The Scottish Open winners list reads like a preview of golf history written a week early: Phil Mickelson won it in 2013 and lifted the Claret Jug seven days later; Rory McIlroy’s 2023 win came on one of the great closing shots of his career; and last year Chris Gotterup outdueled McIlroy at The Renaissance Club, then nearly stole The Open itself the following week. Golf’s best links tune-up has a habit of crowning players just before they matter most.
The modern event runs from the beloved Loch Lomond era through a nomadic decade of true links venues to its current home in North Berwick, where a co-sanctioned, $9 million edition is underway right now, with Gotterup chasing the first repeat title of the co-sanctioned era.
The chart below covers the full year-by-year winners list, the venue eras, and the champions who doubled up at The Open. Take a look, then we’ll break it all down.
Contents
Three eras, one identity crisis resolved
The list above tells the story of a tournament deciding what it wanted to be. The Loch Lomond years (1996-2010) made the Scottish Open glamorous, a parkland jewel that drew Els (twice), Goosen, Kaymer, and Montgomerie’s beloved 1999 home win, but left it strategically odd: a soft, tree-lined course the week before golf’s firmest, windiest major. The 2011 pivot to true links venues (Castle Stuart, Royal Aberdeen, Gullane, Dundonald) was a rebrand with a thesis: become the Open Championship tune-up, and everything else will follow. It did. The fields deepened, Mickelson’s 2013 double supplied the proof of concept, and by 2022 the PGA Tour had co-sanctioned the event outright, doubling the purse and making the Renaissance Club’s July week, now in its eighth straight year, the strongest non-major field of the summer, currently featuring the world’s top two and LIV’s stars on the same leaderboard.
The double, and the near-misses
The list’s most famous row is 2013: Phil Mickelson won at Castle Stuart, drove down the coast, and won The Open at Muirfield seven days later, still the only same-July double in the modern event’s history, and the moment that validated the whole links-prep experiment. The near-misses have piled up since: McIlroy’s spectacular 2023 win (the 2-iron through the wind at 18 remains a signature shot of his career) preceded a top-10 at the Open; MacIntyre’s emotional 2024 home victory, the first by a Scot since Montgomerie a quarter-century earlier, made him a Troon favorite; and last year Chris Gotterup won at 15-under over McIlroy, then chased the Claret Jug deep into Sunday, the closest anyone’s come to Mickelson’s feat. The pattern is now the event’s brand: the Scottish Open leaderboard is the best single predictor of the following week’s major, which is why Sunday’s winner in North Berwick instantly becomes a Birkdale storyline.
This week’s row
The 2026 edition, underway now through Sunday, offers the list a first: Gotterup, fresh off winning the John Deere Classic days ago, is attempting the first successful title defense of the co-sanctioned era, against a field headlined by Scheffler, McIlroy, Fitzpatrick, Rahm, and Hatton. History says defending here is brutal, no one has repeated since the PGA Tour arrived, and history also says watch whoever’s holding the trophy Sunday evening very closely the following week. The table updates the moment there’s a name to add; the row after that gets written at Royal Birkdale.
Final Word
Scottish Open winners by year: thirty champions of the modern era, from Woosnam’s 1996 relaunch through the Els-and-Goosen Loch Lomond years, the links-tour rebrand that produced Mickelson’s 2013 Castle Stuart-Muirfield double (still the only one), and the Renaissance Club era of McIlroy’s 2-iron, MacIntyre’s home tears, and Gotterup’s breakthrough, with the 2026 row being written in North Berwick right now, and its author guaranteed a starring role at Birkdale next week. The full list is above; Sunday adds a name.
The money on this week’s line is in Scottish Open prize money 2026, the major it feeds is chronicled in Open Championship winners by year, and why the week exists at all is explained in why the pros play the Scottish Open.