The European Ryder Cup team traveled to the U.S. this week to find a course that felt just like home: a windswept links-style track, with barely any trees, in a region best known for cheese. It may be 4,000 miles from Europe, but the squad from across the Atlantic could be forgiven for thinking the hosts had been a little too hospitable. 

The Americans enter the 43rd Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits looking to forget a dreadful blowout in the last edition of the series, not to mention decades of international golf misery. They...

The European Ryder Cup team traveled to the U.S. this week to find a course that felt just like home: a windswept links-style track, with barely any trees, in a region best known for cheese. It may be 4,000 miles from Europe, but the squad from across the Atlantic could be forgiven for thinking the hosts had been a little too hospitable. 

The Americans enter the 43rd Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits looking to forget a dreadful blowout in the last edition of the series, not to mention decades of international golf misery. They have a team of golfers so excellent that they’re actually strong favorites to win the U.S. vs. Europe event despite a lengthy history of letdowns. 

The problem: it’s being played at the rare course in the States that may favor the visitors. 

The American team is “already dealing with a little bit of a disadvantage from the get-go in that regard,” says Paul Azinger, captain of the 2008 U.S. team that won on its home soil. “It feels like you’re in Ireland.” 

Team Europe’s Shane Lowry, who is actually from the Emerald Isle, confirmed this impression. Everything about Whistling Straits, he said, reminds him of “a summer’s day in Ireland when you’re out there.”

It’s an odd twist that a golf course near Sheboygan, Wis., on the shores of Lake Michigan could appear so distinctly European. The open design leaves the course, and nearly every shot, exposed to the types of wind gusts that golfers expect at St. Andrews in Scotland or Ireland’s The K Club. It’s so on-the-nose that one of the courses at Whistling Straits is named the Irish Course. 

Team Europe practices on the 18th green at Whistling Straits.

Photo: Warren Little/Getty Images

The trouble isn’t simply that the grounds at Whistling Straits are as comforting to the visitors as a pint of Guinness. It’s that one of the biggest perks of being host—tinkering the set-up to favor its players skills—has seemingly vanished this year. 

When the Ryder Cup alternates between the U.S. and Europe, it also transfers control of some of the layout’s features to the home side. That typically gives the home captain, in this case Steve Stricker, an opportunity to match up the course characteristics and his players’ best attributes. 

It’s an advantage that can have a devastating effect. Three years ago, at Le Golf National outside Paris, Europe didn’t hesitate in setting up the most hometown course imaginable. Like a baseball team shortening an outfield fence to suit its hitters, the Europeans opted for long, coarse rough and narrow fairways, all to punish the bomb-and-gouge Americans. “Le Golf” is widely regarded in golf circles as the greatest home-course advantage in Ryder Cup history. Europe wiped the floor with the U.S., winning by seven points.

“They set that course up to neutralize our strengths,” Azinger said.

For this particular group of American golfers, the natural riposte would have been a course with fairways a mile long and sand they could easily clear.

Instead, the course at Sheboygan, Wis. is so foreign it practically has an accent. It comes littered with dunes, bunkers, and little flexibility for Stricker to bend things in the Americans’ favor. 

“It seems somewhat familiar,” said Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy. “[It] doesn’t look like a typical American golf course.” 

Stricker said the U.S. has still tried to tweak the course to make it pro-American, though he was coy on specifics. That could include efforts to lengthen a couple of holes and adjust the rough in certain areas to either boost his own players or hurt his opponents. 

But there’s one thing he can’t even pretend to control.

“We’ve got some great wind players, but I want some nice weather,” he said. “We don’t want to go around here in any Irish kind of weather.” 

U.S. captain Steve Stricker said the U.S. has tried to tweak Whistling Straits to make it pro-American, though he was coy on specifics.

Photo: jonathan ernst/Reuters

Stricker added that his captain’s picks for the event were a concession to these conditions. He picked Daniel Berger, Harris English, Tony Finau, Xander Schauffele, Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth to join Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas and Patrick Cantlay on the roster. He said his selections came after consulting with the Americans’ analytical team to determine which players fare best in the wind.   

That U.S. roster explains why sports books have placed the Americans as favorites going into the event. Johnson, Morikawa, Cantlay, Schauffele, Thomas and DeChambeau are ranked No. 2 through No. 7 in the world. Finau, Koepka and English are No. 9 through No. 11. While Europe has the world’s top-ranked golfer in Spain’s Jon Rahm, its next highest is Norwegian Viktor Hovland at No. 14. 

But what Europe lacks in present international status, it more than makes up for with its past. 

Europe has won nine of the past 12 Ryder Cups, dating back to the mid-1990s. Many of the team’s current players also have a vast wealth of experience in pummeling Americans. The Europeans are 34.6 years old on average, or over a half-decade older than the U.S. players, whose average age is 29.1. 

It’s such a wide gap, in not just age but also experience in this uniquely formatted event, that one European player, 41-year-old Sergio Garcia, has as many career Ryder Cup points as the entire American team combined.

“That’s quite relevant when you’re playing an away match,” European captain Padraig Harrington said. “Certainly it’s pretty tried and tested in Europe that we’re going to go with experience when we’re coming across here.”

The strange thing is the Americans’ attempt to view the same thing as an advantage. Six of their players are competing in their first Ryder Cup, which means they don’t have the psychological bruising from past defeats. 

“We’re not coming with bad experiences,” Stricker said. “We are using that as a positive and our guys are super fired up and ready to go.”

Like so much of the sports world, they’ve had an extra year to mull it over after the 2020 edition was postponed because of the pandemic. The upside of the delay is that the home team will have 40,000 well-lubricated fans there to cheer them on. Not that this intimidates the Ryder Cup powerhouse from across the pond. Team Europe is arriving with so much swagger that it’s relishing the prospect of a hostile crowd.

“If there was 40,000 U.S. fans and no Europeans, we’d prefer that than having no fans,” Harrington said. “That’s just the reality. We want the noise. We want the excitement.”

Patrick Cantlay hits a tee shot on the 11th hole during a practice session.

Photo: tannen maury/Shutterstock

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com