The boardrooms of European golf don’t usually generate headlines. The sport’s media spotlight tends to fall on Tour players, major championships, and the occasional controversy over handicap systems or equipment regulations.
But behind every tee time, manicured fairway, and clubhouse experience sits a more unglamorous reality: the owner or operator who signed the leases, hired the staff, weathered the rain-soaked winters, and kept the lights on.
That is precisely the constituency that the Golf Course Association Europe (GCAE) was built to serve. And it is precisely the world that Colin Mayes has spent nearly four decades navigating.
A C-Suite Track Record That Commands Attention
When evaluating a candidate’s fitness for an industry leadership role, the most convincing résumé is a long one with hard numbers to back it up. Mayes has both.
He served as CEO of Burhill Group Limited (BGL) for 19 years, stepping down in March 2025, during which time he oversaw the transformation of BGL into one of the most successful golf and leisure businesses in the United Kingdom.
The scale of that transformation is striking: the Guinness family-owned business grew from 8 golf facilities in 2006 to 29 outlets by the time of his departure, with further openings in the pipeline.
But the numbers alone tell only part of the story. What distinguishes Mayes from many golf executives is the breadth of what he built within those facilities.
Rather than running a static portfolio of traditional golf clubs, he engineered a business model capable of surviving the sport’s well-documented volatility.
BGL diversified from being purely golf into a broader leisure business, delivering higher returns to support reinvestment into ongoing ESG initiatives and the BGL team.
Under Mayes, the group expanded into adventure golf, health and fitness, technology-enabled driving ranges, and family entertainment venues, including a chain of indoor activity centers.
This growth turned BGL into a year-round leisure business, protected from the seasonal challenges often found within traditional golf operations.
That pivot from single-sport operator to a diversified leisure business is not a trivial achievement.
It required convincing a family-owned board to invest in categories outside their core product, building management systems capable of running fundamentally different venue types, and doing so while maintaining quality at the flagship golf facilities.
It is the kind of execution that impresses people who have tried to do it themselves.
Before BGL, Mayes had accumulated broad hospitality experience across Old English Inns, Greene King, The Magic Pub Company, and Forte, a commercial education that taught him to run operations at scale, manage margin under pressure, and compete for consumers in a fragmented leisure market.
It is a background notably different from that of the typical golf association president, who rises through the amateur or national federation route.
Mayes has always been, first and foremost, a businessman operating in the golf space, not a golf purist who learned to run a business.
He is currently a board member of both the UK Golf Federation and the European Golf Association (EGA), a dual role that has kept him at the intersection of national and continental golf governance even after leaving the BGL corner office.
When GCAE members voted unanimously to appoint him at the General Members’ Meeting on 21 May 2026, they were not taking a chance on an outsider; they were elevating someone already embedded in the sport’s architecture.
What GCAE Is, And Why It Matters More Than Ever
Understanding why Mayes’s particular profile matters requires understanding what GCAE actually does and what it is trying to become.
Founded in 2003, GCAE represents the owners and operators responsible for the long-term investment, sustainability, and management of golf facilities across Europe.
Its stated purpose is rooted in a simple truth: without financially healthy golf courses, there is no golf.
National associations do important work within their own borders, but the challenges facing European golf operators — regulatory pressure, sustainability mandates, labor market shifts, digital transformation, and the changing expectations of younger consumers — do not respect national boundaries.
GCAE has pinpointed crucial areas for impact, such as a Europe-wide benchmarking study that extends beyond membership counts to assess real golf participation.
This includes collecting detailed data on rounds played to better understand activity and engagement across Europe.
Additionally, GCAE aims to enhance golf course performance using data and industry insights, while promoting environmentally friendly practices to ensure a sustainable future for golf.
The organization recently launched the European Golf Benchmark, developed together with Players 1st and supported by The R&A.
This initiative gives golf facilities access to reliable business performance data and industry comparables for the first time at a continental scale, a tool that any operator running a multi-site portfolio will immediately recognize as foundational to serious management.
For Mayes, this is familiar territory. Running 22 courses across 10 venues at BGL required exactly the kind of systematic data discipline that the Benchmark is trying to bring to the broader market.
He did not wait for industry benchmarks to land in his inbox; he built internal intelligence systems and pushed his teams to measure what mattered.
That instinct will be an asset as GCAE attempts to convert its new data infrastructure into something member facilities actually use.
3 Challenges That Will Define His Presidency
The appointment comes with genuine momentum, a broader membership base, new corporate partnerships, a strengthened relationship with The R&A, and a flagship conference (the European Golf Business Conference, Vilamoura, November 2026) scheduled under the theme Fairways to the Future.
