eligible for neither side. The Solheim Cup is Europe against the United States, and women's golf at the top is not a contest between those two. Players from South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, China and Canada have won a large share of the major championships played since 2000, and none of them can take part. The men's match has the same gap. It is wider in the women's game, and it is the strongest argument against treating the Solheim Cup as a measure of where the best golf is played.
It is better understood as what it is: a contest between two tours and two traditions, with a history of its own.
When it is played: the two-year cycle and the two back-to-back matches
The cycle is biennial and alternates between continents. That part has never changed. The year has, twice, and both times the cause lay in the men's game.
From 1990 to 2002 the Solheim Cup was played in even years, with the Ryder Cup in the odd ones. When the 2001 Ryder Cup was postponed for a year after the attacks of 11 September, the men's match moved into the even years and stayed there. To avoid a permanent clash the women's match switched. It was played at Interlachen in Minnesota in 2002 and then again at Barsebäck in Sweden in 2003, twelve months later, and continued in odd years from there.
The same thing happened in reverse two decades on. The 2020 Ryder Cup was put back to 2021 by the pandemic, which left both matches in odd years. In 2021 they were three weeks apart on the same continent. In 2023 the Solheim Cup in Spain finished five days before the Ryder Cup began in Rome. The Solheim Cup then moved again, with a match in Virginia in 2024 only a year after Finca Cortesín, and has been an even-year event since.
| Period | Solheim Cup years | Ryder Cup years | Reason for the change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 to 2002 | Even | Odd, to 1999 | Original schedule |
| 2002 and 2003 | Consecutive years | Even from 2002 | Ryder Cup postponed from 2001 |
| 2003 to 2023 | Odd | Even to 2018, then 2021 and 2023 | Women's match moved to avoid a clash |
| 2023 and 2024 | Consecutive years | Odd from 2021 | Ryder Cup postponed from 2020 |
| From 2024 | Even | Odd | Current arrangement |
The consecutive matches were not kind to the hosts of the second. A team event draws part of its force from scarcity, and a contest held a year after the last one has less of it. For the players there was a different cost: a captain's pick left out in 2023 had almost no time to change the selectors' minds.
Recent matches have been held in late August or September, after the Women's Open, and in Europe about as late in the season as the light allows for two sessions a day.
The British and Irish courses that have staged it
Five matches have been played in Britain and Ireland. None has been in England.
| Year | Course | Country | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1992 | Dalmahoy | Scotland | Europe 11½, USA 6½ |
| 1996 | St Pierre | Wales | USA 17, Europe 11 |
| 2000 | Loch Lomond | Scotland | Europe 14½, USA 11½ |
| 2011 | Killeen Castle | Ireland | Europe 15, USA 13 |
| 2019 | Gleneagles | Scotland | Europe 14½, USA 13½ |
Dalmahoy, 1992
The second match, on a wet week outside Edinburgh, was expected to go the way of the first. The American team was full of major champions and the European one was not. Europe won by five points. Laura Davies won all three of her matches, and the captain, Mickey Walker of England, had a result that established the event as a contest. Without Dalmahoy the Solheim Cup might have gone the way of several other one-sided team matches.
St Pierre, 1996
At Chepstow, in the first match with twelve players a side, Europe led 9-7 after two days. The United States then took ten of the twelve points available in the singles. It remains the standard warning about a Saturday night lead.
Loch Lomond, 2000
Europe won for the second time, on a course beside the loch that was at that time the home of the Scottish Open. The match is remembered for an incident in one of the fourballs. Annika Sörenstam chipped in at the 13th, and the American side pointed out that she had played out of turn and required the shot to be replayed, as the Rules of match play allowed. She missed the second attempt and left the green in tears. The ruling was correct. It soured the week. The total of 26 points that year was also a one-off: every other match since 1996 has been played for 28.
Killeen Castle, 2011
With three matches still out on the last afternoon in County Meath, the United States were on course to win. Europe took two and a half points from the three. Pettersen birdied the last three holes to beat Michelle Wie, Caroline Hedwall won the final two holes to halve with Ryann O'Toole, and Azahara Muñoz closed out Angela Stanford. The captain was Alison Nicholas.
Gleneagles, 2019
The PGA Centenary course in Perthshire had held the Ryder Cup five years earlier, and it is the one course in Britain to have staged both matches. The sides were level at 8-8 after two days and level again with one match on the course. Bronte Law of Stockport won her singles on the 17th to bring Europe to thirteen and a half, and Pettersen's putt did the rest. Catriona Matthew, a Scot captaining in Scotland, had picked Pettersen to a good deal of surprise.
