Footballers and golf go back a long way, but most of the genuinely good golfers in the game are retired. The ex-pros have the time, the knees and the diaries for three rounds a week.
The current crop is a different matter. Fitting a handicap around league football, European nights and international breaks takes some doing. Strip the list back to active players in Europe who play off single figures and four names stand up, all of them England internationals. One of them is in a different league to the rest.
The figures below were reported at different times and in different contexts, from home-club handicaps to Pro-Am marks to a captain’s best guess about his team-mates. Treat the ranking as informed rather than official.
1. Harry Kane: 1.9
Clubs: Beaverbrook, Queenwood; Wentworth’s West Course a favourite
The Bayern Munich striker and England captain is comfortably the best golfer among active footballers in Europe, and he is still getting better.
Kane took up the game at 16. By 2019 he was playing off four, and he was described as a three in 2024 and again in January 2025. By June this year his handicap had come down to 1.9 at Beaverbrook, as we reported in our rundown of the England squad’s golfers. He has also gone round The Grove in one under par.
National Club Golfer reported that Kane is a member at Beaverbrook and Queenwood, two of the most exclusive clubs in England, both tucked away in Surrey and closed to the public. The West Course at Wentworth is among his favourite tracks.
How often he plays depends on where he is. In interviews in 2024 with Golf Monthly and GOLF.com, Kane described his Tottenham days, when he and his team-mates tried to play “as much as we could after training” and became “a bit obsessed with it.”
International duty helps.
“We get to play JCB Golf and Country Club quite a lot when we’re together with England,”
he said. Since joining Bayern he has played plenty with Thomas Müller, though his first Bavarian winter was a struggle. During that cold spell he admitted he had “only been to the course once or twice” since moving to Munich.
This year Kane led a group of England team-mates out for a round with Brooks Koepka at Dutchman’s Pipe in Florida.
2. Harry Maguire: around 6
Clubs: No membership on record
Asked by Golf Monthly in 2024 to rank the golfers in his England camp, Kane was clear about his centre-back: “Maguire I think plays off about six, Pickford’s about an eight. Maddison hits a really nice ball but I’m not sure of his exact handicap.”
Other reports have put Maguire anywhere between four and six, which would make him a solid second on this list whichever end of that range is right.
There is no record of where Maguire is a member. He teed it up in a LIV Golf Pro-Am in Andalucía, and he was the one pushing for a golf simulator at England’s Euro 2024 training base. A man who lobbies for a simulator at a major tournament clearly takes his golf seriously.
3. James Maddison: around 9.5
Clubs: Hosts his own charity day at Centurion Club, St Albans
Kane may not have known Maddison’s handicap in 2024, but by this summer it had settled at about 9.5, lowered after a couple of good rounds. That puts the midfielder just inside the single-figure cut.
The Maddison Invitational is an annual 18-hole pro-am-style charity event at Centurion Club in St Albans. The 2024 edition raised £75,000 for Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice, according to the charity. Hosting there does not make him a member, and there is no reliable picture of how often he plays away from his own event.
4. Jordan Pickford: between 8 and 9.9
Clubs: No membership on record; played the Wentworth celebrity Pro-Am
Kane reckoned Pickford was “about an eight” in 2024. That September, Pickford was listed at 9.9 for the BMW PGA Championship celebrity Pro-Am at Wentworth.
On the more formal figure, Maddison edges him by a decimal point. On his captain’s estimate, Pickford would be third. Either way, it is close enough to settle with a fourball.
Pickford was part of the England party that joined Kane and Koepka at Dutchman’s Pipe this year, so he is still playing. Where he plays week to week is not on record.
Related: Inside the England Golf XI: Who Is the Best Golfer in Tuchel’s Squad?
How do they compare with the retired brigade?
Retirement frees up a lot of tee times, and the ex-pros set a high bar.
- Alan Hansen, the former Liverpool and Scotland defender, has been as low as 1.7 and holds memberships at Hillside and Queenwood. Kane’s 1.9 puts him within touching distance of that mark while still playing top-flight football.
- Jamie Redknapp plays off four and is a Queenwood member who aims to play “two or three times a week”.
- Alan Shearer plays to around six and has played Pro-Ams at his home club, Close House, including when it hosted the British Masters.
- Jimmy Bullard got to scratch and reached the final stage of EuroPro Tour Q School, though he never made a cut in his handful of starts on the third-tier circuit.
- Gareth Bale has been reported at close to scratch since retiring and has played the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
Maguire, Maddison and Pickford sit roughly where Shearer and Redknapp do, which is respectable club golf for anyone, let alone a full-time international footballer.
Kane is the outlier. Only Hansen, Bullard and Bale have been lower, and none of them was leading the line for Bayern Munich and England at the time.
Simon Bale
Simon Bale is the publisher of Golf Today. A low single-figure handicap golfer, he was previously a major shareholder and course reviewer for Top100GolfCourses.com for over a decade, starting in 2010. Through this role, he developed extensive knowledge of golf course design and architecture while playing more than 300 courses worldwide.