Rory McIlroy no longer has a seat at the table of the PGA Tour after relinquishing his position as a member of its board of directors, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have strong opinions about the future direction of the circuit.
Following his third round on Saturday of the Genesis Invitational in Pacific Palisades, California, McIlroy expanded on his “dream scenario,” which he outlined last month in an interview with Golf Digest, for how a more global circuit could work.
Before the Tour officially finalized its deal with SSG to pump potentially $3 billion into the PGA Tour’s new for-profit entity, PGA Tour Enterprises, McIlroy said, “there is an untapped commercial opportunity out there. Investors always want to make a return on their money. Revenues at the PGA Tour right now are about $2.3 billion. So how do we get that number up to four or six? To me, it is by looking outward. They need to think internationally and spread their wings a bit. I’ve been banging that drum for a while.”
“I think it’s all pie in the sky stuff,” he said after shooting 69 in the third round at Riviera Country Club. “I think there has to be a component of the Southern Hemisphere, Australia, South Africa. There obviously has to be a component of the Far East, whether that be Korea, Japan, China. Obviously the Middle East as well. We’ve been going to the Middle East for a long time, but obviously Dubai, Saudi, and then sort of working our way from east to west and back into the United States for the sort of spring, summertime.”
McIlroy envisions a tour for the best players that would play in the neighborhood of 24 events around the globe, the four majors plus 20 limited-field tournaments in the fashion of this week’s signature event in L.A.
“I would think it would be one tour. I think you would just create a tour for the top 80 players in the world,” he said. “Everything sort of feeds up into that one. You know, the way I look at it, it would be like Champions League in European football. It sort of sits above the rest of the leagues and then all those leagues sort of feed up into that and the best of the best play against each other in the Champions League is the way I would think about it.”
He added: “I don’t think it will look too dissimilar to what it is right now, but maybe the front end of the year and the back end of the year might look a little different. I still think there’s — I don’t think we need to blow everything up, but there definitely needs to be some tweaks, I think.”
McIlroy’s idea could have legs as the Tour plots a new future as a for-profit with private equity investors expecting a return on their investment, not to mention the still-to-be-determined involvement of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the newly-created business.
“I think you just have to convince the players to buy into it because that’s what’s going to be best for them, especially if you’re going to be an owner of that tour,” he said. “Everyone’s got their own interests in this game and that’s what happens when you’ve got quite a fractured landscape at this point. So trying to align everyone’s interests and trying to convince everyone that this is the right thing to do for the game of golf as a whole, and if you can convince everyone of that, then it would be pretty simple. But right now it’s just trying to get everyone singing off the same hymn sheet.”