Golf Rumors: PGA Tour, LIV set to form ‘Elite Global Tour’

The Daily Mail (Sport) produced exclusive details from sources close to the negotiations for the PGA-LIV merger on August 30th. This information hasn’t been officially confirmed by the PGA Tour or LIV Golf but this hasn’t been the first time the Daily Mail has been ahead of breaking golf news.

There are still many details that will emerge over the coming year but some of the vital structural details have come out regarding how and when the global tour will operate. The entity itself still remains nameless currently. There will likely be a new name created to encompass the tournaments played with combined fields from the PGA Tour, DP World Tour, and LIV Golf.

The PGA Tour appears to be in the driver’s seat for this organization.

The Saudi-backed Public Investment Fund (PIF), however, will be pitching in over two billion dollars for the PGA-LIV merger. The three tours will reportedly operate independently in 2024 for the time being.

There will be eighteen tournaments as a part of this umbrella golf organization, twelve events confirmed in the United States and six that will be played in other unconfirmed locations split presumably between LIV Golf and the DP World Tour starting in 2025. This would be on top of the four major championships, which thus far, has allowed LIV golfers to qualify based on previous victories and meeting eligibility criteria.

The report states that Invitations for these events will be based on OWGR rankings and only top players will be initially invited, there will, however, be “wildcard entrants” for these events which are allowed as well. There are no details currently about the size of the fields for these events.

The tournaments will have prize purses estimated at twenty million dollars per event and the events occurring outside of this global tour will also have increased purses so that the current disparity between tours will not be so large that it renders any remaining tournaments meaningless.

This invites intriguing possibilities and questions about how all of this will work. Will LIV Golf events begin to be counted towards OWGR points in order to maintain cohesion between all three tours? Will the eighteen tournaments have no cuts like the current elevated events on the PGA Tour or on the LIV Golf circuit?

Will the performances of LIV golfers in these events count towards their overall team totals? Will the team format from LIV Golf migrate and merge into the PGA Tour? How does the PGA Tour reconcile with its players who turned down tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to join LIV in previous years?

Many questions still remain unanswered but this is a huge step towards understanding how the PGA-LIV merger framework will co-exist and what it means for professional golf as a whole going forward.