The PGA Tour is officially getting smaller.
On Monday evening, the Tour’s Policy Board ratified changes to the competitive of golf’s largest professional tour, fundamentally altering the size and competitive structure of the league. Monday’s announcement was only a formality — an expected result after months of negotiating by the Tour’s Player Advisory Council produced “proposed changes” that first circulated among the membership weeks ago. The changes were a near-lock to pass through the Policy Board, a 12-member council featuring six players who rarely stray from the direction offered by membership.
The changes usher in a new era for the PGA Tour that can best be described by a single word: exclusivity. Under the new rules, pro golf’s highest level will now be harder to reach, more challenging to access on a week-by-week basis and generally smaller than it has been for years. The upside for those on the inside is more opportunities to play and earn than ever before.
“I think you’ll see guys play a little bit more,” Brian Harman said Tuesday. “I think when you reduce some of the field sizes, you’ll get some more players. With the season being slightly more condensed, I don’t feel like guys will take as big of breaks during the year. So that particular part of the season’s going to become more and more important.”
So, what does it all look like? And what do you, the fan, need to know? We break it all down in 6 key points below.
1. Okay, what do I need to know?
You need to know that the PGA Tour just effectively reduced the size of its full-time membership by 20 percent, lowering the total number of full-timers on Tour from 125 players to 100. The changes have the downstream effect of reducing field sizes and qualification methods (we’ll get into that later), meaning that not only will there be fewer PGA Tour cards, but it will also be harder to get them.
The changes come as the Tour’s response to a glut of competitive challenges that have made its “product” lose steam. In theory, the changes make every shot, moment and event matter more than they did in the past, helping to streamline the Tour’s competitive structure and improve efforts to keep the Tour’s product in check heading into the future.
“The PAC discussions were based on a number of guiding principles, including our belief that PGA Tour membership is the pinnacle of achievement in men’s professional golf,” PGA Tour board member Adam Scott said in a letter to membership Monday evening. “The changes approved today will provide equitable playing opportunities for new young talent to be showcased, and positively refine the playing experience for our members.”
2. What else is changing?
The Tour is also reducing the number of full-time Tour cards given to top finishers on the Korn Ferry Tour (from 30 to 20), Q-School graduates (just top-5 finishers now, not top-5-and-ties), and will be removing Monday qualifiers from many of its events.
The Tour will reduce field sizes at many of its events. It has also proposed a new system for enforcing pace of play rules that would stiffen punishments for repeat offenders (while also lessening the penalty for one-off slow rounds).
3. What happens to the guys left behind by the new changes?
Thankfully, the changes won’t cast off 25 players from the Tour entirely. Misters 101-125 still will have opportunities to play on the Tour through “conditional status” and sponsors exemptions, which will allow them to play in events when fields have not been filled or sponsors wish to have them in the mix.
In some ways, this isn’t too different than life in 2024 for the Tour’s lower earners; the Signature Events series made it hard for many players, even those with full-time status, to earn slots in some of the Tour’s early-season events.
For non-PGA Tour members, the same pathways to a Tour card still exist, but the math just got a little bit harder.
4. Who came up with these ideas?
The ideas originated with the PGA Tour’s 16-member Player Advisory Council — think of them like the House of Representatives — based on feedback from Tour membership. They were then sent along to the Policy Board — essentially the Senate and Executive branches — for approval, which is where Monday evening’s rubber-stamp came from.
5. Why does the Tour suddenly care so much about improving the “competitive product”?
Change is the way of the world in professional sports. Those who embrace it get ahead, and those who do not wither on the vine.
LIV is the spark behind the fire of change that has come to the Tour in the last few years, helping to start the internal conversations that birthed many of the changes to the pro golf world, including these. Still, these changes are more internally driven than the turf-defending changes that came before it, like the creation of the Signature Events, limited fields and larger purse sizes.
In short, LIV’s success alerted the Tour that changes needed to be made. Players and new investor groups like the Strategic Sports Group have provided feedback about how those changes could look. And now, with the approval of (most) parties involved, the changes have been approved to make the Tour more consistently interesting and competitive.
Though these changes might feel severe, the Tour isn’t alone in making structural changes to its competitive product. Major League Baseball is perhaps the best comparison. MLB has evaluated many of the tentpoles of its organization over the last decade, and has produced sweeping changes (the pitch clock, new shift rules, etc.) that reignited fan interest despite early acrimony. That’s what the Tour is hoping for here.
6. What do we even mean by the “competitive product”?
We mean the top-to-bottom, beginning-to-end, day-in and day-out entertainment value and professional efficiency of the PGA Tour. Thursday and Friday rounds routinely failing to end on Thursday and Friday — as was the case for much of 2024 — represented just one of inefficiencies Tour players looked to as evidence for change.