The Wall Street Journal published a “Heard on the Street” column on May 31 called “Golf Is Now Cooler and Younger. The Stock Market Has Noticed.”
The headline says it all. The financial press has finally connected the dots between golf’s cultural refresh and what investors are actually buying. The Journal noted that golf-equipment stocks are outperforming, that the sport is drawing younger players, that the crusty country-club image is finally fading. They’re right on all three counts.
But they stopped one sentence short. The single largest force making golf younger, cooler, and more investable isn’t a new Tour star or a rules change. It’s the simulator industry. Indoor golf. Screen golf. The $1.9 billion market that’s pulling an entirely new demographic into the game.
We’ve been saying this for a year. It’s nice to see the WSJ catch up.
What the WSJ Got Right
The Journal’s core thesis is unassailable. Golf has a demographics problem that’s been worsening for decades, and something has finally started to bend the curve. The average golfer age has been creeping toward 60. Course closures have outpaced openings. The sport has been shrinking for a generation.
Something changed post-2020. Participation surged. Equipment sales exploded. Private clubs started waiting lists again. And the stock market noticed: shares of Acushnet (Titleist, FootJoy), Callaway (now Topgolf Callaway Brands), and other golf-adjacent companies have outperformed the broader market in 2025 and 2026.
The WSJ attributes this to “golf getting cool.” They point to Topgolf’s entertainment model, to younger Tour players, to the sport showing up in pop culture. All true. All surface-level.
What the WSJ Missed
The WSJ didn’t talk about simulators. Not once.
That’s a miss. Because the indoor golf boom is doing something no Tour player and no driving range chain can replicate: it’s putting a golf club in the hands of people who would never set foot on a course.
Walk into a Five Iron Golf or an X-Golf or a Golfzon Social on a Thursday night, and the median age is 28. Half the people there don’t own a set of clubs. They’re not there because they love golf. They’re there because their friends wanted to do something fun, and simulator golf is a social activity that happens to involve swinging at a screen. Then some of them catch the bug. Then some of them buy a home sim.
That pipeline — entertainment → exposure → obsession — is what’s driving golf’s youthification. The country club can’t do that. The municipal course can’t do that. Only simulator lounges in urban centers, staffed by people in their 20s and serving craft beer, can pull it off.
The FT noticed home simulators are mainstream. The Golf Digest ran a feature on whether Five Iron is the future of indoor golf. The WSJ talked about golf getting cooler. The three pieces describe the same phenomenon from different angles, and every one of them leads back to the same conclusion: indoor golf is the engine, and everything else is downstream.
The Numbers the WSJ Should Have Cited
The global golf simulator market hit $1.9 billion in 2025, with a projected 9.8% CAGR through 2034. That’s from Fortune Business Insights and Grand View Research. Our own coverage broke down the four forces — price compression, technology improvement, TGL awareness, and the facility explosion — that make that growth path more likely than not.
The facility boom alone tells the story. Sim lounges, training centers, and 24/7 keycard-access bays are opening in cities from Pipestone, Minnesota to Fort Worth, Texas. Forty-plus new facilities appeared in a single week earlier this year. The franchise war between Five Iron, Another Nine, and Back Nine is turning into a land grab that’s bringing sim golf to every mid-sized American city. We mapped that competition here.
That infrastructure is what creates new golfers. A sim bay in a commercial space doesn’t just generate revenue — it produces converts. People who try sim golf at a lounge are the same people who later search for “home golf simulator” on Google. They’re the same people who become the “younger, cooler” golfers the WSJ noticed.
What the Stock Market Is Actually Pricing
The WSJ’s mistake is treating golf stocks as a proxy for “the sport got cool.” The truth is narrower and more specific: the market is pricing the infrastructure buildout of indoor golf. Companies like GOLFZON, which dominates the Korean screen-golf market and is expanding aggressively in the U.S., are asset-light, technology-forward, and demographic-proof. They don’t care if the Tour ratings go up or down. They care about real estate, software subscriptions, and recurring revenue from people who want to hit balls at a screen.
The WSJ noticed the symptom. We’ve been covering the cause.
The market is telling you something. Listen to it the right way: the sim industry is the most investable part of golf, because it’s the only part that’s actually growing the base of players who pay.
What to Watch
Two things will determine whether the WSJ’s thesis holds up over the next 18 months:
First, the franchise buildout. If Five Iron, Another Nine, and Back Nine continue opening at their current pace (they are), the infrastructure will create its own demand. More bays = more new golfers = more stock market attention. The franchise war is a leading indicator. Read the full breakdown.
Second, TGL Season 2. The first season of the indoor tech-infused league was a proof of concept. Season 2, which starts in January 2027, will determine whether the momentum holds or fades. The league’s TV ratings and social media engagement are directly correlated with mainstream awareness of simulator golf. Here’s how TGL already made home sims mainstream.
The WSJ was right about the destination. They just missed the vehicle that’s getting us there.
This is part of our ongoing industry intelligence coverage — consumer-facing market analysis that cuts through the mainstream media noise. For the operator/commercial perspective, see our Sim Business beat. For company-specific news, see Brand Watch.