[Photo: Getty Images]
Step aside “product,” there’s a new buzzword in town. You’re going to hear “scarcity” a lot over the coming 12 months in professional golf.
A quick refresher: as our colleague Joel Beall reported, news emerged recently about the possibility of a future 20-odd tournament schedule for the PGA Tour – a model that could cut the current number of events the tour holds roughly in half. It would also aim to start the PGA Tour season in late February and end in late August. PGA Tour pro Harris English said, “I think that’s what they’re going to change down the road, maybe in 2027, is have all the tournaments be equal and not have the eight elevated events and the regular events. They’ll have 20, 22 events that are all the same.”
One person we hadn’t heard from about the changes, until last week’s Australian Open, was reigning Masters champion Rory McIlroy. You may remember he held a role on the PGA Tour’s Policy Board but resigned in November 2023 due to time commitments.
The newest member of the career grand slam winners club, who headlined a record-breaking Australian Open at Royal Melbourne last week, was asked what he thought of the PGA Tour hypothetically moving to an NFL-style model.
Arguably the most successful sporting league in the world uses a regular season format of 17 games in 18 weeks before the playoffs. If your team doesn’t make the playoffs, NFL fans wait from early January to September to see their team in action again in the new season. Even if they are in, or win, the Super Bowl, it’s still mid-February to September. Hence, scarcity.
As always, McIlroy was thoughtful and zoomed out from the PGA Tour to discuss global golf the impact scarcity would have on the game, including the DP World Tour which co-sanctions the Australian PGA and Open. (Note, he did not use the word scarcity).
The world No.2 did not specifically say it, rather he alluded to the fact that the Dubai Desert Classic would enjoy more limelight in late January, while the DP World Tour wold also take centre stage from August onwards. The European circuit schedules a group of its biggest and most watchable events from August through October. That slate includes its flagship BMW PGA at Wentworth and McIlroy’s home event, the Irish Open, as well as the dreamy Omega European Masters in the Swiss Alps and the British Masters. The DP World Tour also stages its two-event finale in Abu Dhabi and Dubai every November.
The tour then heads down to Australia for the PGA and Open, which are among the tour’s first events of its new season.
Back to McIlroy. He was asked, “Rory, what do you make of the, that the PGA Tour may consolidate itself to around 20 events, years down the track, and would that help an event like this?”
“Yeah, I think I understand what they’re [PGA Tour] doing,” McIlroy said. “They’re trying to get their domestic model right before focusing internationally, and they obviously don’t want to go up against football. NFL is king in the States, and it makes sense from an American point of view, but then I think it does let international and global golf shine for five months of the year.
“So if the [PGA] Tour are really thinking about playing from February through to August, that leaves September through to January for here [Australia] and Europe and wherever else in the world to really be the shining light of golf for that five months. So I think people could really get behind that. And you sort of have the American swing – with maybe the Scottish Open and The Open in the middle – but the rest of the big international stuff sort of in that September to January timeframe, which I think works pretty well, especially for the Southern Hemisphere, for tournaments like this.”
