How To Choose The Best Golf Clubs from the 2025 Releases

Ready for a change this year?

The golf clubs currently sitting in your bag have served their purpose, but you want to update what you have.

Your decision can be fuelled by the raft of new releases witnessed at the start of this year.

Drivers promise more distance and playability, and new irons will help you knock out the flagstick more.

However, making changes means spending money. New golf clubs aren’t cheap, and the expectations of success are high when you commit to making a purchase.

We understand that sometimes the desire to change is too strong, regardless of the financial implications.

To help you make the right decisions on what you need to improve in your game, let us offer some advice which concentrates on three areas:

• Understanding Your Game
• What’s New In 2025: New Releases, New Tech, New Materials
• How Custom Golf Clubs Improve Your Game

Understanding Your Game

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your game is the first step in making the correct golf equipment choices.

If you’re thinking about how to analyse your golf game, we’re here to provide some handy tips.

Driving

The first place you can start to create your own bank of stats is in the number of fairways you hit off the tee. If you take all the par fours and par fives on your home golf course, you’re looking at 13 or 14 fairways to hit over a round of golf.

The first task is to simply record how many fairways you hit. If you hit 7 out of 14 fairways, you have a 50% success rate. If you want to test your accuracy, the PGA Tour average for the 2024 season was 61.3%. England’s Aaron Rai led the way, hitting just over 72% of the fairways from the tee.

Diving a little deeper into your own driving performance, you can check for any patterns relating to which side you’re more likely to miss the fairway, left or right. When you miss the fairway, how much are you missing it? If you’re missing the fairway by a wide margin to the right, opting for a more draw-friendly driver might straighten your drives up.

Approach Play

What we’re talking about here is greens in regulation. Here's a brief overview for those unfamiliar with the term and wondering what it means to hit greens in regulation.

Hitting greens in regulation is an expected number of shots for your ball to end up on the putting surface relative to the hole's par.

If you are playing a par three, the expectation is you’ll hit the green in one shot; for a par four, two shots; and for a par five, three shots.

Throughout a round of golf, you can easily keep track of the number of times you hit a green in regulation. If you want to test yourself against the best, the PGA Tour average for 2024 was 66.75%, with Patrick Fishburn leading the way at 74.21%.

From a golf equipment perspective, missed greens in regulation could be attributed to irons that aren’t very forgiving on off-centre hits. Maybe you face a lot of long approach shots and don’t have the necessary club to cover the distance adequately.

As with driving stats, we can dig deeper. You can record details such as when you miss a green, are you missing long or short (most amateurs are short of the green) and if your misses are left or right of the green.

It’s interesting to note that if your driving is poor and you miss a lot of fairways from the tee, your greens in regulation stats are likely to be poor, but your scrambling stats might be amazing!

Scrambling

Scrambling is also known as up-and-downs. It refers to the situation of missing a green in regulation. Can you save a shot by chipping close and holing the subsequent putt?

We can see a correlation between players who are inaccurate off the tee but excellent at scrambling around the greens to save shots. Think of players like Phil Mickelson or Seve Ballesteros. 

Players who hit lots of greens in regulation aren’t likely to be great scramblers because they don’t face a situation where they have missed a green on many occasions.

If you miss the green, whether from the rough or a bunker, keep track of how many shots you take to get up and down.

Analysing your short game might indicate that you may need to add an additional wedge in the bag to help you be more successful. Good wedge play can also be attributed to consistent loft gapping between your wedges that help cover every eventuality if you miss a green.

Putting

Is there anything more annoying than playing a hole well only to have a nightmare on the green?

Putting well can help build or maintain momentum during a round of golf. You can record how many times you three-putt during a round. You also track whether you miss the hole left or right, long or short. If your stats are bad in these areas, your putter might not be helping you build consistent speed control.

You can easily keep a note of all these stats on your scorecard or your phone. Some apps and tech can collate your stats to give you an in-depth analysis of your game.

The important thing is that you record your stats consistently over a number of rounds of golf. One round doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the state of your game.

Recording your stats over multiple rounds will give you a true, accurate reflection and some meaningful data that can be used in a very positive way that we’ll share with you shortly.

First, though, let’s whet your appetite for some of the new golf club releases of 2025.

What’s New In 2025: New Releases, New Tech, New Materials

When it comes to new releases, people tend to get the most excited about new golf drivers. The promise of longer, straighter drives gets us thinking this could be the year we unlock our inner Rory.

2025 is shaping up to be a strong year in the driver market. We have new releases from Callaway, Cobra, TaylorMade, and Srixon. Don’t forget the Titleist GT Series. Although launched in 2024, the GT Series offers something for every level of golfer.

One trend that we see with the new crop of golf drivers is the ongoing importance of tuning performance through moveable weights and adjustable hosels.

Adjustable weights on the sole of the driver can centre mass in a location to create different playing characteristics.

More weight positioned in the rear of the sole at the furthest point from the face increases stability. Move the mass forward, and you will get lower spinning drives.

Callaway’s Elyte drivers have a moveable weight positioned in the rear that can be moved to aid draw or fade shots. The Callaway Elyte X is designed to reduce slices, so the weight can be placed in the heel of the head to allow the toe to close quicker and straighten the clubface at impact. The Callaway Elyte Triple Diamond model can have more weight sitting in the weight port behind the face for even lower spinning drives.

TaylorMade and Cobra adopt the same principle for their low-spin versions but add an additional weight port to help draw or fade bias.

With the launch of the TaylorMade Qi35 series, TaylorMade is making a big deal about the effectiveness of moveable weights in their Trajectory Adjustment System (TAS).

Adjustable hosels also allow fitters to dial in launch and spin rates perfectly by adding or removing loft. Altering the lie angle in the hosel can add further shot-shaping bias.

