The Faldo Course at Emirates Golf Club: Skip This One
- Gunnar Kobin
- Apr 22
- 4 min read
Usually I like Nick Faldo courses. The Cornelia in Belek is great. I've played his courses in Vietnam and Thailand and those were good too. Solid designs, proper bunkering, routings that make you think. So when I booked the Faldo at Emirates Golf Club in Dubai for the first time I was expecting more of the same. I was wrong.
The course is just boring. That's the only word that fits. I finished the round and I could not have told you anything about holes three through twelve if my life depended on it. Nothing sticks in the memory. Nothing makes you stop and take a photo. Nothing makes you say to the person in the buggy next to you, wow, look at that. You just walk around, hit shots, move on to the next one. Four hours of pleasant enough golf that evaporates from your brain the second you hand your scorecard in.
This bothers me more than usual because of where it is. You're in the middle of Dubai. You've got the same skyline views as on the Majlis, basically. You can see the same towers, the same Marina in the distance, the same Burj Khalifa over the shoulder when you turn the right way. All the ingredients are there to be magical. And yet somehow it isn't. Walking the Majlis you feel something. Walking the Faldo you feel nothing.
I have a theory about this. It's not a new theory, I just keep seeing it confirmed. When a resort or a club builds two courses, the first designer always ends up with the better piece of land. He gets to walk the whole site, pick the best dunes or the best water features or the best natural viewpoints, and he routes his course through the good stuff. By the time course number two gets commissioned, whatever was left is what the second designer has to work with. This is how you end up with so many A-course-B-course resorts where the gap between them is embarrassing. Emirates is one of those places. Karl Litten took the Majlis in 1988 and used everything interesting on the property. When Faldo came in to rework the old Wadi course in 2005, he was basically decorating leftovers. That's not an excuse for the course he ended up with. He's Nick Faldo. He's been around. He could have made more of it than he did. But I do think it explains why the Faldo feels this flat even though the ingredients are all there.
OK, night golf. Let me deal with that one because it's the thing everybody asks about. I tried it once. I will not be trying it again. The problem with night golf at the Faldo, and the thing nobody writes about in the glossy reviews, is that the lights aren't actually bright enough to play proper golf. You hit a drive and the ball goes up into the black sky and you lose sight of it completely. Somewhere out there it lands. You walk down the fairway hoping you'll find it. Putting is worse. The greens look flat under the floodlights even when they're not, your depth perception is messed up, and you end up guessing at breaks. I played my worst round of the trip that night and I wasn't tired or hungover or anything. The lighting just doesn't work. The marketing photos show this glowing neon stadium look. Reality is dimmer. Much dimmer. You're paying premium rates for a gimmick and what you actually get is a bad round of golf in conditions that would be unacceptable at any other course in the world. If you want to tell your friends back home that you played golf at night in Dubai, fine, do it once. But it's not worth what they charge. Night golf is a waste of money. I said it.
The golf itself during the day. The par is 72, about 7,000 yards from the back tees, standard Faldo features like the revetted bunker faces and some wadi waste areas that add visual drama. First hole has a tricky elevated green with some rocks that punish anything leaking right. The back nine has a couple of par 5s that are okay. The 18th is a decent closer but nothing special, par 4 with the wadi cutting in from the right and a cluster of bunkers on the left that make you think about your tee shot. I mean, it's fine. Everything about the Faldo is fine.
You know a course is in trouble when the best thing you can say about it is that everything about it is fine.
The clubhouse is the same Bedouin-tent building you use for the Majlis, so all the facilities and the service and the locker rooms are at the expected Emirates Golf Club standard. That part I have no complaints about. The staff are good, the food is good, the pro shop has the shirts you'd want. None of that is the problem. The problem is just the 18 holes of golf.
On money. The Faldo is cheaper than the Majlis but not enough cheaper to make it worth the trip. You save a bit of money and you play a significantly worse course. Not a good trade. Just pay the extra and play the Majlis again. Or take a day off and go sit by the pool.
So here's where I land. I'm not going to tell you to play this course. I played it twice, once during the day and once at night, and both times I walked off feeling like I'd wasted money and time. The day round is forgettable, the night round is frustrating, and the whole experience reminds you mostly of how good the Majlis is by contrast. The only reason to tee it up here is if you've already done the Majlis and you have a specific personal goal of playing every 18 at Emirates Golf Club. Otherwise skip it.
Faldo, if you're reading this, I still like your stuff. Come back and give this place another look. The bones are here. The vibe is missing.
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