Notable shift in balance of power

EUROPEAN TOURTHE TWO faces of the European Tour can be seen clearly over the coming weeks as the Irish Open at Adare Manor is followed on the schedule by the BMW PGA Championship from Wentworth.

There was a time when these two events were of roughly comparable status, pulling in big crowds and world-class fields. For the Irish Open those days are over and they are not coming back. Ireland, in so many ways a beneficiary of globalisation, is a notable loser in golf's new world economy. This is not idle speculation. It's a view from one of the game's powerbrokers within European Tour headquarters.

"It's a competitive market and very difficult to get the players to the tournaments," says Keith Waters, director of international policy for The European Tour and one of chief executive George O'Grady's key senior aides. "We (the Tour) can't influence the market. If a company wants to go to Shanghai, rather than Ireland, we have to go with it. Ireland is a tough sell."

The field assembled for the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth outshines any other tournament in Europe this year, with the exception of the Open Championship at Troon in July.

Money is a major reason for this. Just last week, the European Tour issued a statement informing us that the prize fund for the BMW PGA would increase to €4.5million, the biggest outside of the four Major Championships and the three World Golf Championship events. This year's winner will walk away with €750,000, €25,000 more than Denmark's Anders Hansen won last year. In all, the prize fund is up €150,000 on 2007, and by €500,000 over the three years since the German car maker took over as sponsor.

Apart from the cash on offer, the event has much going for it. The tournament has a long history, with many famous former winners, it enjoys wall to wall terrestrial TV coverage on the BBC and it's played on a famous course: Wentworth is not only home to the European Tour HQ, it is situated deep in the London stockbroker belt, ensuring an upmarket crowd, who flock to peer through the hedgerows at some of the most expensive real estate in Europe, home to Bruce Forsyth, Andriy Shevchenko and countless secretive Russian billionaires.

In many ways the PGA at Wentworth is a throwback to the days when the tour's big dates were the national open championships of Europe, held in Ireland, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. But Europe's national opens have declined in status, moved around the schedules to accommodate sponsor-driven events in the Far East and the Gulf. Money and golf have always been synonymous, but even senior European Tour executives admit they are now the beneficiaries of an arms race and next year, the stakes are raised still further.

From 2009 the tour's money list will be renamed the Race to Dubai and the season will culminate in the Dubai World Championship held at the Jumeirah Golf Estates, the richest event ever staged anywhere in the world. Players will be ranked according to their earnings from all events on The European Tour International Schedule, including all European Tour tournaments, the Major Championships and the World Golf Championships (WGC).

Players ranked from 1 to 60 in The Race to Dubai then compete in the season's climax, the €6.4 million Dubai World Championship. Following this tournament, the season's 15 top-ranked players by earnings share a bonus pool of over €6 million. The number one player will receive €1.2 million, the runner-up €968,693 and the third-placed player €645,795, with prizes down to the 15th player, who will earn €161,372.

"With the combined prize funds of the Dubai World Championship and The Race to Dubai, we have the prospect of a player standing over a putt for $3,666,660," said O'Grady.

Despite the riches on offer, Tiger Woods has said he doubts he will be there next November, saying the rigours of maintaining his European Tour card, a pre-requisite of entry, will be too much.

Woods' absence would undermine the event's World Championship claims, and it remains to be seen if the Tour will accommodate his schedule to get him in. Such is his pulling power that even mega-rich events like that can look pedestrian without him. For example, HSBC pulled out of its sponsorship of the World Matchplay, also at Wentworth, after five years of a 10-year deal, originally set to run to 2012. Part of the deal was a new qualification system based on the "HSBC Major Championships Ranking". However, Tiger Woods played just once during the bank's sponsorship of the event, losing in the first round to Shaun Micheel in 2006.

Would HSBC have stayed if Tiger played more often? Giles Morgan, head of sponsorship at HSBC, the global bank and financial services company, calls this "literally the million dollar question".

