Pebble Beach Pro-Am: 'Diminished' PGA Tour could scale back number of events says Rory McIlroy
2025-01-29
Category: sports

Rory McIlroy believes that golf fans could become "fatigued" by the wealth of options now available to them and suggested there are "definitely too many" events on the current PGA Tour schedule.The Northern Irish golfer, 35, has been a vocal critic of the breakaway LIV Golf circuit in the past, while he is a co-founder of Tomorrow's Golf League (TGL) which is in its first season.With YouTube golf content also on the rise, the world number three admitted that the PGA Tour's more traditional offering has been "diminished" by the volume of competition from elsewhere and suggested following the lead of American football's NFL, which plays a 17-game regular season. "I can see when the golf consumer might get a little fatigued of everything that's sort of available to them,"  McIlroy said."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 might not be a bad thing."I think 47 or 50 tournaments a year is definitely too many."
McIlroy will make his first PGA Tour start of 2025 at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am this week and warned against making too many changes to emulate what is on offer elsewhere."I don't think we should try to dumb down golf to appeal to more people," he said."Golf is golf at the end of the day. It's been this way for hundreds of years. You know, I really like the way golf is and I think a lot of other people do, too, but I still understand the critiques of how the entertainment product could get better."Hopefully people find that entertaining, and if not, then I don't know what to tell them."One persistent criticism at PGA Tour events in recent weeks has been pace of play but the four-time major winner admitted there are no easy solutions. As a signature event, the field will be limited to 80 at Pebble Beach this week but such numbers across the season would deny others playing opportunities. "There's a lot of different answers, but not every answer is going to make everyone happy," he said."I could say smaller fields. Smaller fields, smaller fields would help pace of play, but that takes away playing opportunities from people. I think as well, the other thing is when we play in this time of the year, the tee times have to be a little bit tighter together so that they can get everyone through with daylight and everything."If you could be able to space the tee times out a little bit more, that would hopefully make things flow a little bit better."