That England has never been host is partly an accident of who bid. The event goes to venues and national bodies prepared to underwrite it, and Scotland, backed by its tourism agency, has been the most willing in these islands. The English resort that held the men's match four times, described in our guide to the Brabazon course at The Belfry, has never staged the women's.
The English players who shaped it
Laura Davies
Davies played in the first twelve Solheim Cups, from 1990 to 2011, without missing one. At the end of the 2024 match she still held the European records for appearances and for points won, 25 of them, from more matches than anyone on either side has played. Records move, and the points mark is the one most likely to be passed; no other player had reached twelve teams by then.
Her importance was greater than the numbers. In the early 1990s she was the one European whom the Americans regarded as their equal or better, a winner of majors on their own tour, and she played the match with a length off the tee that no opponent could answer. She was left out for the first time in 2013 and later returned as a vice-captain.
Alison Nicholas
Nicholas, from Yorkshire by upbringing and five feet tall, was Davies's regular partner in the early matches and the other half of the pairing that won at Dalmahoy. She played in six Solheim Cups from 1990 to 2000 and won the US Women's Open in 1997. As captain she lost in Illinois in 2009 and won at Killeen Castle two years later, which makes her one of the few to have won the cup as both player and captain.
Mickey Walker and the first four teams
Walker captained Europe in each of the first four matches, from Lake Nona to St Pierre. Her players came from half a dozen countries and from a tour far smaller than the one their opponents shared every week, and she had to make a side of them with no precedent to follow. Losing heavily in 1990 and winning in 1992 with much the same group is the measure of what she did.
Hull, Hall and the present generation
Charley Hull made her debut in Colorado in 2013 at seventeen, the youngest player the match had seen. She beat Paula Creamer in the singles and then asked her for an autograph. Europe won 18-10, its first victory on American soil. Hull played in every match from then to 2024.
Georgia Hall, from Bournemouth, joined the team in 2017, won the Women's Open at Royal Lytham the following summer, and at Gleneagles in 2019 won four matches out of four, three of them alongside Céline Boutier of France. Law's point that same Sunday made it an unusually English week. Trish Johnson, Mel Reid, Karen Stupples and Jodi Ewart Shadoff are among the others from England who have played.
Solheim Cup vs Ryder Cup: what is shared and what is not
The playing format is identical: twelve a side, 28 points, the same three days, 14½ to win, the holders keeping the trophy on a tie. A spectator who understands one understands the other.
| Feature | Solheim Cup | Ryder Cup |
|---|---|---|
| First played | 1990 | 1927 |
| European side run by | Ladies European Tour | Ryder Cup Europe |
| American side run by | LPGA | PGA of America |
| Teams and points | Twelve a side, 28 points | Twelve a side, 28 points |
| Selection routes at the most recent matches described here | Points list, world rankings and picks | Points list and picks |
| Held in England | Never | Fifteen times, most recently 2002 |
Who runs each side
This is the main structural difference. Both Solheim Cup teams belong to tours, the organisations that stage tournaments week by week. In the men's game the American team belongs to the PGA of America, a body of club professionals quite separate from the PGA Tour, and the European side to a partnership in which the DP World Tour is the senior member. The Solheim Cup's arrangement is simpler, and it explains why its selection criteria are tied so directly to tour points and tour membership.
Scale
The Ryder Cup is one of the largest events in sport and is priced accordingly. The Solheim Cup is smaller: fewer spectators, smaller grandstands, lower ticket prices and a shorter build. That has advantages for anyone attending. It is possible to walk with a match and see most of the shots, which is close to impossible at a Ryder Cup, and the players are near enough to hear.
The crowds have grown with each European staging, and the atmosphere on the first tee is now a deliberate copy of the men's match, with a grandstand around the tee and singing before the opening shots.
Courses
Solheim Cup venues in Europe have been resort and parkland courses, chosen with hotel rooms and hospitality in mind as much as architecture: Dalmahoy, St Pierre, Barsebäck, Halmstad, Killeen Castle, St Leon-Rot. The course is set up shorter than for the men, and the home captain has the same influence over how it is prepared.
Captains, vice-captains and the exchange of pairings
Each tour appoints its own captain, generally about two years before the match and generally a former player with several appearances behind her. Europe's has been named by the Ladies European Tour and the American by the LPGA, and neither process involves a public shortlist. Recent European captains have served twice, once at home and once away: Matthew in 2019 and 2021, and Pettersen in 2023 and 2024. The men's equivalent is covered in our guide to the Ryder Cup captaincy.
