Birmingham Tee-Off Time Announced as Pitch Capitalizes on Golf-and-More's Growing City Appeal
The London-based simulator and entertainment firm has grown rapidly since 2022, and aims to leverage a combination of direct operations and franchising for further growth.
The UK-based city golf entertainment company Pitch continues to make waves with the announcement of another new venue, its first in the UK midlands.
Having started out in London’s Bishopsgate area in 2016, the company has been growing rapidly over the past three years. Two more venues have opened in that timeframe — a second in London, in Soho, before the first steps of an international expansion with a launch in Dublin, Ireland in 2024 — and two more are slated to open their doors in the spring of 2025.
A fourth venue, London’s third, will open in Canary Wharf on the bank of the Thames in east London in February and the indoor-golf-and-more operation will open its fifth unit in Birmingham in April.
There are also advanced plans for a sixth, in Manchester, with no date publicly confirmed for that venue as yet.
What’s been happening with Pitch, specifically? And how does it fit into broader golf and business trends? Let’s take a closer look.
The Pitch Business Breakdown
There are a number of core elements to the Pitch value proposition, namely:
Locations in fashionable city addresses that appeal to corporate employees
Bays to rent by the hour (or three) for casuals and visitors
State-of-the-science Trackman technology in every bay
Exclusive areas for members
Availability of formal professional guidance and coaching in-house
A trendy vibe lending it the feel of a fancy hotel bar more than pure golf
Where Pitch seeks to add value, and create significant value on the back-end, is in its layered offerings — because renting bays by the hour is just the first in a series of tiers that Pitch presents to its patrons.
The company’s founders Elliot Godfrey and Chris Ingham both have a professional golf teaching background — the pair first met at South Bedfordshire Golf Club near Luton in their early teens before each taking PGA qualifications at the University of Birmingham.
So it won’t be surprising that serious golf teaching is a central element to all Pitch locations, each of which has PGA professionals available for coaching sessions.
Much more than that, Pitch aims to bring a big chunk of the social upside of club membership and become — as its website promises — “a modern golf club for all”:
“Pitch takes the best elements of a traditional club and reshapes them to create an enhanced golfing experience. Our venues combine cutting edge technology with world class coaching in thoughtfully designed surroundings. Whether you’re a serious golfer looking to utilise our world class academies and technology, or a more casual player hoping to enjoy our social lounges, Pitch has you covered.”
To this end, and to fit in with the ethos of “a modern golf club for all”, there are a number of different membership options. London price tiers and feature sets include:
Pitch Social: £35 per month, which comes with a 20% discount on bookings
Pitch Play: £120 per month, which allows members to book up to five anytime hours
Pitch Plus: £195 per month, which comes with four peak hours per month (after 5pm Monday-Friday and all day Saturday) and unlimited off-peak bookings
Pitch Corporate: £210 ex VAT per month, which includes up to five corporate members
All memberships have the attractive offering of unlimited guests at no charge, a feature which is likely to do an excellent job of leveraging the network effect of its early adopter members — the best way to market the experience, after all, being to give a close-up experience of the experience — but that model may be challenging to keep in place if the venues’ popularity continues to grow.
Inclusivity as Clever Business Strategy
A commitment to inclusivity is also at the core of the Pitch offering, and it’s a clever business strategy, too, as it extends the market from established golfers to an experience that’s much more appealing to the golf-interested, including beginners and, especially, women.
Pitch partnered with adidas to create the “adidas Women’s Beginners Golf Academy” in London, which in 2024, by my calculations, gave away 500 free beginner lessons to 100 women, with each participant getting five lessons — two group sessions and three individual lessons with a PGA professional.
That’s just the golf, but Pitch is aiming to be much more than just golf.
While other indoor golf venues are heavy on the game itself — Urban Golf markets itself as “London’s original indoor golf destination”, with technology that is “quite simply the best in the market” — Pitch aims to layer much more than golf onto the experience.
