The Origins of FootGolf: How a Post-Training Kickabout Became a Global Sport

Every sport starts somewhere, and FootGolf's beginning is more recent — and more specific — than most. The modern format of the game was formalised in the Netherlands in 2008 by Michael Jansen and Bas Korsten, who wrote its first set of regulations by adapting the rules of traditional golf to a football.

The idea itself traces back further, to a post-training kickabout: Bas Korsten's brother, professional footballer Willem Korsten, played a similar game with teammates during his time at Tottenham Hotspur between 1999 and 2001, kicking a football around a golf course to unwind after training. Korsten was an established top-flight footballer, which meant the informal game had, from its very first moment, a genuine connection to professional football rather than being purely a golf-club novelty — a link that's arguably part of why the sport appealed so quickly to football-first audiences once it was formalised.

The First Tournament

In 2008, Jansen organised the first nine-hole FootGolf tournament played on an actual golf course in the Netherlands, contested by a mix of Dutch and Belgian professional footballers. It was a small, largely informal event — but it proved the format worked, and word spread quickly through Dutch and Belgian football and golf circles.

From Local Novelty to International Sport

What started as a golf-course curiosity took only a few years to go global. By 2012, national federations had begun forming across Europe and the Americas, setting the stage for the sport's first true international governing body — a story we cover in Inside the FIFG: The Governing Body Behind International FootGolf. The speed of that transition is unusual: most sports take generations to move from an informal pastime to a codified international competition structure. FootGolf did it inside four years.

Why It Caught On

FootGolf's appeal is straightforward: it takes the strategic, hole-by-hole structure of golf — course management, reading the ground, controlling distance — and replaces the golf swing with a football kick, a skill far more people already have. That accessibility, combined with real golf courses as venues, is a large part of why the sport spread as fast as it did. It also solved a real problem for golf courses themselves: FootGolf gave venues a way to bring in a new, often younger demographic during quieter tee-time slots, without requiring any change to the course's physical layout beyond cutting a larger hole.

Where the Name Comes From

The name itself is a straightforward compound of its two parent sports — football and golf — reflecting exactly what Jansen and Korsten set out to build: golf's course-management challenge, played with football's most basic skill.

Today, FootGolf is played on dedicated and repurposed courses across dozens of countries, with a competitive structure running from local club leagues all the way to a World Cup contested by well over a thousand players. It's a rare thing in sport: a game whose entire history, from invention to global federation, fits within less than two decades.