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TOUR LIFE · THE OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP · JULY 2026
The final men’s major of 2026 tees off Thursday morning at Royal Birkdale Golf Club in Southport, England, and it arrives with more layered narrative than any Open in recent memory. Scottie Scheffler is the world number one and the +700 favourite. Rory McIlroy is playing the best links golf of his career and enters at +850. Tommy Fleetwood is the local — Southport-born, a Birkdale member — and the +1500 story of what would be, if it happened, one of the most emotional major championship victories of the modern era. And below the top of the leaderboard, this is the deepest and most competitive Open field in a decade.
Royal Birkdale, Reimagined
The R&A has been busy in the seven years since the 2017 Open here. Every one of Royal Birkdale’s eighteen holes has been altered — most subtly, three of them (the fifth, fourteenth, and fifteenth) substantially. The course now stretches to 7,223 yards from the championship tees, a full 67 yards longer than the 2017 setup, and the changes have been engineered specifically to counter the way modern equipment has shrunk historic links courses. The bunkering is deeper, the fairways narrower in specific landing zones, the run-off areas around several greens more punishing. Royal Birkdale in 2026 is not the same test that Jordan Spieth won in 2017. It is a harder, more strategic, more architecturally interesting version of itself.
The prevailing wind at Birkdale is a southwesterly off the Irish Sea, but the meteorological forecast for the week suggests a rare northerly pattern through Thursday and Friday, with the traditional southwest breeze filling in over the weekend. This matters more than it might sound. A northerly at Birkdale reverses the strategic character of several holes — turning helpful crosswinds into head-and-tail winds, converting difficult par-fours into holes where a mid-iron approach becomes reachable. Players who have prepared meticulously for the prevailing conditions will have to re-solve the course on Thursday morning in wind they haven’t practised against.
“Birkdale in a north wind is basically a different course. You spend two days playing shots you never rehearsed, and then the weekend comes and you’re playing the golf course you actually prepared for. It’s a real test of adaptability.” — A veteran Open competitor on the forecast conditions
The Favourites
Scottie Scheffler arrives at Birkdale with the shortest odds and the most consistent 2026 season of any player in the field. He has now won five times on the PGA Tour this year. He has finished no worse than T6 at any major. He has, as of Sunday’s Scottish Open, hit more greens in regulation than any other player over the last six weeks of tournament play. He is thirty years old — as of the final day of the US Open, when the Shinnecock gallery sang him happy birthday — and he is playing the best golf of his career, on the game’s most demanding stage, with the calm efficiency that has become his signature. The question is not whether Scheffler can win at Birkdale. It is whether anyone can beat him.
Rory McIlroy is the answer to that question that most people are quietly hoping for. He arrived at the 2017 Open at Birkdale as the pre-tournament co-favourite and finished T4 — a result that felt, at the time, like a small defeat but reads now as a genuine positive because it confirmed the course suits his game. His iron flighting in wind, his ability to shape the driver in either direction, and his long-standing comfort with links golf all point to a player who should contend here. He has come to Birkdale off the back of a T2 at the Scottish Open, having chased Tom Kim’s Sunday 64 without ever quite catching it. The form is there. The comfort is there. What remains uncertain is whether the mental space for a fifth major — added to the two Masters titles he won in 2025 and 2026 — is now settled enough to allow the final piece of concentration his game requires.
The Local Story
And then there is Tommy Fleetwood. Southport-born. A boyhood member at Birkdale. A career that has produced fifteen wins on the DP World Tour, a Ryder Cup partnership with Francesco Molinari that will be discussed for decades, and — most conspicuously — zero major championships. Fleetwood has been the best player without a major for so long that the phrase now feels almost synonymous with his name, which is a strange kind of legacy for a golfer of his obvious talent. He is +1500 for the week. He arrives at his home course with everything he needs to write the story of a lifetime, and the pressure of that possibility is going to test him in ways that no golf-related pressure has yet.
The image that would follow a Fleetwood victory at Birkdale — the Southport crowd, the family in the gallery, the boy from just down the road lifting the Claret Jug on his own boyhood course — is one of those tableaus that would immediately become one of the defining photographs of the decade. The pressure of that image being possible is itself considerable. Fleetwood has spoken about it this week with characteristic dry realism: “It would be a lovely story. It’s not the story I’m going to try to write. I’m going to try to write the story where I hit the fairway on Thursday morning.”
Below the Headline Names
Matt Fitzpatrick, +1500, is the pick of the analysts. He ranks second in this field in true strokes-gained tee-to-green over the last twelve months, third in adjusted scoring average, and third in bogey avoidance — a combination of statistical strengths that suits the demanding character of Birkdale’s setup almost exactly. He has won at Shinnecock before, in 2022. His links game has always been quietly excellent. If the models were choosing, the models would take Fitzpatrick.
Tom Kim, having won the Scottish Open on Sunday with a bogey-free closing 64, arrives with the kind of momentum that has produced Open champions before. Aaron Rai, the reigning PGA champion, brings the specific technical profile that suits links golf almost as well as it suited Aronimink. Xander Schauffele, still hunting for the major that would elevate him into the top tier of his generation’s conversation, has finished top-10 at each of the last three Opens. And Cameron Young, whose game we profiled in May as the best in the world without a major, arrives with another summer’s worth of near-misses to convert into a story.
The Prediction
Scheffler is the obvious call. Fitzpatrick is the model call. Fleetwood is the story call. The romantic pick is McIlroy, playing the finest golf of his career on a course that suits him perfectly, chasing a Career Grand Slam finish that would be — depending on how you count — a fifth or sixth major and the completion of a personal narrative arc that began at St Andrews in 2005 when he made his amateur debut. If we had to choose one name, we would choose Fitzpatrick. If we could choose two, we would add McIlroy. And we would watch every shot on Sunday, because whoever lifts the Claret Jug this week is going to have earned it against the strongest field in a decade.