UK Golf Guy On Golf Digest's Latest World Ranking: "The methodology for selecting the list is fairly awful."

UK Golf Guy maintains a compilation hybrid list of the world's best courses based on various lists, but he's decided to no longer include Golf Digest's stab at an international list due to a long list of issues.

He details them in this post and while his concerns are not shocking given the awfulness of their last attempt in January 2016, the latest effort seems even more unseemly.

He writes:

Well, the 2018 edition is out and despite the title 'World's 100 Greatest Golf Courses' they have stopped bothering to rank golf courses from all over the world. Instead they have made this a list of their top 100 golf courses outside of the USA. And thoroughly disingenuously, they have shown the previous positions of the golf courses in the rankings - despite the comparator including courses from the USA.

This allows many courses to claim they have moved up places in the world rankings. The tweet below from Bluffs Ho Tram in Vietnam is a prime example.

The methodology for selecting the list is fairly awful. The Golf Digest team ask 'international panelists organized by our affiliate magazines around the world'. Oh dear, that would be the affiliate magazines who rely on the course's advertising to pay their bills, the associate magazines whose staff get wined and dined by the latest new courses wanting to make a splash.