Eagle Club, the first urban golf in Barcelona

The sport of golf and its professionals and amateurs are adapting to new technologies to make it more accessible, participatory, and immersive. This entails some changes regarding the usual outdoor practice on a natural grass course. And more and more cities around the world have enclosed venues with virtual reality simulators that equate the game to what can be done on an outdoor course. From now on, Barcelona will be no exception.

An entrepreneurial initiative, led by the company Basfl Group in collaboration with several private investors, brings this sport to the city center, with the opening of Eagle Club. A space on Muntaner street that will make the daily practice of golf more accessible to professionals and amateurs through new technologies, as they can complete a round in one or two hours and improve their game. They will control their swing —complete club and ball analysis through video recording— using specific data and personalized information, and they will evaluate the ball's flight by capturing the launch angle, rotation, and curvature, and the impact by capturing the club path, face angle, swing direction, and rotation.

Several golf simulators, which include a tracking radar, information interpretation software, and virtual reality software to reproduce what outdoor sports practice would be like, will allow, among other things, golfers to train when the weather does not permit it and to avoid having to leave the city or wait for the weekend to enjoy their professional or amateur sport. The technology belongs to the German company Trackman which, according to the main promoters of the project, brothers Juan and Carlos Bascones, provides radars that adequately combine evaluation capability and simulation software.

Several golf simulators will allow golfers to train when the weather does not permit it and to avoid having to leave the city or wait for the weekend

Given its club concept, the project starts from the importance of training to perfect the practice of the sport and to increase the number of fans. In this sense, Juan Bascones, alma mater of the initiative and CEO of the company, explains that they want "to close an agreement with the Catalan Golf Federation to become a training center". For now, they have specific agreements with a group of golf professionals to teach classes at Eagle Club, which will be directed by the young active professional player Jorge Feliu Feducci. As a social meeting point, Eagle Club has a small bar and a shop with golf products and accessories.

The business plan for this family entrepreneurship project foresees a turnover of 250,000 euros in the first year, thanks to a 50% occupancy, that is, about 15 hours of daily occupancy and an average expenditure of 120 euros per user per month. "If we manage to get close to these objectives, we plan to open another location in Barcelona before expanding to other cities," specifies Juan Bascones and reminds that Barcelona is the fourth Spanish city to have an urban golf course, after Palma de Mallorca, San Sebastián and Madrid.

This type of establishment is very widespread in Europe, for example, in countries with more adverse weather and lower temperatures. In fact, "while we start operating in Barcelona, ​​in Sweden these weeks a project with six locations spread across the country will open. And there are more significant examples, such as the case of South Korea with 5,800 locations spread across the country," says Bascones, a doctor and former executive at Merryll Lynch and Mediaplanning. For his part, Carlos Bascones is a communication consultant and current vice president of Club Natació Barcelona.

The radiography of the sector in Spain shows a sport with 430 golf courses, out of more than 40,000 worldwide, enjoyed by 269,919 people ---including professionals and amateurs with a license--- and representing a small part of the six million active players in Europe.

Regarding its economic impact, golf practice generates 11,000 direct jobs in Spain, and an annual turnover of 2,000 million euros, largely thanks to attracting foreign visitors who, in recent years, have amounted to 1.1 million tourists, making Spain the second country in the world that receives the most tourists due to interest in its golf courses. In Europe as a whole, the business amounts to 15 billion annually.