Peter Jones will hear Glyn Richards pitch Fingagolf on Dragons’ Den on Thursday, September 10. For the Southampton inventor, the One appearance is the latest step for a tabletop golf game that has become his full-time job, with a national TV slot now carrying the product beyond the trade shows that built it.
Richards, who now lives in Phuket in Thailand, said he had spent years making games before Fingagolf clicked three years ago with cardboard and a foam ball. He described the game as a compact indoor version of golf, built around a very light ball that spins and floats, and said it works like a one to 100 scale game of golf.
Board in the City in Southampton
The game has already built enough of a following to sustain an annual tournament at Board in the City in Southampton. That matters because Dragons’ Den is not arriving at the start of the story; it is arriving after Fingagolf has already moved from idea to product, then from product to something Richards says now pays his way.
Richards said the first spark came from childhood, when he would take a Subbuteo ball to the beach and try to shape a golf-like game in the sand. “I was trying to tee the ball on sand, somewhere in my mind I was trying to make the game where you can get the ball in the air,” he said, adding that the design had to be tuned “to a fine milligram” so it would float and spin.
Five millionaires in the lift
“You’re stood in that lift and you’re about to talk to five millionaires and I’m about to pitch them Fingagolf,” Richards said of the Dragons’ Den moment. He added that the experience “made me smile a lot” because he had already done so many trade shows in the UK and America and in Germany, which gave him some distance from the pressure even as the pitch itself arrived.
That balance is the real commercial signal here: Richards says there was nothing wrong with the game, but the pitch was still nerve-wracking. For a maker whose latest game has become his full-time job, the One slot is less about a single television appearance than about whether a niche indoor sports product can turn scattered interest into a bigger run.
Fingagolf Open Championship
Emily won the Fingagolf Open Championship lifting the Carrot Jug trophy, another sign that the game already has a competitive core rather than a one-off novelty. On Thursday, September 10, the only question that matters for the business is whether any of the Dragons decide Fingagolf deserves backing strong enough to match the work Richards has already put into it.
