McEwan: Golf’s financial insanity is cause for concern

“I wore out two hips and a knee walking to the model that charity is the biggest winner every week. I pray that the PGA Tour does not lose that. I was proud to be part of that. I was proud that we weren’t trying to get every dollar we could possibly get. But it feels that way now. I’m not sure I know golf anymore.”

The words of Hal Sutton.

The former US PGA champion joined Eamon Lynch and Damon Hack on the Golf Today show on Tuesday as the PGA Tour released its 2024 schedule, with money, as ever, dominating the headlines.

We now know that the winner of next year’s FedEx Cup will pocket a $25million bonus payment, up from $18million this year and $10million in 2007, when Tiger Woods won the inaugural staging of the year-long contest.

The Comcast Business Tour Top 10 – another contrived scheme that pays out yet more bonus cash, this time to the top 10 players on the FedEx Cup standings at the conclusion of the regular season (i.e. before the fiscal insanity of the Playoffs begins) – will shell out $40million in 2024. That’s double this year’s bounty and includes $8million for the winner.

All of which is to say nothing of the Player Impact Program ($50million for the top-10 players) and the eight Designated Elevated Signature Events, which each have a minimum prize fund of $20million.

The remaining 30-ish events are hardly going to be frugal affairs – far from it – with the full extent of the PGA Tour’s newly-minuted friendship with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF) still unclear but likely to result in even more money being ploughed into the sport, if not next year, then certainly in the years that follow.

It’s a great time to be great at golf.

The most recent ‘regular season’ on the PGA Tour, which concluded with last week’s Wyndham Championship, resulted in 123 different players earning more than $1million, not including bonuses. That’s up from 45 in the year 2000.

Scottie Scheffler, who has been playing golf professionally for only five years, is already 27th on the tour’s career money list, a table on which the top-240 names have all got eight-figure hauls next to their names. Again, that’s not including bonuses, appearance money, endorsements, etc.

Sutton, it should be noted, is one of those. In a PGA Tour career spanning 646 events, he won $15,267,685, good enough for 151st spot on the career earnings list. Every time he played, he earned an average of $23,600, give or take. Peter Kuest and Kyle Westmoreland each earned around that for finishing T45 at the Wyndham on Sunday.

If Sutton’s not sure he “knows golf anymore”, imagine how the rest of us feel.

Whilst the top fraction of those who play the game continue to get more money that they presumably don’t need, their fans are having to pay more to watch them as subscription television broadcasters continue to raise their prices and the cost of admission to attend events in person accelerates its own upwards trajectory.

All this against the backdrop of inflationary pressures and a cost-of-living crisis that is forcing entirely too many people to choose between heating their homes and feeding themselves.

Something’s broken.

My colleague Alex Perry made an excellent point on this week’s bunkered Podcast where we briefly touched on golf’s lust for lolly. He noted that, relative to the biggest names in other sports such as the NFL and NBA, golf’s top players arguably don’t earn as much as they might or should.

For example, just two weeks ago, American footballer Justin Herbert signed a new five-year, contract with the Los Angeles Chargers, including a $16,128,376 signing bonus, $218,738,376 guaranteed, and an average annual salary of $52,500,000.

The $16million he got just for putting his name on his lucrative new contract is more than all but 136 players have made in their entire PGA Tour careers.

For good measure, you could also look at tennis. Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer – all have made more money from playing on the ATP than Tiger Woods has made from the PGA Tour.

Monopoly money is a phenomenon across all sport, no doubt. But golf appears to be growing at a rate that’s out of step with everybody and everything else, not least because the PIF has shown a willingness to sign cheques like Rickie Fowler signs autographs.

Like it or not, the Saudification of sport is happening, happening fast, and will continue to happen so long as the PIF remains interested. The Saudi royal family has a net worth of around $2.6 trillion. That’s 16 times more than the British royal family.

How much is $2.6 trillion? Think of it this way. If you were to count from zero to one million, it would take just over 11 days, at a rate of one number per second without stopping. To count to one billion at the same rate would take 31 years, 251 days, 6 hours, 50 minutes and 46 seconds. To count to one trillion? That would take 31,688 years.

Saudi Arabia is so rich that it could give $20 to every single human being who has ever lived, and still have change.

To believe that it will simply “run out of cash”, as some people have suggested, is preposterous. It would require a financial collapse on a scale that’s almost too vast and calamitous to comprehend. Hoovering up entire sports and its biggest stars is akin to the rest of us buying a pint of milk, a purchase so insignificant that it barely registers.

For the game’s best male golfers, that’s clearly exceptional news. But for the game itself? Its soul? Its future? Well, Hal Sutton’s worried. So, too, Martin Slumbers, the chief executive of the R&A.

Ahead of last month’s Open Championship, he said: “If you want to know what I really care about and what I think is important for the game, it’s the financial sustainability of professional golf. It’s ensuring that golf is thriving in 50 years’ time, but really importantly, that we maintain and do not forget the values around our game.”

Alas, it feels a little like Slumbers is being left to fight this battle almost single-handedly.

After all, who really cares about values when you’re shopping for yachts?

Michael McEwan is the Deputy Editor of bunkered and has been part of the team since 2004. In that time, he has interviewed almost every major figure within the sport, from Jack Nicklaus, to Rory McIlroy, to Donald Trump. The host of the multi award-winning bunkered Podcast and a member of Balfron Golfing Society, Michael is the author of three books and is the 2023 PPA Scotland 'Writer of the Year' and 'Columnist of the Year'. Dislikes white belts, yellow balls and iron headcovers. Likes being drawn out of the media ballot to play Augusta National.

Deputy Editor