Bumper £2.78m pay for Tour chief Pelley
IT HAS emerged on the eve of the Ryder Cup that golf’s European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley earned an extraordinary financial package of £2.78million last year.
Pelley’s pay is far in excess of that earned by the previous CEO of the European Tour, George O’Grady, who was on £610,717 when Canadian businessman Pelley succeeded him in 2015.
The Tour’s published accounts detail that Pelley (below) also earned more than £2.5m in 2016.
Yet despite Pelley’s massive remuneration, no bumper new sponsors that would greatly improve revenue have been added to the Ryder Cup or European Tour roster of backers during his time. If anything, the European Tour has lost ground to the booming US PGA tour.
It should be a cause for concern that next year Europe’s top two golfers, Justin Rose and Rory McIlroy, are not due to tee off in Europe until July.
The accounts also show that during Pelley’s tenure, the number of external consultants used by the European Tour has doubled. A Tour spokesman would not comment on Pelley’s contract, but said the set-up of the organisation had improved under his leadership. LBBC Sport’s slavish adherence to French employment law at the Ryder Cup reached the ridiculous levels yesterday of Iain Carter, the golf correspondent, not going to the course to avoid exceeding his hours two days before the tournament. IT WILL be difficult for some to take David Ginola seriously as presenter of the Ryder Cup opening ceremony today. This follows his doomed 2015 bid for the FIFA presidency that lost credibility when it emerged his campaign had been sponsored by bookmakers Paddy Power.
It was considered that Ginola being French made him a more apt choice for Le Golf National — he was rehearsing on the autocue yesterday — than Sky Sports golf presenter Di Dougherty, who hosted at Celtic Manor and Gleneagles. TIGER WOODS took his place in the front row on the right hand of captain Jim Furyk for the American team pictures yesterday. This was in stark contrast to two years ago in Hazeltine, when an injury-hit Woods had to be reminded he wasn’t one of the players when he stayed in the line-up with the rest of the team after the vice-captains’ picture had been taken. The Europeans turned up promptly at 8am as scheduled on Tuesday for their pictures, but the Americans turned up more than 20 minutes late — blaming a rules meeting and buggy drivers going to the practice range rather than the 10th fairway for the pictures.