When the Europeans destroyed the Americans on the first day of the 2023 Ryder Cup at Marco Simone outside Rome, the twosomes that captain Luke Donald sent out received well-deserved praise. So did he. His charges won all four of the morning foursomes, then went undefeated in the afternoon. That marked the first time in Ryder Cup history that the U.S. team had not won a single match in a day, and it gave the Europeans a 6½-1½ lead.
Those in the know credited yet another member of the European team, Edoardo Molinari, even though he never so much as picked up a club. Rather, it was the analytics “Dodo” provided Donald that made the difference.
A native of Turin, Italy, and one of five vice captains, Molinari had helped determine which of the Euros might be better suited to play those matches as well as who should be paired together and who should tee off on the odd- and even-numbered holes in the foursomes.
In addition, Molinari had learned through a deep dive of past Ryder Cups that winning the first hole was critical and being up after three holes was just as important. That led Donald to have this team prepare by playing one- and three-hole matches in practice.
Those opening triumphs were only the beginning of a beatdown that saw the Europeans wrest back the trophy they had lost to the Americans at Whistling Straits two years prior.
And the strategies that Donald employed that first day were only some of the fruits of his collaboration with Molinari, a longtime touring professional and past Ryder Cup player who earned a degree in engineering from the Polytechnic University of Turin and is regarded as the game’s consummate number-cruncher.
In the lead-up to the 2023 Ryder Cup, Molinari worked with the statistics he had compiled to discern the best possible pairings based on playing styles and the strengths and weaknesses of individual games under a variety of conditions and situations at Marco Simone. He even took personalities and cultural backgrounds into consideration and went so far as to produce models that simulated all 66 possible combinations of Europe’s 12 players to find the optimal pairings.
Donald, an art theory and practice major from Northwestern University whose academic background is more grounded in aesthetics than analytics, also leaned on Dodo to determine such things as his captain’s picks as well as the course setup that would most favor his team.
Not surprisingly, Donald heaped praise on Molinari when asked about him after the matches. Dodo was “extremely important to his team’s strong performance,” Donald said, adding: “All my vice captains were immense, every single one of them meant so much to me and were a big help. But obviously Dodo, I spent a bit more time with him just because of the statistics, because of trying to figure out ways to tell all my guys why they were going to win.”
What spoke even louder than those words was how quickly Donald reached out to Molinari after being tapped to return as captain for the 2025 Ryder Cup at New York’s Bethpage Black.
“Luke texted me the day before that appointment was announced,” Molinari said. “He said he wanted me by his side again.”
Based on what went down at Marco Simone, that move may well be as consequential as any Donald makes this time around.
After Marco Simone, Donald spoke about how the sport “has become dominated by statistics.” He makes a good point, because for all its artistry, golf is very much a numbers game. And that is what makes Molinari so valuable to the European team, for no one is as facile with figures – and as good as explaining what they all mean.
“Numbers are like second nature to Edoardo, and with his level of expertise in that area, he could easily be managing a major hedge fund,” said Sal Syed, an MBA from Yale and the co-founder and CEO of Arccos, which is the leader in connected AI golf products and employs Molinari as its chief data strategist. “The sophistication of what he has built surpasses anything I have seen in the field of golf analytics. And he is able to communicate whatever information he gathers so clearly and concisely.”
“I wanted to better understand my own game and how I could improve,” said Molinari, adding that he also possesses a photographic memory and can remember the position of each card even after a deck has been shuffled.
What makes his presence practically indispensable is the combination of that knowledge with his experiences as a golf professional who has won 10 times on various worldwide tours and also competed on the 2010 Ryder Cup team.
“Players say it is different talking to me than to a guy who may be a good golfer but did not appreciate what it was like to compete on the very highest levels,” Molinari said. “I do not burden my golfers with a lot of information or say anything obvious. I know they do not have a lot of time, maybe only 10 minutes or so for a call or some texts. So, I make sure what I give them is very relevant.”
Molinari, 44, has been a professional golfer for almost two decades, having turned pro in 2006 after winning the 2005 U.S. Amateur at Merion. He has won in places as far-flung as Colombia, Kenya, Morocco and Japan, and captured the 2009 World Cup with his younger brother Francesco, besting the Irish duo of Rory McIlroy/Graeme McDowell and Sweden’s Henrik Stenson/Robert Karlsson by a stroke.
In addition, Edoardo compiled an 0-1-2 record for the triumphant European squad in the 2010 Ryder Cup in Wales, with one of the ties coming in a match that he played with Francesco. That same year, Dodo – a handle his brother hung on him as a young boy because he could not properly pronounce Edoardo’s first name – reached No. 14 on the Official World Golf Ranking, his highest position ever.
“I still enjoy competing,” Molinari said on a Zoom call from his home outside Turin, where he and his wife, Anna, a former member of the Italian national women’s golf team, live with their two young daughters. “But I came to realize a few years ago that I was nearing the end of my playing career. So, I thought it made sense to do something that would keep me involved with golf the rest of my life.”
