In the fall of 2025, the PGA Tour created something of a skunk-like in-house business, aiming to change the way the golf tour’s governing body operates. The effort, called the Future Competition Commission, is headed by Tiger Woods, who, along with PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp, will launch an effort to reimagine professional golf.
Like all professional sports, this means it comes down to media, television and how consumers watch their favorite athletes compete at the highest level. said Dhruv Prasad, Chief Commercial Officer of the PGA Tour Hollywood Reporter That “the first step the committee actually took was to invite current and potential future media partners to share their thoughts with us about what was good and what wasn’t great about the current model of the PGA Tour.”
Prasad didn’t mention names, but one doesn’t have to use much imagination to suspect the likes of NBC Sports, ESPN, Netflix, Golf Channel, CBS Sports and other networks will be involved.
“I think we’re pretty transparent about what we’re trying to do,” Prasad says. “We’re trying to create a more compelling media product that leads to more viewership, which leads to greater fan affinity, and a larger, more diverse, younger fan base that leads to greater value in our media rights and in our overall economic model.”
In a sports media environment where the big boys are getting bigger (think NFL and NBA), everyone is rethinking how they operate, and for the PGA Tour, led by Rolapp, a longtime NFL media executive, that means transforming the PGA Tour itself.
“We also exist in a really competitive sporting world,” Rolapp said at a press conference unveiling the format. “Whether you’re competing for fans’ attention, or if you’re competing for media dollars, which is the economic lifeblood of every sport in this country, you need to constantly improve the product. I think we looked around and saw what we needed to do to increase fan interest and create more value for our partners and felt this was necessary.”
The result of this effort was revealed last week, and it will completely change the sport starting in 2028: There will be two series of events occurring simultaneously, a Championship Series featuring the best players in the world, and a Challenger Series with up-and-coming players. In particular, as with European football, there will be a relegation and promotion system, where the best Challenge Series players are promoted to the Championship Series, and lower-ranked Championship Series players are relegated to the Challenge Series. There will also be a made-for-TV ‘Last Chance’ series, where relegated Championship players and some of the best Challenger players go head-to-head for places in the Premier League.
“A lot of the topics are [the current and possible future media partners] “The ones we worked on and turned into principles for the future competition committee were identified from a design perspective,” says Prasad. “A bigger peak season, a more consistent product, a longer seasonal narrative, a simpler points system, a grand opening with a series of tournaments that really matter in premium venues, these are all things that will be implemented in the new model, and they come from direct feedback and advice from our media partners.”
The PGA Tour, of course, has its current deals locked in through 2030, and while Prasad says they haven’t had any discussions about new deals yet, he adds: “I don’t think we have any preconceived ideas about what the future packaging will look like, what elements of each package will be for our media distribution partners.”
He adds: “It is possible to continue with the current partners.” “It’s possible that new partners will come along at some point in the future. I don’t think we know that yet.”
But Prasad, who worked with Rolaab in the NFL, acknowledges that the changing media environment has played a big role in shaping how the PGA Tour approaches that future.
“I think we’re at a very interesting time in history from a media environment standpoint, because you have experienced sports broadcasters who are doing, I think, amazing, wide-ranging productions, and they have experience — you know, sports broadcasting is a skill, it’s an ability and aptitude that not everyone has — and so you have partners who have been in this space for a long time, delivering a great product, and then at the same time you have new partners coming in, taking what seems to be increasingly bigger bites of the sports media pie, whether it’s NFL football games, whether it’s Major League Baseball or “Hockey, or Formula One, is starting to see bigger and bigger shots from the likes of YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple.” “What’s interesting about this is this focus by new entrants on supporting events and discrete properties that can be identified within perhaps an overall ecosystem… I expect this to change in the future.”
But to start, the PGA Tour must implement the new vision articulated by Rolapp and Tiger Woods, who remains undoubtedly the most famous golfer on the planet, and the liaison between players, fans and the Tour itself.
“What makes the best sports great from a fan perspective is when every match matters, every week matters, and in our case every tournament matters in an overall competitive system,” Prasad says. “And what I think the PGA Tour lacks today in our current model is fan understanding of how each tournament fits into the overall system, so we’re trying to evolve to a system where every tournament every week is important from a competitive standpoint, whether that’s in the Championship Series where players are fighting for a championship for a season, or in the Challenger Series, where players are trying to move up to the Championship Series, and that’s the primary thing they’re playing for.”
Longtime PGA Tour sponsors are also participating, Prasad says, noting that the changes will bring “more clarity to our corporate sponsors as to what product they are investing in” in both series.
And the “last chance” events could become must-see television in their own right: “The stakes in this event, or in that series of events, couldn’t be higher because people are literally playing for their competitive future and the championship path that they’re going to be competing on, so this is a whole new platform that hasn’t existed before.”
It’s the kind of structure that could bring new media partners out of the woodwork, or allow the Tour to pivot to new media in a way the NFL has done with a combination of deals, slicing and dicing to achieve maximum reach and maximum revenue.
“I’m very optimistic about the opportunity for new partners, and we’ve seen how that has expanded the distribution framework in the NFL, and I think it can now do the same in golf,” Prasad says.
