The unintended consequence of PGA Tour's proposed changes

By: James Colgan

November 7, 2024

The PGA Tour is on the brink of sweeping change.

And with change comes consequence.

Guy Kinnings knows this better than most. As the head of the DP World Tour, he witnessed (from afar at first, but now from up close) how change befell his tour in the era of Saudi investment in pro golf.

He knows how the DP World Tour was reportedly faced with the opportunity to take on substantial PIF funding, and then how it made the decision to pursue a “strategic alliance” with the PGA Tour instead, binding the two tours together in ways that both helped his employer (through co-sanctioned events and an infusion of investment) and hurt it (through a feeder system that sapped the DPWT of talent and relegated it beneath its American sibling).

Now, Kinnings is watching closely as the PGA Tour stares down the barrel of another wave of changes, announced last week in a memo to players. Starting in 2026, should the changes receive approval from the Tour’s various boards, the effective size of the Tour will shift from 125 full-time members down to 100, shrinking the size of golf’s largest professional tour in pursuit of a more streamlined competitive product for all members. As part of the shift, the Tour also would lower the number players ascending from its feeder tour, the Korn Ferry Tour, each year, and cut down on the number of Monday qualifiers into events.

The changes are meant to improve the quality of the Tour’s week-in, week-out product, but they will come with their own set of consequences for the golf landscape, particularly for those seeking to enter into the highest stratosphere of the pro game.

For an organization like the DP World Tour, that’s not just news, that’s an opportunity — one that might convince players of more diverse backgrounds to begin their pro-golf journeys in Europe, and that might, by extension, improve the quality of the DP Tour overall.

In an interview with The Scotsman’s Martin Dempster this week, Kinnings was keen to point out as much.

“I don’t think it has had a huge effect,” Kinnings said, referencing the growth of the DP World Tour’s feeder tour, the Challenger Tour, and the increased resources Kinnings’ team has put into its events. “But, at the same time, the announcement last week by the PAC could lead to players maybe starting to look differently about what is the best way for them to try to get a card and it doesn’t matter where that is.”

Under the proposed new PGA Tour structure, there would be no changes to the current “strategic partnership” with the DP World Tour, in that the top 10 finishers on the Euro tour still would get PGA Tour cards for the following season. Meanwhile, the number of cards to pros coming from the Korn Ferry Tour would decrease from 30 to 20.

While that still leaves a 2-to-1 advantage for Korn Ferry Tour cards over the DP World Tour, there are advantages to playing in Europe that might benefit prospective Tour stars, such as venue quality and access to outside tournaments that once made the DPWT a competitor to the PGA Tour in the late 20th century. A new crop of stars coming up through the DP World Tour could then boost the underpinnings of its new schedule, which includes a focus on unoccupied calendar stretches by other major tours.

These aren’t groundswell changes — in fact, they’re nothing at all yet. But for Kinnings and Co., they represent a consequence of potential PGA Tour changes that hasn’t been addressed, and something that could soon benefit them.

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if more Americans started to look at the DP World Tour,” Kinnings said. “If you look at the pathway through from the Challenge Tour to the DP World Tour, it is a very clear route and it has worked very well. But we just have to monitor that and see what happens.”

Rest assured, the DP World Tour will be watching closely, because a smaller pro golf game could very well mean more room for the DP World Tour within it.