That led him to create StatisticGolf and begin offering to fellow pros the sort of information he had been compiling for himself.
“Basically, I started using statistics so players could better understand what they were good at and what they needed to improve,” Molinari said. “Later, I began advising them on things like course management.”
His first client was Matt Fitzpatrick, and they started working together in June 2020, just as the PGA Tour restarted its tournament schedule after shutting down during COVID-19. Less than two years later, Fitzpatrick broke through with his first major championship, prevailing in the U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Soon after, other golfers began turning to Molinari for assistance, and in just a few years’ time, his players amassed a total of 27 worldwide tournament wins.
Today, Molinari has a stable of nearly 40 pros, among them Viktor Hovland, Adam Scott, Nelly Korda, Corey Conners and Nicolai Højgaard. Molinari continues to consult with Fitzpatrick and has taken on three full-time employees to help him keep up with demand.
In addition, Molinari has formed a partnership with Arccos, which has revolutionized the use of statistics for recreational players. He continues to service his elite clients through an entity now called Arccos Pro Insights as he helps Arccos scale that level of acumen and expertise to everyday players.
The eldest of two children, Molinari was born and raised in Turin, a metropolis of 2.2 million residents located in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. As the home to Fiat, the country’s largest automobile manufacturer, Turin has long been called the Detroit of Italy. But the city is also renowned for its elegant Baroque and Neoclassical architecture, its stylish cafes and well-curated museums, and its proximity to the Alps and some of the best alpine skiing on the continent. Nearby truffle grounds are also considered among the richest in all of Europe.
Molinari’s father, Paolo, was a dentist and his mother, Micaela, an architect. They were golfers, too, and Molinari was 8 when he started accompanying them to a local club.
Dodo quickly progressed as a player, winning the English Boys Under 16 Championship in 1996. Five years later, he captured the Italian Amateur. Then in 2002, he took the Italian Amateur Foursomes with his brother Francesco, who is 21 months his junior. Two years later, the siblings prevailed once again in that tournament.
At the time of those triumphs, Edoardo was in the midst of a five-year engineering program at the Polytechnic University of Turin. “I have always liked numbers and statistics, even as a kid in school,” he said. “And math was my best subject. But I never really thought I would make it a career.”
Molinari did, however, like the idea of doing that with golf. And while he was still in college, he started using his aptitude for analytics to help achieve that goal.
“I wanted to better understand my own game and how I could improve,” said Molinari, adding that he also possesses a photographic memory and can remember the position of each card even after a deck has been shuffled. “So, in 2003, I created a very rudimentary Excel spreadsheet that allowed me to input and track my golf stats. Basic things like driving distance, shot dispersion and greens hit in regulation.”
It would be 17 years before he turned that exercise into a business, during which time he refined the data and also the ways he analyzed it.
“I was very impressed when I met Edoardo,” said Syed. “Matt Fitzpatrick connected us right before he won his U.S. Open, and I found Edoardo to be very bright, very humble and an incredible engineer. The spreadsheet he showed me was one of the most advanced I had ever seen.”
In many ways, it is appropriate that Fitzpatrick was Molinari’s first client, for the Englishman, who is playing in this year’s Ryder Cup as a member of the European team, was famous for the meticulous records he’d kept about his game since he was a young teen.
“When we started, Matt did not hit driver nearly as often as I thought he should. He was leaning on his 3-wood, and I showed him numbers that highlighted just how many shots he was losing per round as a result. So, he worked on adding length.” –Edoardo Molinari
“Matt and I see things in a very similar way,” said Molinari, who is fluent in English and Spanish as well as Italian. “He had a lot of data saved on his computer, data that went back years. And one of the first things I did was help him organize that.”
After the two officially started collaborating in June 2020, Molinari says that Fitzpatrick started playing better right away.
“When we started, Matt did not hit driver nearly as often as I thought he should,” Molinari said. “He was leaning on his 3-wood, and I showed him numbers that highlighted just how many shots he was losing per round as a result. So, he worked on adding length.”
By hitting the gym and dedicating himself to a speed stick called The Stack, Fitzpatrick gained roughly 15 yards off the tee. It turned out to be a game-changer, leading to what Molinari described as “a massive breakthrough at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022.”
That improvement was in evidence during the first two rounds of the 2022 U.S. Open, as Fitzpatrick more than held his own off the tee with big-hitting Dustin Johnson, who was one of his playing partners.
The Englishman also flaunted his newfound power on the final day of play, such as the time he drove the green on the uphill, 301-yard par-4 fifth hole and then two-putted for birdie.
Molinari’s stats business grew quickly in the wake of that triumph, with a number of professionals coming to him for help. Only briefly did he fret that sharing what had previously been proprietary information with the golfers he often played against might put him at a competitive disadvantage.