Cobra has taken the adjustable hosel concept to a new level by introducing the SureFit 33 hosel.

The new adjustable hosel provides, yes, you’ve guessed it, 33 possible combinations to hone in on shot shape and trajectory.

The beauty of this system is that the face will always remain square, which is huge for golfers, especially if loft is being added. Adding loft gives the impression of a closed face at address that can frighten some golfers into thinking they will hit it straight left.

Further trends we see in the 2025 driver lineups are the use of new carbon fibre derivatives. Callaway is using a material known as Thermoforged Carbon, and TaylorMade is employing a material called Chromium Carbon.

Titleist started this trend by employing Proprietary Matrix Polymer (PMP) in its GT Series.

Used extensively across the crown, these new materials reduce weight, further helping to increase clubhead speed. The saved weight can also be positioned more effectively internally, depending on the driver’s playing characteristics.

Along with new materials, performance can be enhanced by increasing the spring effect from drivers within the legal limits.

Srixon’s new ZXi golf driver family features i-Flex Face technology, which varies the face thickness to improve the energy transfer from the clubface to the ball. In reality, Srixon is saying that you will experience improved driving distance regardless of where your strike location on the face is.

Energy transfer is further enhanced by creating a secondary flex zone behind the face, which amplifies the trampoline effect across the face in what Srixon calls its Rebound Frame.

One final driver trend to focus on is the ongoing use of AI.

Callaway’s Elyte range debuts the updated version of last year’s Ai Smart Face, the Ai10x Face.

The Ai10x Face introduces even more hotspots across the face to encourage faster ball speeds regardless of where the strike comes from.

Cleveland is also championing the use of AI in its new HiBore XL drivers.

AI-based research has helped create the distinctive triangular shape and variable face thickness technology that improves performance on miss-hit shots.

What does this mean in the real world?

Lighter materials used in the head construction coupled with more forgiving faces help golfers who struggle with clubhead speed and hitting the centre of the face consistently.

Shots hit out the heel or toe previously suffered from drop-offs in ball speed and accuracy. Improved technology helps miss-hits travel similar distances to well-struck shots.

Using the tuning features of moveable weights and adjustable hosels can help eliminate a destructive shot like a slice.

Irons

Performance golf irons for mid to high-handicap golfers like the Elyte or Cobra’s DS-Adapt build on technologies they use elsewhere in their ranges. With Callaway, they are employing Ai10x Face technology to aid shots that aren’t struck out the centre to fly the same distance and stopping power of a well-struck shot.

Cobra incorporates improved versions of its PWR-BRIDGE and SPEEDSHELL to improve ball speed and spin rates across the face for increased performance.

For better players, Srixon’s new i-Forged process uses a new softer steel and a condensed forging process to enhance feel. This process is used in the creation of the new Srixon ZXi range of golf irons. The ZXi4 is a multi-material iron that utilises the same soft steel and condensed forging process as the ZXi5 and ZXi 7 irons, which lends itself perfectly to a blended set of irons that produce the same feel from the longest to the shortest iron.

How Custom Golf Clubs Improve Your Game

Golf is a game where confidence is key to shooting good scores.

If you are playing with golf clubs that aren’t suited to your exact needs, your confidence in knowing how your clubs will perform can lead you to second-guess where your shots will end up.

Custom golf club fitting removes the guessing element from your game and starts with the stats you’ve been tracking.

Two things happen when you have a custom-fitting session. Your fitter will ask you a series of questions so they can understand better how your game works. This is the opportunity to share the stats you’ve been keeping.

Using a launch monitor such as GC Quad will reveal how your club head and club face are aligned at impact, which then dictates the outcome of your shots.

If you are fighting a major slice off the tee and your stats show you are missing fairways right and by some margin, the launch monitor can determine that your clubface is open at impact and that the club head path is out to in, which leads to that big banana slice.

Your stats data and the findings on the launch monitor provide valuable insights into the type of driver you need that will help you hit the ball straighter.

The fitter can either get you hitting draw-bias drivers like the Callaway Elyte X or the Cobra DS-Adapt Max D.

Given the customisation options through moveable weights or adjustable hosels, the fitter could also try you with the high MOI drivers like the Cleveland or TaylorMade Qi35.

The difference in results is measured through the launch monitor, where we can measure how effective we are in straightening up your drives.

At the end of your custom-fitting session, you have a recommendation for a driver backed up with the launch monitor data that will help you hit more fairways.

Imagine that feeling now when you are facing a challenging hole where all the trouble lurks down the right side. Before you could predetermine the outcome, your confidence would be low, and the likelihood of pulling off a good shot would be non-existent.

Now, you have a driver built specifically to help straighten your shots out, and suddenly, that demanding drive doesn’t pose the same threat.

You can experience this feeling throughout your golf bag.

Whether it’s being able to successfully take on that long par three with a new hybrid or fairway wood, hit more precise iron shots, chip and pitch more effectively due to an improved golf wedge setup or take fewer putts, custom golf clubs unlock a new level of confidence in your game because you now have the right tools for the job.

With the new releases of 2025, there is more choice in golf equipment than ever before.

To make the financial commitment to purchasing new golf clubs to pay off, your best option is custom golf clubs.

At Nine By Nine Golf, our experienced fitters work with every level of golfer, from beginner to elite-level amateurs and professionals.

We work with you to uncover what head and shaft combination delivers the desired results. If you go with our recommendation, our team of technicians will build your clubs in-house, further ensuring you have the perfect set of golf clubs for your game delivered to your door.

You can book a custom-fitting session via our website, where you can also explore all the new releases from Callaway, Cobra, Srixon, and TaylorMade.

We’d be happy to help If you have questions about any of the 2025 releases or whether custom-fitting will benefit your golf.