Incoming president Lars Havrevold, stepping into the role of Honorary Vice President after six years at the helm, leaves a structurally stronger organization than the one he inherited.
But Mayes walks into the role at a moment when the industry faces pressures that no amount of institutional momentum can fully offset.
Amplifying the Owner’s Voice in a Game Dominated by Governing Bodies
European golf’s power structure is not designed with owners and operators at the center. The R&A, national federations, professional tours, and equipment manufacturers each wield significant influence over the sport’s direction.
Operators, who collectively employ hundreds of thousands of people and generate the overwhelming majority of the sport’s consumer revenue, have historically been represented less loudly in those conversations.
GCAE CEO Renate Roeleveld has articulated this directly:
Facility owners and operators “make long-term decisions about investment, sustainability, employment, and the golfer experience — they deserve a strong voice in the conversations around golf.”
Mayes has spent nearly two decades on the other side of that table, as an operator who understood governance but was not primarily a governance figure.
His challenge will be to translate that operational credibility into genuine political influence within the sport’s power structures.
Credibility earned in one context does not automatically transfer.
Driving Membership Growth Across a Fragmented Continent
European golf is not a single market. It is several dozen distinct markets, each with different ownership structures, regulatory environments, cultural attitudes toward the sport, and economic cycles.
GCAE welcomed 130 golf facility owners and operators from 15 countries representing around 270 facilities at its 2025 conference — impressive engagement, but only a fraction of the continent’s estimated 6,000-plus golf facilities.
Turning GCAE from a club for the already-converted into a genuine pan-European platform means building the business case for membership in markets where English is not the primary business language, where local associations already command loyalty, and where the value proposition of continental representation is not always obvious to the owner of a single 9-hole facility in rural Catalonia or central Poland.
Mayes has a track record of building membership and customer bases. BGL’s growth in female membership and junior participation under his tenure demonstrated that deliberate inclusion strategies can move the dial.
But recruiting individual consumers to golf clubs is a different challenge from recruiting national associations and independent operators to an international body with an annual subscription.
Navigating the Sustainability Imperative Without Losing the Operators
Golf facilities face increasing pressures, including climate change, player expectations, resource limitations, and evolving environmental regulations.
Water scarcity is already an existential operational issue in Spain, Portugal, and parts of France. Energy costs have reshaped P&L profiles across northern Europe.
Environmental stewardship of golf courses requires owners to be equipped with the latest advice and technology.
The challenge for GCAE’s leadership is to position sustainability not as a regulatory burden but as a competitive advantage, and to do so in a way that is credible to operators whose primary concern is keeping their businesses financially viable.
Mayes’s record at BGL, where he pursued ESG initiatives within a commercially disciplined framework, suggests he understands this balance.
BGL’s chairman explicitly credited him with “delivering higher returns to support reinvestment into ongoing Group ESG initiatives”, a formulation that frames environmental investment as commercially compatible rather than commercially sacrificial.
That framing, applied at a European scale, will be central to GCAE’s ability to lead on sustainability without alienating the cost-conscious independent operators who make up much of its potential membership base.
The Succession Signal
One of the most underappreciated aspects of the GCAE announcement is the simultaneous appointment of Nathanaël Pietrzak-Swirc, CEO of UGOLF International, as Treasurer and President-elect.
UGOLF is France’s largest golf course operator, with a portfolio of facilities that spans multiple formats and business models.
Bringing a French operator into the succession line signals that GCAE is serious about its continental ambitions and that Mayes’s two-year term is explicitly designed as a bridge, not a destination.
That kind of structured succession planning, defining the handover before the tenure begins, is itself a mark of institutional maturity.
It is also, notably, the kind of thinking that characterizes experienced operators rather than career association figures.
Mayes knows what it looks like when an organization is managed for continuity rather than for the current leader’s legacy.
It was the right choice to signal it clearly from day one.
The Bottom Line
Colin Mayes arrives at GCAE with something more valuable than a prestigious title to add to a distinguished résumé.
He arrives with the specific kind of credibility that GCAE’s members, hard-nosed operators who have been around long enough to be suspicious of association politics, are most likely to respect: nearly four decades of building, managing, and growing golf businesses, including one of the continent’s most sophisticated multi-site portfolios.
The sport’s future in Europe will not be determined by the Tour.
It will be determined in the boardrooms and back offices of the facilities that deliver golf to ordinary consumers every day.
Whether those facilities are financially healthy, environmentally resilient, and commercially sophisticated enough to thrive through the next decade of disruption is precisely the question that GCAE exists to help answer.
With Mayes at the helm and a clear structure for what comes next, the association has positioned itself to be more than a networking body.
The question is whether it can become the authoritative voice it has always aspired to be — and whether the industry’s power brokers will make room for it.