A World Golf Tour? Not So Fast

In the past two years alone, we have seen the emergence of a World Golf Championship in China, a PGA Tour sanctioned event in Malaysia and 12 of the top-20 players in the world coming from outside of the United States.

Eight of the last 12 major championships, including three of the last four, have been won by international players 

One might assume that Greg Norman’s vision of a world Golf tour, which was shot down by Tim Finchem more than a decade ago, is beginning to take hold.

Golf has certainly become a global sport and there’s no doubt that it deserves a global stage.  

But at this point in time, an organized world golf tour may still be more of a fantasy than a certainty.

Here’s the thing, 99 percent of the world’s top players compete on either the European or PGA Tours.

If a true world golf tour were to materialize, the first step would undoubtedly be the merging of the PGA and European Tours.

Easy, you may say.

Well, not really.

The European and PGA Tours each have full schedules with events taking place 48 weeks out of the year.

For example, last Jan. 28-31, the Farmers Insurance Open was taking place on the PGA Tour, which is an event at Torrey Pines, frequented by the likes of Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods.  That very same week, the Qatar Masters was taking place on the European Tour, which is an event that has become very popular amongst the top players in Europe.

If a true world golf tour were to emerge, which of these events would have to go?

Or the more likely scenario: which of these events would be fully sanctioned by the world golf tour, and would the event that is not sanctioned survive?

And this is just the European and PGA Tours we’re talking about here.

What about the Japanese Tour, the Australasia Tour, etc.?

What would happen to events that are scheduled to take place on those tours during the week of Jan. 28-31?

Let’s move ahead to March 4-7.

The Honda Classic was taking place that week on the PGA Tour, which is an event that has been a pillar of the Florida swing for many years, while the European Tour had a fairly prestigious event with the Malaysian Open that very same week.

Again, which tournament would go?

The European Tour and its players would want the Honda Classic to go, while the PGA Tour and its players would obviously want the Malaysian Open to go.

The European and PGA Tours each have 48 sanctioned events on their schedules.  While some events such as the WGCs and major championships are co-sanctioned, most are not.

So, if we were to merge these two tours alone, each tour would have at least half of their events unsanctioned by a world golf tour.  

But, a true world golf tour would not simply involve the merging of the European and PGA Tours.  The Japanese Tour, the Australasia Tour, the Australian PGA Tour, etc. would also need to be included.  

That would mean that somewhere in the vicinity of 75 percent of the current PGA and European Tour events would be unsanctioned by a world golf tour.

Who’s going to shell out millions of dollars to sponsor an event that is not sanctioned by the world golf tour and is unlikely to attract any of the world’s top players?

The alternative of having three or four world golf tour events taking place in one week would be more or less what we have right now. Each and every week there are different professional events taking place on different tours around the world with World Golf Ranking points up for grabs at all of them.   

Although it may seem as if professional golf is headed in the direction of a single world golf tour, when considering the details and logistics, things become complicated to say the least. 

We are talking about multi-million dollar sponsorship deals, massive amounts of revenue, not to mention charitable donations and the economic affect that the 96 European and PGA Tour (48 on each tour) events have on local communities during the course of a season.

How is anyone going to possibly create a 48 week world golf tour schedule from the hundreds upon hundreds of professional golf events taking place each year on dozens of tours around the globe?

The fact of that matter is that it’s simply an impossible task…and probably will be for quite some time.

The 2016 Olympic Games, in which golf is included, will likely be as close as we’ll come to a world golf tour over the next decade.