Strategic Alliance? The PGA Tour cares about nothing but itself

This coming Sunday 10 guys will be getting PGA Tour cards for 2025 on the back of their 2024 season on the DP World Tour. And a very decent card it is too as it guarantees (a) getting into enough tournaments on the PGA Tour to have a sensible chance to retain it, and (b) envious glances from many of their colleagues.

Now there are a few ways to look at this. You look at it like guys I know from the corporate world who are incredulous that any business would give away its 10 most talented people to a rival business for free every single year, depleting their talent pool and arguably making it less likely that people, like sponsors for instance, will want to do business with them.

“We used to have some really good staff, but next year we can only offer staff who are good but not quite as good.” Hardly a great sales pitch to someone you want to part with millions of euros.

Alternatively, you look at it like the DP World Tour does and trumpet this as a shining example of the benefits of the Strategic Alliance with the PGA Tour. You emphasise the great opportunity it offers to the players and how big an incentive it is to keep grinding away.

You back this up by pointing out that six of the class of 2023 (class size in the end nine as Adrian Meronk went straight to LIV Golf) actually kept their cards for 2024, and how that harbinger of doom (The Secret Tour Caddy in “that bloody book”) was wrong saying we’d see most of them back with tails between their legs.

And all the while, brushing any notion of this being bad for business straight under the carpet alongside last year’s DP World Tour financial statement released the other week. Jeez, it’s getting crowded under that carpet.

Or you take a more cynical view. Like I, and many of my colleagues, do which is that ultimately America as a nation rarely, if ever, acts in anything other than self-interest, and the PGA Tour (being American) is no different.

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DP World Tour-PGA Tour card scheme only benefits one party

So forget any notion you might have about these 10 cards being offered out of the goodness of their hearts, their desire to “grow the game” globally, and all that b******s. No, these were offered solely to legitimise creaming off any of the cream of European talent that didn’t make it to the PGA Tour by any other means.

With these players added to the PGA Tour roster will come extra eyeballs and increased exposure outside of the US. Golf fans follow their favourites no matter what tour they play on and 10 more “Europeans” means potentially thousands more “European” eyes on the coverage, on the sponsors’ logos, or whatever else these eyes fall on.

All of it is to the commercial benefit of the PGA Tour.

But in case you’re still undecided as to whether giving away these PGA Tour cards is a good thing or not, here’s something that you might have also missed in all this.

Of the 10 guys who got PGA Tour cards from the DP World Tour in 2023, only 4 played in Abu Dhabi last week: Olesen, Meronk, Campillo and Nicolai Højgaard.

Four then became three for this week’s DP World Tour Championship in Dubai, as the defending champion and Ryder Cup star Højgaard needed a top 5 at Yas Links to make it inside the top 50, but finished T13. So didn’t.

Olesen is in Dubai thanks to a win in Ras Al Khaimah early in 2024 (before heading back to the US but probably not on BA), while Campillo had good results when he came back to play the DP World Tour in the autumn after a fairly average year on the PGA Tour. And as for the other member of this illustrious trio, Meronk, he’s only there because his appeal against his fines for playing on LIV Golf is still pending.

The defending champion in Abu Dhabi (when it wasn’t a play-off event), Victor Perez couldn’t defend his title and isn’t in Dubai either: mainly because he didn’t even come near making the top 70. His compatriot Pavon was good enough to win on the PGA Tour and play their Tour Championship, but he didn’t qualify for the DP World Tour Play-Offs. With Ryan Fox being perhaps the other big name conspicuously absent.

Which, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when 10 of your best players from a year ago end up predominantly playing their golf in the US, so by definition can’t amass any points in Europe as they ordinarily would.

And not amassing points means that qualifying for your supposed showcase end-of-season Play-Off events becomes much harder than it ordinarily would be for these 10 guys, to the point where it’s, to all intents and purposes, virtually impossible. Especially now every tournament on the DP World Tour schedule has basically the same R2D Points on offer.

Now whether someone should have seen this coming, or whether they did but considered this a risk worth taking, is another matter. But either way what you end up with in Abu Dhabi and Dubai are weaker fields that these events probably deserve given that they are after all Play-Offs.

After which you do it all over again.

Which, some would say, is madness.

But ultimately whether you think giving these 10 cards away is a good thing or a bad thing, ultimately it made 9 of my colleagues an awful lot more money than they would have made caddying in Europe this season.

So maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all.

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