Belgium
Royal Waterloo Golf Club and the Royal Belgian Golf Federation have been named as hosts to the 2027 European Young Masters.
The championship, an annual event for the continent's leading boys and girls under the age of 16, will be staged at the prestigious club in Lasne, located around 25 minutes from the centre of Brussels.
The Marache course was designed by Fred W. Hawtree and opened at the Lasne site in 1960, when Royal Waterloo moved from its original home at Rhode-Saint-Genèse, where the club was founded in 1923. Today, Royal Waterloo boasts forty-five holes across three courses: the 18-hole La Marache, the 18-hole Le Lion and the 9-hole Le Bois-Héros.
The club has a long history of hosting elite championships on both the professional and amateur side of the game, and staged the Belgian Open on several occasions between 1979 and 1991, and more recently the European Amateur Team Championship in 2023. The Marache course will stage the first playing of the elite European U16 event in Belgium next summer.
The European Young Masters was instituted in 1995 and is contested over three rounds of stroke play with no cut. Each EGA member federation country may enter a team of four players, two girls and two boys. Three trophies are awarded across the week, for the leading boy, the leading girl and the nations' cup team event, in which the three lowest of a country's four scores count on each day.
The championship has previously welcomed a number of players who went on to become stars of European golf. Sergio Garcia won the inaugural boys' event in 1995, and Rafael Cabrera-Bello and Matteo Manassero are among the later boys' champions. In 2010, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Georgia Hall and Bronte Law all represented England in the event, while Viktor Hovland, Jon Rahm and Rory McIlroy also appear on the list of past participants.