Its target market includes everyone interested in a good night out, whether that’s with a friend group or a corporate gathering that tries to make things looser than the stiff and stilted norm in that domain.
The bottom line, from a business strategy perspective: if you only target seasoned golfers who work in the city center, you’re greatly limiting your total addressable market when the actual TAM might be so much broader if you extend the welcome both to absolute beginners and the masses of casuals out there looking for an interesting new diversion on evenings and weekends.
The Pitch “Vibe”
To appeal to the novices and casuals, few things are more important than vibe, and that’s clearly something that’s been front and central of the founders’ thinking.
In a long interview with Golf Business News in 2024, co-founder Ingham said (emphasis mine):
“I’m really into music, so when I’m not playing golf I was doing some club nights in London as a DJ, so that’s why Pitch is very music-orientated. I’ve even got my record collection stored here.
“We didn’t want it to feel like a traditional golf studio, but more of an entertainment space where golf was going on. First-time visitors are always surprised that it’s actually a very chilled vibe, with music, nice lighting, artwork, comfy seating and a quality F&B offering.”
Pitch Golf’s Latest Additions
The newest additions to the Pitch stable will open in quick succession in the spring of 2025, first Canary Wharf in London in February — delayed from its original target opening date in the summer/autumn of 2024 — before the first move into Birmingham in April.
Canary Wharf, for more than a century a center for the ship-laden exports and imports of international trade — it was the site of the West India Docks from 1802 until the 1980s — has been undergoing rapid regeneration as a center of 21st century trade and commerce in recent decades.
As of 2024, six of the ten tallest buildings in the UK are situated in Canary Wharf, and some of the biggest corporations in finance (like HSBC, Barclays and Citigroup) and media (such as The Telegraph, The Mirror and The Independent) are all based there. The major property agent Knight Frank estimates that the working population of Canary Wharf will double to 240,000 by the late 2020s.
Colmore Square, in Birmingham, fits a similar profile to Canary Wharf, as it’s situated right in the center of Birmingham’s business district and is an area which has been attracting significant new investment itself over the past 10 years.
Pitch’s new Colmore venue will feature a premium bar and eight simulator bays, making it slightly smaller than existing Pitch venues — Dublin has 10 bays while the two active London venues have 15 and 11.
The Competitive Entertainment Trend
Competitive entertainment has been a growing trend in recent years, and Birmingham has in many ways been at the epicenter of that.
The city has venues such as Toca Social (soccer), F1 Arcade (motor racing), Flight Club (darts) and Clays (laser shooting), which all seem to have been a big hit in recent years, each attracting popular reviews from customers via the typical online review channels.
Golf, too, has been part of the “competitive entertainment” trend in the UK’s second city, with Golf Fang’s seven UK locations including one in Birmingham. Golf Fang takes crazy golf (or mini golf, depending on where you’re reading from) to lavish new heights with its heavy focus on an interior design that gives every hole a different theme, includes floor to ceiling urban graffiti and features putting challenges in situations dressed up to be dank basements and rancid toilets.
For the Birmingham market, however, you can expect Pitch to be a step up on existing offerings.
Flight Club’s social darts games start from £11 per person, while Toca Social has off-peak pricing starting at £12.50pp for its soccer-themed games. F1 Arcade, which has a premium feel through its official licensing partnership with Formula 1 — it hosts F1 watch parties — has arcade pricing from £15.95pp off-peak, leaving it closest in scale to the baseline Pitch offering — £55, or €55 in Dublin, for a 55-minute bay at off-peak times. For most bay rentals, you’d expect, the cost would be shared between a number of friends or colleagues.
A quick glance at Dublin and London booking platforms at the time of writing showed minimal availability at peak times for next weekend, a bog standard weekend in January, suggesting that those peak rates of £80 or €80 are no barrier at all to healthy sales returns.
Looking more broadly, Pitch (and its competitors) fit into a global trend under that “competitive entertainment” umbrella.
