TORONTO — In the victorious European team room after the 2018 Ryder Cup, the man now tasked with bringing championships to Toronto’s biggest sports franchises found his why.
Keith Pelley still recalls the feeling at Le Golf National outside Paris when he surveyed the revelry and saw his then-teenaged son, Jason, locked in conversation with one of Europe’s standout performers in the aftermath of that dominant victory over the U.S.
“I looked over and there in one chair was Tommy Fleetwood and in the other chair was my boy, Jason,” Pelley told The Athletic this week. “They were leaning over and having a great chat and I said (to my wife, Joan) ‘That’s why we did this job.’
“It’s a memory I’ll never forget.”
Pelley oversaw Europe’s entry at the past four Ryder Cup matches as part of his CEO duties with the European Tour Group.
Those collective experiences have had a profound impact on the vision he’s brought to Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, his next big challenge in a career full of them. As president and CEO of MLSE, a role he assumed in April 2024, Pelley is responsible for establishing a winning culture at the top of an empire that includes the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs, NBA’s Toronto Raptors, MLS’s Toronto FC and CFL’s Toronto Argonauts.
Put simply, he’s trying to recreate the spirit he found in the European team room at the Ryder Cup. There’s no mystery for Pelley in how they’ve managed to win five of the past seven matches despite being perennial underdogs against the powerhouse Americans — a place Europe finds itself again entering this weekend’s event at Bethpage Black.
“It is a special bond that the European players have,” he said. “It is something you have to see to believe. How much they want to win and how much they want to support each other. It’s an incredible bond.”
There’s little wonder why you’ll so often hear Pelley cite terms like “culture” and “chemistry” when discussing what it’s going to take to get the Stanley Cup or Larry O’Brien Trophy back to Toronto.
The most significant front-facing moves during his first 18 months on the job with MLSE have been removing monumental figures at the top of each team’s organizational structure — parting ways with former Raptors president and vice chairman Masai Ujiri in June, and former Leafs president Brendan Shanahan in May.
Those changes were made to help clear the way for what Pelley hopes becomes a more unified approach from top to bottom. Inside that framework, he believes his job is to create an environment for each team’s management group to thrive.
“As much as I love the game, and I love the NBA, and I love Major League Soccer, I’m the CEO of MLSE, so the people that are going to make the key hockey decisions, the people that are going to make the key basketball decisions, are basketball-oriented people and are hockey-oriented people,” Pelley told reporters in May. “My role is to be a sounding board. My role is to try to create a culture and a chemistry within that organization that builds a culture of winning championships.
“So that’s the way I look at it. I look at it as a holistic leader that can provide support and guidance from a leadership perspective, from a culture side, but I’m not going to be deciding who we draft and what free agents we’re going to sign.”
While there is no apples-to-apples comparison to what a professional sports team encounters over a long season and what Europe’s Ryder Cup team endures during a three-day competition contested every second year, Pelley believes there are still lessons to be found there.
For starters, he admires how the Europeans have managed to continue finding inspiration from Seve Ballesteros, who competed in eight Ryder Cups with great enthusiasm as a player and captained the team to victory in 1997. Ballesteros died of brain cancer at age 54 in 2011 but was still being recognized with a jersey in the team room when Europe won the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome.
“The respect, the love, that they have for Seve is always visible in everything that they do,” Pelley said.
He also saw firsthand how much the team meant to European golfers broadly, be it in how distraught they were after not being selected or how persistent they became when the golf world fractured with the launch of the Saudi-backed LIV Tour in 2022. Pelley said that every player who defected from the DP World Tour asked him what it meant for his Ryder Cup status moving forward.
“Every single one,” he said.
Across multiple generations of golfers, the European team has built something more meaningful than the game itself. That helps explain why the players have eschewed any notion of being paid even while their American counterparts are now set to receive $500,000 apiece to direct toward personal and charitable aims — a major talking point ahead of this week’s matches.
“The players played for the love of Europe and played for each other and for their captain and never, ever asked for any type of compensation,” Pelley said.
That’s another area where it’s tough to draw a line directly between his current job and his former job. No one is going to fault NHL or NBA players for drawing a paycheck, especially during the grind of an 82-game regular season.
What Pelley hopes to recreate, though, is an environment where the Leafs and Raptors can tap into the kind of “magic” that Europe’s Ryder Cup team seems to find when the competition is at its fiercest.
“I look at the Raptors now, I look at the Leafs, culture and chemistry still (matters),” he said. “You can’t put a number on it, but it makes a difference.
“You get chemistry and culture and momentum, and that can take you to spots that you didn’t think you could get to.”
Which brings Pelley to another one of his lasting Ryder Cup memories: the morning after that 2018 win in Paris, when he scrolled through his phone and first saw the viral video of Fleetwood and Francesco Molinari lying in bed together with the Ryder Cup after going 4-1-0 and 5-0-0, respectively.
POV: You are the 2018 highlights 😏 #Moliwood pic.twitter.com/PKzbsKZ06N
— Ryder Cup Europe (@RyderCupEurope) July 28, 2025
That video was the brainchild of Michael Gibbons, who is in charge of Europe’s social media content and remains a valued contributor behind the scenes for the team, according to Pelley.
“He’s been a game-changer for chemistry and culture,” Pelley said. “When I woke up and saw that video, I went, ‘Wow. These guys really get it.’ The trust and confidence that our players have with Michael Gibbons is a key component to that culture.”
Pelley plans to watch this weekend’s Ryder Cup from afar but did offer one prediction about the competition.
“I can tell you that the European team, whether they win or lose at Bethpage, will have a culture and a bond between them that is magical,” Pelley said. “It’s magical in the passion and the love that they have for each other. How they want to play for each other is phenomenal.
“If they win at Bethpage, a lot you can attribute to the culture and chemistry that (captain Luke Donald) and the players have.
“I honestly believe that.”
(Photo: Andrew Redington / Getty Images)