The PGA Tour Policy Board approved extensive changes to eligibility and field sizes Monday.
These changes, going into effect for the 2026 season, come after pressure from fans and sponsors to create a more engaging product. However, the PGA Tour chose to appease its top players under the illusion of improvement.
Changes include reducing exempt status from top 125 to top 100 in FedEx Cup standings and smaller field sizes for events. In a statement detailing the tour’s plans, the Policy Board Player Director and former Masters champion Adam Scott claims the changes “enhance the golf fan experience” and “positively refine the playing experience for our members.”
Theoretically, the best and most popular players will make up a greater percentage of the field as the tour hopes to improve viewership by increasing speed of play.
Lucas Glover, currently 62nd in the FedEx Cup standings, calls the negotiations “cool kid meetings.”
He told Golfweek that the tour is insulting the intelligence of its less popular members by “trying to appease six guys and make them happy so they don’t go somewhere else and play golf.”
The former U.S. Open champion also told the Golf Channel at the Worldwide Technology Championship in early November that becoming the only professional sport to reduce membership instead of expand is “asinine.” He believes it’s more sensible to make certain players to play faster instead of blaming lower-ranked members for a decline in product value.
The Golf Channel heard a contrasting opinion from Wesley Bryan, the face of one of the most popular YouTube golf channels, “Bryan Bros Golf.” If the season were to end today, Bryan would be the last member given exempt status for the 2025 season because he sits at 125 in the FedEx Cup standings.
Bryan trusts the “elected players” to make proper decisions for the PGA Tour “in a really weird time [of professional golf].” He claims that besides “six or seven guys,” other members, including himself, “don’t always put the most exciting product on the golf course.”
However, other popular members supported Glover’s sentiment this week, including this post on X from major champion and “Full Swing” star Matt Fitzpatrick.
Max Homa, a top performer on the PGA Tour, reposted the video below on Instagram of LPGA player Charley Hull blasting pace-of-play concerns.
With the division that exists in professional golf between LIV and the PGA Tour, players have more power than ever. The Policy Board has no option but to capitulate or the tour risks further irrelevance and maybe even extinction. It’s rightfully scared, for example, to enforce pace-of-play rules and lose the support of its stars.
According to the Sports Business Journal, the PGA Tour “averaged 2.2M viewers for its Sunday telecasts (no majors) in 2024, a drop of 19% from 2.7M in 2023.” Fans aren’t avoiding final rounds of events because of the members at the bottom but because of who isn’t competing at the top.
LIV may not be pulling in impressive viewership numbers, but it still stole some of the game’s most impressive and entertaining players.
The PGA Tour’s main issue is not its number of members nor the size of event fields but its war with LIV. The answer to declining viewership is not to also start a war with itself.
Until both tours bring golf back together, the PGA Tour will sacrifice growing the game for the future for its bottom line now.