"People assume we pulled out because of Tiger but its not true," Morgan told The Irish Times. "The reason we pulled out of Wentworth had nothing to do with Tiger playing or not playing. In the UK, golf is a mature market. What we got was an entrée in to the sport by buying one of the most famous and prestigious of the older tournaments. The golf demographics in Asia are so powerful because it is the aspirational sport of the affluent. Asia looked like the logical place for us to be."

The HSBC Champions in Shanghai was duly created in 2005, with a purse of €3.2 million, the largest in Asia. "We could never have created the HSBC Champions without having first done the World Matchplay. But another five years of Wentworth, which is an expensive tournament, did not make sense. Once you've taken a client to Wentworth once you don't need to keep doing it."

The Dubai World Championship takes the number of events in the Gulf region to six next year. At the same time, Irish golf fans can expect very few opportunities to see the world's best players close up, with the Irish Open at Adare Manor, the sole Tour event taking place in this country for the forseeable future.

Keith Waters offers an insight into the workings of golf's new global economy. You have to have the right venue, the right prize fund, the right facilities. For example, the HSBC Champions event (in Shanghai) didn't exist until two years ago. Now the top players go and play it because of the combination of money and pressure from their sponsors. Phil Mickelson was there because Callaway wanted him to go to Singapore and Shanghai."

"It's not just Ireland that is suffering by comparison. The Heineken Classic, formerly held in Australia, was, he says, a great success, but was not deemed good enough for the people who write the cheques. It was the first co-sanctioned event played on a fantastic golf course (Royal Melbourne) with great weather and infrastructure.

"When Heineken withdrew I was amazed how hard it was to replace them. We have good relationships with sponsors, big brands like HSBC, UBS, Omega and BMW. For a relatively small budget they could have become the title sponsor. But we couldn't find one of these international companies to put the money in.

"At the same time they were saying we want tournaments in Hong Kong, Shanghai etc. They wanted to spend three times the amount of money to sponsor an unknown event compared to going to Melbourne."

The Irish Open's decline has mirrored the national open championships of Spain, Italy and Portugal, which routinely attract second-string fields and have been moved around the tour schedules to accommodate the glitzier newcomers.

"To keep national opens going, some of which have been played for 50 or 60 years, is not easy," says Waters, looking over the 18th green at Pearl Valley Golf Estates, north of Cape Town. He gestures to the players walking up the fairway. "The South Africa Open here has had a torrid time, the European Tour put up half the prize money at one point.

"Likewise, the Tour owns and organises the Irish Open. When Murphy's pulled out we took on the responsibility, so we're pretty committed to making it work. But the Irish Open has had a challenging time because of the growth and diversity of the tour. It has also had too much competition within Ireland. The Smurfit Kappa European Open was a huge success over the last 10 years, and has replaced the Irish Open in some respects, which 20 years ago was one of the great events on the Tour.

"Ireland has also had the WGC and the Ryder Cup in recent years. We want to put it back to where it was and I like Adare Manor (which will host the event for the next three years) and most of the players do. As to whether a national open should stay in one place, or move around the country is another question. It should really move, but that's not how it works now."

Giles Morgan says: "In the next 18 months it will be tough for all sports to continue to attract the level of money they've been used to," he said.

"It's like the house market, prices won't collapse, but it will encourage people to look more carefully at what they spend, so it is with sponsors."

Inside the ropes, the main beneficiaries of golf's new economy walk by like sun gods, safe in the knowledge that their very presence can make or break an event, however storied its history.

And despite its glamour, even the BMW PGA Championship has not put up enough to lure Tiger Woods, or any other American in the top 50 to Surrey this month.

Nor will there be a significant show from the big Australians; Adam Scott, Aaron Baddeley, Geoff Ogilvy will all be absent, as will new Masters champion South African Trevor Immelman and current Open Champion Padraig Harrington, who has dropped the tournament because it doesn't fit with his US Open preparations.

When Ernie Els talked of getting out his wheelbarrow to carry home the cash from international tournaments, he was merely reflecting the mood in the locker-room. For the lucky few, golfing talent has become one of the most over valued commodities on the world markets. They know, that for the European Tour, money is the only club in the bag.