Are these the first steps towards a World Tour?
europeAN Tour chief Keith pelley believes closer co-operation with the behemoth pGA Tour in America is the way forward if golf is to take on the competing interests of other sports.
The Canadian stopped short of saying there will finally be a World Tour in place in the near future but conceded it was a possibility.
‘I don’t know the reasons why the relationship was strained between us and the pGA Tour in the past, but it’s certainly changed now,’ he said. ‘I have an excellent relationship with Jay (Monahan, Ceo for the pGA Tour) and we are talking right now about how we can work closer together.
‘Jay and I are more colleagues than would have been the case with our predecessors. We’re still running our respective tours, we’re both members’ organisations but there needs to be somewhere down the line where we strategically align far better than we’re doing now.
‘does that mean a World Tour down the road? potentially, but let’s start having good, positive conversations now.’
pelley’s vision makes perfect sense. For too long, we’ve had top-grade tournaments taking place in the same week on both sides of the Atlantic, competing for the same A-listers, with the result invariably being that two thirds of them play in America and both events get diluted.
Now, with the announcement of the 2019 european Tour schedule yesterday and three rolex series events — the BMW pGA at Wentworth, and the French and Italian opens — moving to more favourable autumn dates, we’re seeing the first signs of a departure from that unhealthy strategy when it comes to attracting global interest in the ultra-competitive sports market.
‘There are four points in the year where we can generate excellent fields,’ said pelley. ‘You’ve got the Middle east at the start of the year, July in europe, after the Fedex Cup finishes in America in August, and then the end of the year.’
Tellingly, only one of those four points — the Gulf swing in January/February — will now see a split among the top players as to where to compete.
What price in five years we’ve reached some sort of amalgamation between the european and pGA Tours, with a schedule beginning in the Middle east, moving to America before a europe swing in July, back to the us and then on to other parts of the globe — a World Tour, in other words, with another stratum of events one rung below?