The Future Of Mens Professional Golf

With sweeping changes being recently announced at PGA Tour HQ regarding its future schedule, I thought it might be worth adding a few thoughts and highlighting where I think we could end up one day.

I think it’s a good move to have more of an obvious promotion/relegation strategy. We are obviously used to this in the UK with the Premier League and the pyramid of football, and fans of clubs who find themselves in positions whereby they can be either promoted or relegated I’m sure would advocate the importance of this in sport as it drives passion and added interest towards the end of each season. There is real jeopardy when a football club is relegated from the Premier League to the Championship, and it seems wholly reasonable to attempt to ensure we have more of this cut throat element in professional golf.

I have mixed feelings about the intent to “bring the top players together” more often. I do not doubt that this needs to happen more than is currently happening, and that includes the addition of a couple of LIV golfers whose presence at future PGA Tour events will only add value. However, I have some concerns about the general effect this could have over time. Previously, it was the case that the top players (top referring to say top 20 players in the world) would approximately come together and all face each other fifteen times a year or so. If we rewind back to the period of 2010-2020, so pre LIV and also a time when the WGC’s were still intact, Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods would play in the same events around a dozen times a year. Take 2013, they played in the same events exactly twelve times that year. It would have been thirteen but remarkably Rory didn’t make the Tour championship… My sense is that every time the top players play against each other, relatively speaking each of their own “value” at the event is diminished. Now the whole equals more than the sum of its parts, but I only think that’s the case if there’s enough scarcity. I think it’s reasonable that more than fifteen events breaches that threshold, and so effectively the coming together of the top players loses its pull after that number is reached, especially if it’s in an event where there isn’t a whole lot of history attached. The WGC’s ended up being a pretty good barometer of this, and by the end they quite often felt stale. Having the top players come together at the Scottish Open feels more compelling than having them come together at the Cadillac Championship. My argument is that it’s best for the overall health of the Tour to not have them come together at the Cadillac, and instead have a few of them play the Cognizant Classic and a few play the Texas Open. This spreads their respective values as players much further and wider. It’s undeniably the case that when Jordan Spieth or Justin Thomas play a tournament alongside Rory McIlroy or Scottie Scheffler, they (Jordan and Justin) lose some of their commercial pull as participants, as most of the attention is understandably focused on Rory and Scottie.

This points to Rory’s recent comments, which I have also made on the podcast, that in actual fact the way the schedule used to be actually worked very well, and of course it’s only since the emergence of LIV golf that we now feel it necessary to promote the idea of bringing the top players together more regularly. More regularly than we have had in the last few years? Yes. But more regularly than we did back between say 2005-2020? I’m not sure. However, it seems likely that top players will be forced to come together more often, and ultimately it’s probably necessary given the “two tier” Championship/Challenger Series that is being implemented. If players decide not to come together as often as Brian Rolapp would like them to, then the future structure of the PGA Tour will be compromised and new problems will inevitably form.

Bringing the DP World Tour into the discussion, I have an idea of what the future could look like. This won’t be a popular view, and I’m not saying it’s likely to happen, but in my mind and given the funding constraints that are set to plague the DP World Tour moving forward as the PGA Tour reassess it’s involvement in the tour, I think it’s possible something like what I’m about to propose could conceivably happen…