A Solheim Cup captain does not hit a shot. Her influence is in three places: the picks, the pairings and the order.
Vice-captains
The captain chooses her own assistants, three or four of them in recent matches. They follow matches on the course and report back, which matters because the captain cannot be in four places during a pairs session. A vice-captain's opinion on who looks tired or who is holing putts shapes the next set of pairings. Many are former captains or future ones, and the role has become the apprenticeship for the job.
How pairings are exchanged
Neither captain sees the other's choices before committing her own. For each pairs session both hand in a list of four pairs in the order they will play, and the lists are laid side by side: first against first, second against second. A captain can guess where her opposite number will put her strongest pair. She cannot know.
The afternoon pairings have to be submitted while the morning matches are still in progress, so a captain is choosing players for the fourballs before she knows how they have finished in the foursomes.
For the singles each captain ranks all twelve. The classic argument is whether to put the best players out first, to build a lead and change the colour of the scoreboard, or to hold them back in case the match goes to the final games. Both approaches have won and both have lost.
The envelope
One provision is rarely needed. Before the singles each captain names a player to stand down if an opponent is unfit to play, and the match between the two is recorded as a half. At Killeen Castle in 2011 the American Cristie Kerr could not play because of a wrist injury. On that occasion the point was conceded outright to her opponent, Karen Stupples.
The Junior Solheim Cup and the route from amateur golf
In the days before the main match, on a course nearby, the Ping Junior Solheim Cup is played between twelve European girls and twelve Americans. It began in 2002 and follows the same pattern as the senior event on a shorter timetable, with foursomes, fourballs and singles. The players are aged eighteen and under and are amateurs. They then attend the Solheim Cup itself as guests, which is the point of the scheduling.
A good number of those who have played in the junior match have gone on to the senior one. It works as a first look at match play in team colours with a crowd watching, something stroke play amateur golf does not offer.
From the Curtis Cup to the professional team
For a British or Irish player the junior match is one of several steps. The others are amateur. England Golf runs national squads from under-16 level, and the best of those players are picked for Great Britain and Ireland in the Vagliano Trophy against the Continent of Europe and in the Curtis Cup against the United States, the amateur match administered by the R&A on this side and described in our piece on the Curtis Cup and women's amateur golf.
The link between that match and the Solheim Cup is direct. Hull played in the Curtis Cup in 2012 and in the Solheim Cup a year later. Law was in the side that won the 2016 Curtis Cup in Ireland, three years before her point at Gleneagles.
There is one adjustment to make on the way. In amateur golf a British player represents Great Britain and Ireland. As a professional she represents Europe, alongside the Swedes and Spaniards she played against in the Vagliano Trophy.
The usual path after amateur golf runs through an American college or straight to the LET's qualifying school, then onto the LET points list or up the world rankings. No selection criterion mentions the amateur record. But captains pick players they have watched in match play, and the Curtis Cup is where they first watched most of the British ones.
How it began: Karsten Solheim and Lake Nona
By the late 1980s the women's tours on both sides of the Atlantic wanted a team match of their own. What they lacked was someone to pay for it.
Karsten Solheim was born in Norway in 1911, taken to the United States as a small child, and worked as an engineer before he began designing putters in his garage. The company that grew from them was Ping. He and his wife Louise were long-standing supporters of women's professional golf at a time when few manufacturers were, and when the LPGA and the European women's tour agreed on a match he put up the money and his name.
The first Solheim Cup was played at Lake Nona in Florida in November 1990. It was a modest affair by later standards: eight players a side, sixteen points, and an American win by 11½ to 4½.
| Year | Venue | Players a side | Points played for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Lake Nona, Florida | 8 | 16 |
| 1992 | Dalmahoy, Scotland | 10 | 18 |
| 1994 | The Greenbrier, West Virginia | 10 | 20 |
| 1996 | St Pierre, Wales | 12 | 28 |
The growth was quick. Teams went to ten in 1992 and twelve in 1996, at which point the format matched the Ryder Cup's. The speed says something about how the event was regarded: it was built to be a counterpart to the men's match and was brought into line with it as soon as each tour had twelve players it was prepared to field.
Solheim died in 2000. His family and the company have remained attached to the event, and the junior match still carries the Ping name. It is unusual for a sporting trophy to be named after a living sponsor and more unusual for the name to outlast the reason for it. In this case the name stayed because the match became worth having.
More guides to the game are on the golf hub, and the rest of this section starts from the England page.