“I found that it actually helped my game even if I did give away a few secrets,” he said. “I had clients asking me to play practice rounds, and in many ways those interactions made me a better golfer because I learned as much from them as they learned from me.”
One of the golfers who reached out to Molinari was Henrik Stenson, who in the spring of 2022 had been named captain of the European Ryder Cup team for the following year. But the DP World Tour sacked Stenson after he decided to join the Saudi-funded LIV Golf league, replacing him with Donald.
“Luke is a few years older than I am, and while we had never been close, we certainly knew each other,” Molinari said. “We played some amateur golf together. We had played a lot of European Tour events and had been on the 2010 Ryder Cup team together. He called the day after he was named captain and asked me to be one of his vice captains and do for him what I was going to do for Henrik.”
Donald would make Francesco a vice captain as well.
As you might expect from brothers so close in age and the only siblings in the family, Edoardo and Francesco Molinari have always been tight. And they shared many interests.
Like Edoardo, Francesco took up the game as a youngster and did well as a junior. He turned pro in 2004, two years before Dodo did. And Francesco caddied for Edoardo when he competed in the 2006 Masters, one of Dodo’s spoils for winning the U.S. Amateur the previous summer. They also proved to be a formidable team on the golf course, winning amateur and professional tournaments (the Italian Foursomes and the World Cup, respectively).
“Edoardo and I spent a lot of time on the golf course growing up, and we both love the game,” said Francesco, who is also married and has two children. “We went to the same high school and the same college. We have never been too much into partying, and we’re pretty quiet, too.”
But the brothers have their differences. For one thing, Edoardo roots for his hometown soccer team of Juventus, while Francesco is a fan of the Internazionale squad, which is also known as Inter Milan and based out of that northern Italian city.
“Dodo is also more methodical than I am and more organized,” said Francesco, who like his brother is also fluent in English, Spanish and Italian. “I like improvisation a bit more, and he likes everything planned. As far as numbers are concerned, I like working with them but not nearly as much as he does.”
Francesco chuckles when he remembers what Paolo the patriarch said when the boys were teenagers and thinking for the first time about trying to become professional golfers.
“Dad told us that it was OK to pursue a career in golf,” recalled Francesco, who in the fall of 2018 was ranked a career-high fifth in the world. “But he wanted to make sure we earned college degrees so we had a Plan B.”
That the elder Molinari chose engineering was no surprise given his interest in numbers. Francesco chose business.
It turns out that neither of the Molinaris needed a contingency, as they both have made a good living. Francesco was more successful, winning two events on the PGA Tour and five on what today is the DP World Tour in addition to his greatest triumph, the 2018 Open Championship at Carnoustie. Francesco also tied for second at the 2017 PGA Championship and fifth at the 2019 Masters, which he led through 54 holes before being overtaken by Tiger Woods. And no one performed better at the 2018 Ryder Cup at Le Golf National south of Paris, for he won all five of his matches, beating Phil Mickelson in singles and besting Woods twice in four-balls.
It was during that Ryder Cup year that Francesco started talking to Dodo about his work with statistics.
“Edoardo had been trying to get me on the program, and I did some stuff with him,” Francesco said. “But my brain does not work that way. I do appreciate how good he is at simplifying things, especially as it involves highlighting the parts of a player’s game that need work, and explaining why.”
Edoardo smiles when he is asked about working with his brother.
“Francesco is my only non-paying client, and I try to give him some useful advice,” said Eduardo, who has battled wrist and thumb injuries. “But his interest in statistics is nowhere near as deep as mine.”
One thing they are equally passionate about is the Ryder Cup, and the brothers enjoyed serving together as vice captains in 2023, especially with it being staged in their home country. They are excited to be reprising those roles in this year’s matches, and once again, they will be performing different tasks.
“We have our own skill sets, and we complement each other as a result,” said Francesco. “That is why Luke asked us back. I try to bring my experiences as a player to the team, as someone who was lucky enough to compete on three winning Ryder Cup teams, and try to help the players as they go through the highs and lows of the week because I have been there.”
As for Edoardo, he says he is not really in a position during Ryder Cup week to tell team members what they should be working on, as the time for talk like that will be long past. Rather, his primary function at that point is advising the captain on who’s playing well and who’s not and on what pairings are working and which ones are not.
“My brother has a very big role,” said Francesco. “And Luke puts a lot of trust in him.”
So do the members of Donald’s team, such as Rory McIlroy, who said after the 2023 matches in Italy: “There is a big level of trust that [Molinari] … knows what he is talking about and what he’s giving us is good information.”
Edoardo appreciates those sentiments and is ready for Bethpage.
“In 2023, I was playing tournaments almost up to the week of the Ryder Cup, and that was too much with all that was going on with the matches,” he said. “This time, I will stop playing sooner, so my priority from mid-August to the end of September is the Ryder Cup and helping Luke.
“I will have a lot of data for him,” Molinari added.
If past is prologue, it will be plenty impactful.