England eyes first Open champion on home soil since Tony Jacklin

England will send 20 players into the 154th Open at Royal Birkdale from 16-19 July 2026, and Tommy Fleetwood arrives with the clearest chance to end a national wait that has stretched since Nick Faldo’s 1992 victory. The scale of the challenge is plain: no Englishman has won The Open on home soil since Tony Jacklin lifted the Claret Jug at Royal Lytham & St Annes in 1969.

Jacklin’s win remains the benchmark. The Scunthorpe-born golfer was 25 when he took the 98th Open by two strokes over Bob Charles from 9-12 July 1969, ending an 18-year wait for a British winner. Around 20,000 spectators pushed him on at Royal Lytham, where he later said one fan even stepped on his heel as he walked up the 18th. His third-round 70 gave him a two-stroke lead heading into the final round, and the title became the first of his two major championships before his 1970 U.S. Open win.

That memory still hangs over England’s Open hopes because Jacklin remains the last Englishman to win the championship on English soil. The Open’s history pages and England Golf both underline the same hard fact: Faldo, at Muirfield in 1992, was the last English winner overall. Since then, the home crowd has had to watch others fill the gap, even as English contenders have remained prominent in the sport’s biggest events.

Royal Birkdale now offers the next test of that drought. Fleetwood is a local favorite and ESPN has framed him as the man who could finally become the first English winner since 1992. He will do so in front of a sizeable home contingent, with England Golf confirming 20 English players in the field. That depth matters because it turns the week into a national examination, not just a single-player pursuit: one breakthrough would satisfy a 60-year story at home, while another missed chance would extend a familiar silence.

The historical markers at Royal Lytham sharpen the contrast. Jacklin’s 1969 triumph was the first Open to use leaderboard scoreboards, a small but telling sign of how much the championship has changed while England’s wait for another home champion has not. The question at Royal Birkdale is whether this generation can finally turn the numbers around.