In an interview with The Scotsman’s Martin Dempster, DP World Tour chief Man Kinnings hinted at a significant unintended consequence of PGA Tour modifications.
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The PGA Tour is on the point of sweeping change.
And with change comes consequence.
Man Kinnings is aware of this higher than most. As the top of the DP World Tour, he witnessed (from afar at first, however now from up shut) how change befell his tour within the period of Saudi funding in professional golf.
He is aware of how the DP World Tour was reportedly confronted with the chance to tackle substantial PIF funding, after which the way it made the choice to pursue a “strategic alliance” with the PGA Tour as an alternative, binding the 2 excursions collectively in ways in which each helped his employer (by means of co-sanctioned occasions and an infusion of funding) and harm it (by means of a feeder system that sapped the DPWT of expertise and relegated it beneath its American sibling).
Now, Kinnings is watching intently because the PGA Tour stares down the barrel of one other wave of modifications, introduced final week in a memo to gamers. Beginning in 2026, ought to the modifications obtain approval from the Tour’s numerous boards, the efficient dimension of the Tour will shift from 125 full-time members right down to 100, shrinking the dimensions of golf’s largest skilled tour in pursuit of a extra streamlined aggressive product for all members. As a part of the shift, the Tour additionally would decrease the quantity gamers ascending from its feeder tour, the Korn Ferry Tour, every year, and minimize down on the variety of Monday qualifiers into occasions.
The modifications are supposed to enhance the standard of the Tour’s week-in, week-out product, however they are going to include their very own set of penalties for the golf panorama, significantly for these searching for to enter into the very best stratosphere of the professional recreation.
For a corporation just like the DP World Tour, that’s not simply information, that’s a chance — one which may persuade gamers of extra numerous backgrounds to start their pro-golf journeys in Europe, and which may, by extension, enhance the standard of the DP Tour total.
In an interview with The Scotsman’s Martin Dempster this week, Kinnings was eager to level out as a lot.
“I don’t assume it has had an enormous impact,” Kinnings stated, referencing the expansion of the DP World Tour’s feeder tour, the Challenger Tour, and the elevated assets Kinnings’ crew has put into its occasions. “However, on the identical time, the announcement final week by the PAC may result in gamers possibly beginning to look otherwise about what’s the easiest way for them to attempt to get a card and it doesn’t matter the place that’s.”
Beneath the proposed new PGA Tour construction, there can be no modifications to the present “strategic partnership” with the DP World Tour, in that the highest 10 finishers on the Euro tour nonetheless would get PGA Tour playing cards for the next season. In the meantime, the variety of playing cards to professionals coming from the Korn Ferry Tour would lower from 30 to twenty.
