What LIV Golf has identified best is the need for the game to better serve golf-starved communities. The success of the event in Adelaide, South Australia, best illustrates that there are places across the planet that crave and deserve to have elite golfers make an effort to expand their horizons and compete outside of their own borders.
Rory McIlroy has endorsed the idea of a “global tour,” noting that “golf is at an inflection point, and if golf doesn’t do it now, I fear that it will never do it and we’ll sort of have this fractured landscape forever.” He envisions something like soccer’s Champions League, where the top national league champions and teams across Europe compete in a World Cup-style tournament.
For golf, an elite global circuit can work within the framework of the current tour schedules.
“The way I view it is a bit like Champions League in football,” McIlroy said in January at the Dubai Desert Classic. “If you want to create something that is real value for the game of golf, I think it’s this top-level tour, and then all the other tours feed into it.
“If this global tour somehow comes to fruition in the next few years, could you imagine bringing the best 70 or 80 golfers in the world to India for a tournament?” he said. “I think [it] would change the game and the perception of the game in a country like that. So again, there’s so much opportunity out there to go global with it.”
The simplest way to build a global circuit – without blowing up the established tours by creating something completely new (as LIV did) – would be to designate already existing national opens across several tours in a similar way that the PGA Tour developed its signature events.
“If this global tour somehow comes to fruition in the next few years, could you imagine bringing the best 70 or 80 golfers in the world to India for a tournament? I think [it] would change the game and the perception of the game in a country like that.”
RORY McILROY
A series of traditional national opens across multiple continents – in countries such as Australia, Canada, Mexico, Ireland, France, Spain, Argentina, South Africa, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, India, Japan or Korea – could form the foundation of a global series that spreads out across the full year and offers enhanced purses and season-long points bonuses to entice players from all tours to compete. Perhaps six events per season – with a few as annual pillars while others can rotate to different national “opens” every year – would be the right fit to supplement fields filled with top players from various tours and bring a different energy level to these markets.
The biggest compromise for the PGA Tour – aside from accepting periodic competition against LIV golfers – would be ceding windows on the calendar. Particularly January, when the tour struggles for ratings against American football postseason. Golf could turn this month into a global showcase to kick off the new season with a bang, while the PGA Tour can still run its usual regular events in Honolulu and Palm Springs opposite two international showcases.
The year could still kick off the first week with a signature tournament of champions in Hawaii, but by including DP World Tour and LIV winners it would present a compelling product for primetime broadcasts. Wrapping up on Friday or Saturday night instead of Sunday would alleviate the conflicts with the NFL playoffs.
The second week could launch the global series at a multi-sanctioned Australian Open, one of the great traditional championships played at world-class courses in a market hungry to bring the most elite golfers to their distant shores. It, too, would include golfers from all tours, including LIV, in a full-field event sanctioned by each respective tour.
The third week, to appease Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund negotiating with the PGA Tour, could be an upgraded Saudi International event with a massive purse that draws the top players from every global tour. It would dovetail seamlessly into the DP World Tour’s popular Middle East swing while top PGA Tour players would return Stateside a week later for the Torrey Pines event.
Through the rest of the season, global open series events – with expanded access to top players outside the primary host tour – could dot the schedule. The Canadian and Scottish opens would be natural anchor candidates in the heart of the summer – wrapped around the Open Championship and perhaps the flagship BMW PGA Championship moving forward in the schedule to create a month-long Commonwealth swing.
National opens in South Africa, Asia and continental Europe can fill in gaps in early March, late April and mid-September to round out a six-event schedule that wouldn’t overextend players and take them away from their primary tours.
It will be a big ask from top players, but one worth their while. Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy can play in four majors, the Players, eight signature events, three playoff events, up to six global series events and a selection of other tournaments to keep a schedule of about 25 weeks annually. That’s more than the 21 events Scheffler and McIlroy each played in 2023, but the new for-profit PGA Tour Enterprises is going to require players to do more to earn their handsome income supplements.
PGA Tour Enterprises needs a money-making vehicle to generate billions in return to pay off equity shares and investment commitments made by Strategic Sports Group and eventually PIF, and these six events could offer them a profit center via sponsorship and TV rights deals.
It’s ambitious and complicated and will require a lot of compromise and outside-the-box thinking from tour leaders and players across golf’s existing ecosystem, but the end result of thoughtfully globalizing the professional game would be worth it in the long run.
Scott Michaux