Rory McIlroy has raised a suggestion to the PGA Tour (Image: Pedro Salado/Getty Images)
Rory McIlroy has expressed his belief that golf has becomie oversaturated and has called for the PGA Tour to reduce its schedule.
The European Ryder Cup star, who is due to make his first PGA Tour appearance of the season this week at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, stated in his pre-tournament press conference that he “can see when the golf consumer might get a little fatigued of everything that’s available to them.”
The 35-year-old was not only referring to the division between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf – which has resulted in the world’s top players rarely battling it out against each other – but also the surge in YouTube golf content.
Content creators such as Good Good, Rick Shiels, Grant Horvat and Bob Does Sports have achieved significant success with their channels, particularly among younger viewers.
Meanwhile, the PGA Tour has seen a drop in TV viewership over the past year, and LIV Golf has struggled to convert its substantial investment in its star-studded line-up into high viewing figures on a consistent basis.
From the PGA Tour’s standpoint, McIlroy believes less is more may be the way forward, urging the circuit’s chiefs to “scale back” the tournament schedule. With nearly 50 PGA Tour-sanctioned events scheduled for 2025, the world No. 3 feels that it’s simply too many to maintain viewer interest in the product.
However, he insisted that TGL – the tech-powered golf league he launched with Tiger Woods earlier this month – is not contributing to the issue due to its brief two-month schedule.
“I think it already has been diminished,” McIlroy remarked on the PGA Tour’s challenges. “I would say the one thing about TGL is only going to last two months. You get this sort of big burst of it in January, February and a little bit of March, then it’s done. It’s gone for 10 months basically. I would say that is hopefully somewhat additive to the ecosystem.
“YouTube is like golf entertainment adjacent, whatever. Those guys are killing it. They found a niche and it’s really cool and it serves a purpose for a lot of people. But look, I would much rather sit down and watch real golfers play real tournaments and that’s just my opinion. That to me is more entertaining.
“But I understand that other people want something different and that’s totally fine as well. I think there’s space for all of this. Yeah, I can see when the golf consumer might get a little fatigued of everything that’s sort of available to them.
“So to scale it back a little bit and maybe have a little more scarcity in some of the stuff that we do, like the NFL, I think mightn’t be a bad thing. I think 47 or 50 tournaments a year is definitely too many.”
With McIlroy advocating for a trimmer schedule, it would be a move that would potentially see the PGA Tour follow LIV Golf’s path.
The rival circuit will play host to just 14 events in 2025, and while the PGA Tour is unlikely to cut back so drastically, McIlroy firmly believes that a reduction in tournaments is the right direction.
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