Professional Golf Tours - Structure of Tour Golf

Structure of Tour Golf

There are more than twenty professional golf tours, each run by a PGA or an independent tour organisation which is responsible for arranging events, finding sponsors, and regulating the tour. Most of the major tours are player controlled organisations whose commercial objective is to maximise the income of their members by maximising prize money. The larger tours have a tournament almost every week through most of the year.

Each tour has "members" who have earned their "tour cards", meaning they are entitled to play in most of the tour's events. A golfer can become a member of a leading tour by succeeding in an entry tournament, usually called a Qualifying School ("Q-School"); or, by achieving a designated level of success in its tournaments when competing as an invited non-member; or, much rarer, by having enough notable achievements on other tours to make them a desirable member. Membership of some of the lesser tours is open to any registered professional who pays an entry fee.

There are enormous differences in the financial rewards offered by the various golf tours, so players on all but the top few tours always aspire to move up if they can. For example, the PGA Tour, which is the first-tier tour in the United States, offers nearly a hundred times as much prize money each season as the third-tier NGA Pro Golf Tour. The hierarchy of tours in financial terms, as of 2011, is as follows:

• Clear 1st: PGA Tour
• Clear 2nd: European Tour
• Clear 3rd: Champions Tour
• Clear 4th: LPGA Tour
• Fifth to seventh (in alphabetical order): Asian Tour; Japan Golf Tour; LPGA of Japan Tour

In the 1990s the Japan Golf Tour was the third richest tour, but in recent years its number of tournaments has been steadily contracting from a peak of 44 in 1990 to 24 in 2007, and tournament purses have risen only slowly. The (U.S.) LPGA saw a substantial decline in financial rewards in the late 2000s; when its commissioner Carolyn Bivens was forced to resign by a player revolt in 2009, it had only 14 events locked in for 2010. Its 2010 schedule was ultimately unveiled with 24 events, down from 34 as recently as 2008. The tour saw signs of recovery in 2012, with the addition of three new events, the sanctioning of a tournament in Australia, and the return of one tournament that had been off the schedule for a year. The late-2000s economic crisis has not yet had a major impact on the PGA Tour, mainly because most of its tournament sponsors were locked in through 2010; there was media speculation that the expiration of those sponsorship contracts in 2011 would see substantial changes in the landscape of that tour. However, this speculation proved misplaced or at least premature, as the 2011 season was announced with only one less official money event than in 2010, with virtually identical prize money. The Asian Tour and the LPGA of Japan Tour enjoyed rapid growth in prize money in the early 2000s, and have been less affected by the economic crisis than the U.S. LPGA.