The publicly-traded Callaway Golf revealed in the second half of 2024 that it would be spinning off its Topgolf acquisition into a standalone independent company after facing some market challenges, but that doesn’t change the fact that Callaway acquired Topgolf in a deal worth $2 billion in 2021 and it is still expanding rapidly — Topgolf now counts more than 100 venues across the US alone.
As Gen Z’ers continue to come of age — the oldest among that generation were 11 when the iPhone was launched — their appetite for modern and preferably participatory entertainment shows no signs of slowing down.
Food at the table or drinks at the bar are no longer always good enough for today’s young adults, and perhaps that’s to be expected, given that they are both (a) almost all dopamine-addicted through several years of 16-hours-a-day smartphone company and (b) desperate for experiences away from those screens, in real life and three dimensions.
Pitch’s Expansion Model
It’s clear that Pitch, which took six years to go from one venue to two, is expanding at a rate of knots after surviving the headwinds that came with Covid-19 restrictions on indoor gatherings.
In a post on LinkedIn recently, co-founder and CEO Godfrey wrote:
“Birmingham and Manchester … extend Pitch beyond London and into the heart of the UK’s biggest cities. Each location brings a unique local flavour but retains the Pitch feel.
But we’re just getting started — there are even more international venues signed for 2025 as we continue to push the boundaries of what indoor golf can be.”
With a view towards that expansion, a closer look at the Pitch model makes for some interesting reading.
First, Pitch is actively seeking franchisees who might be interested in building their own city entertainment on top of what might be termed the twin tailwinds of Pitch’s growing brand resonance and golf’s current indoor movement. (As part of its franchise-focused content, Pitch’s website cites data from Trackman, the technology firm whose technology powers every bay in every Pitch venue, which foresees “80% of golf rounds being played indoors”, on simulators, by 2028.)
The first question in the franchisee FAQ suggests £750,000 as a minimum viable amount of capital to commit to opening a new Pitch site in your city.
Other notable info for interested franchisees include suggestions that a site with between 3,000 and 13,000 available square feet would be ideal. An initial franchise fee will apply, as well as licensing fees and ongoing revenue share systems after a franchised venue is up and running.
On top of the franchise model, there are direct ownership operations in place too.
In March 2024, a new company, PVMGolf Limited, was registered with Companies House in the UK.
PVMGolf’s ownership structure includes the two co-founders, Godfrey and Ingham, who are also directors of the main Pitch company (Golf Masters Limited).
That separate entity, PVMGolf, also has two high profile owners/investors — Manchester United’s England soccer internationals Luke Shaw and Mason Mount.
PVMGolf will operate the Pitch venue in Manchester when it opens. No firm details of the Manchester opening date have been revealed as yet, although it is set to be located in Manchester Goods Yard, a high-profile new development in the city.
The Goods Yard location fits with the look-and-feel of Colmore Square, Canary Wharf and Dublin’s Grafton Place, which has been described in marketing materials by investment managers Mark as “Dublin's No.1 office address”.
With all this, there must be a question of longevity and sustainability among customers.
Can simulator venues and the whole idea of golf-through-technology maintain their appeal over time, or will they struggle to sustain and increase cashflows after the initial novelty factor fades?
For now, there’s no doubt that screen golf remains on a steep upward growth curve, as the entire Rory and Tiger-backed TGL primetime television development in the US shows, and there’s every chance that at least a small percentage of those introduced to golf through high-tech screens will grow to love the warts-and-all experience that comes with trudging around a massive field, forest or sand-dune, swiping at long grass in search of the location of an errant tee shot.
Nevertheless, all of this — Pitch, for sure, but also the rest of the ever widening range of other urban indoor sports offerings — is an undeniable part of a continuing trend that shows a growing appetite for nights out that combine fun and competitiveness.
And after all, isn’t fun and competitiveness what being young and in the city is all about?
Thanks for reading.
Till next time.
Shane