There are far too many golf tournaments on TV

View From The Fairway by Derek Clements

The professional golf tournament schedule is insane. Here we are in December and a couple of weeks ago we saw two DP World Tour events being played simultaneously - the Australian Open at Royal Melbourne and the Nedbank Challenge in South Africa. At the same time, 20 of the world’s best golfers were taking part in the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas.

Does any of that make sense to you because it certainly doesn’t to me.

The 2025 DP World Tour season ended in Dubai in November. The 2026 season began two weeks later and runs through until November next year. Many of the fields we will see over the coming 12 months will be without Europe’s leading golfers. 

Rory McIlroy has called upon his fellow European luminaries to spend more time on their "home" tour but is it any wonder that so many of them do not?

He said: "I've been excited to come back down here for a while, it's been over 10 years since I played in the Australian Open. This is a golf tournament that has got so much potential. But there's still a ways to go.

"I would love to have a few more players come down and play. But it's hard. There's three tournaments going on in the schedule this week. There needs to be conversations had with people much more important than me that set the schedules and do all that sort of stuff. Hopefully the Australian Open can find a date that accommodates everyone and everyone can at least have the option to come down and play."

I have long called for our sport to have a fifth major that is staged in either Australia or South Africa. In my view, that tournament should be the Australian Open. This year’s version, which was won by Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen, was staged at Royal Melbourne, which is one of the finest golf courses on the planet. 

McIlroy was the star attraction but it has to be said that the field could not be regarded as stellar. He was joined by the likes of Min Woo Lee, Adam Scott, Cameron Smith and Abraham Ancer. 

Meanwhile in South Africa we saw Kristoffer Reitan winning the Nedbank. Also playing were Thomas Detry, Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Haotong Li, Will Zalatoris, Ewen Ferguson, Tom McKibbin, Garrick Higgo, Nick Taylor, Viktor Hovland, Aldrich Potgieter, Thriston Lawrence, Marco Penge and Laurie Canter. 

All of those individuals would have enhanced the field in Melbourne. Playing two such prestigious events in direct opposition to one another makes absolutely no sense to me.

The official PGA Tour season ended with the Tour Championship in August. After a brief hiatus, we saw a string of second-rate Fall Series tournaments dominated by players desperately trying to retain their playing privileges. 

The likes of Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa, Hideki Matsuyama, Russell Henley, JJ Spaun and Keegan Bradley opted to put their feet up. A number of them were in action at the Hero World Challenge, a meaningless exhibition event boasting a 20-man field but, unbelievably, awarding world ranking points.

They will not be seen again until January.

I love watching golf, both in the flesh and on TV, but there is too much of it. And it is clear to me that too many tournaments on both the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour are second-rate. The golf season is too long. Far too long.

Football is the most popular spectator sport on the planet. In this country, the club football season runs from August until May. The domestic cricket season runs from late April through to September. There is a designated season for baseball, American football, ice hockey, basketball, rugby union, rugby league. You get the picture.

But for some reason the powers-that-be seem to believe that professional golfers should be competing for 12 months of the year. 

I don’t blame the best players for picking and choosing the events they want to compete in. When you take into account all the travel, staying in hotel rooms, dragging around an entourage, caddie, coach, it is easy to understand why some of them cite exhaustion. 

And if you are a tournament sponsor pouring millions of dollars into an event, do you want the best golfers turning up stale? Of course you don’t.

The PGA Tour has its own issues. It has to compete with the NFL. Like it or not, American football is the most popular sport in the United States. Until now the two sports have existed alongside one another but there is no doubt that the PGA Tour struggles to attract significant TV viewing figures when competing directly against big NFL weekends. It also has a serious impact on the size of the crowds who attend certain tournaments.

And all the smart money is pointing towards some serious scheduling changes in America. It will not happen next year. The 2026 schedule is already set in stone.

But I am certain that we are going to see some huge changes in 2027. Speaking at the Hero World Challenge, which he hosts, Tiger Woods hinted as much.

Woods and new PGA Tour chief executive Brian Rolapp, who is replacing Jay Monahan, met with the 20-man field to lay out the plans for the future of the tour and it seems certain that we are going to be looking at a much-reduced schedule.

Rolapp has previously hinted that, moving forward, he would like to see the season start after the Super Bowl has been played and many leading players, including world number one Scheffler and Jordan Spieth, have indicated that they would support such a move.

Scheffler said: "I'm excited about some of the changes they're looking to make. Obviously, right now nothing's set, and I think right now they just have kind of some loose ideas of things that they're looking at.

"I like being able to have a little bit of freedom in the way I play tournaments. That’s something that I think is an advantage to our Tour, I definitely enjoy that part of it. But at the end of the day, I’m going to play where the best players are playing. I love competition, I love playing against the best players, so wherever those guys are playing that’s probably where you’re going to see me."

It seems that, for the PGA Tour at least, they have finally reached the conclusion that less could actually be more. The DP World Tour would do well to follow that example because a repeat of what we have just witnessed is no longer acceptable.