Brian Rolapp, CEO of the PGA TOUR, speaks, during the announcement of the new competition model on the PGA TOUR, before the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands on June 23, 2026 in Cromwell, Connecticut.
Ben Jared PGA Tour | Getty Images
Golf fans are finally getting the details of a new chapter of the PGA Tour designed to increase competition and increase payouts to winners.
PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp unveiled a new competitive model for the professional golf circuit ahead of this week’s Travelers Championship outside Hartford, Connecticut.
Rolapp has prioritized modernizing the Tour since being named CEO in June 2025 following a 22-year career in the NFL. Tour boards also approved Rolapp to replace Jay Monahan as commissioner after Monahan retires at the end of the year, the Tour said Tuesday. Rolapp will retain his role as CEO.
“We had a wonderful meeting yesterday where our boards approved the recommendations of the Future Competition Committee to establish a new PGA Tour competition model beginning in the 2028 season,” Rolapp announced Tuesday.
Instead of one main series of events, the new format will have different series of tournaments: one, the main track called the PGA Tour Championship Series and the second one that provides a path to those higher events called the PGA Tour Challenger Series.
The new system will be familiar to fans of other sports such as soccer, where different leagues promote and retain high-performing teams, while relegating low-performing ones.
In a press release, Rolapp called it “a new model of competition based on meritocracy, with clear paths, higher stakes and more consistency where the best players compete together.” He added that the focus will now be on finalizing the details and preparing to implement the plan for the 2028 season.
Wyndham Clark, fresh off winning the US Open on Sunday, applauded the changes Tuesday, telling CNBC in an interview that the Tour is “in an amazing place.”
“I think this two-track system will bring prestige and make it easier to follow the PGA Tour, and the game play should be a lot more fun to watch,” he said. “I think the Tour has made an incredible push to get better and improve their product.”
The proposed two-track system would create a schedule with approximately 23 to 24 events per season, including The Players Championship, major golf tournaments – The Masters Tournament, PGA Championship, US Open and The Open Championship – end-of-season tournaments and any international team events contested annually, such as the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup.
The season will run from February to August of each year and will consist of four rounds of 18 holes where almost half of the field will advance to play the full event after the 36 hole cut.
The tour will also bring back playoff events that feature so-called “match play,” where winners are determined by a head-to-head scoring process, instead of “medal play,” which determines the winner with the best combined scores over four rounds of play.
Match play is very similar to other competitive sports formats such as NCAA basketball, or the knockout rounds during World Cup soccer.
Another big difference will be seen in the prize money at stake each week.
In the Championship Series, the minimum purse each week will be $20 million and the locations will be in high-profile locations and large media markets. The Challenger Series events will feature purses of at least $4 million in at least 20 events during the season at “popular venues that regularly host PGA Tour events.”
There will be different points systems for both circuits, and that will encourage the creation of promotion and relegation where at least 90 players will keep their places in the Championship Series after each season, and 20 players from the Challenger Series will be promoted, while the remaining players will be demoted.
The announcement of the PGA Tour’s new format comes at a time when professional golf’s competition is at a crossroads. The last few years have led to what some golf fans call a “civil war” in the sport, after the first LIV Golf League began in 2022 with much fanfare and endless funding from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.
Some of the sport’s top players have left the ranks of the PGA Tour to join LIV Golf for big payouts. But LIV Golf’s future was thrown into doubt earlier this year after Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund announced it would no longer support LIV Golf after the current season.
LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil is in the process of raising new capital to fund the league’s operations in a post-PIF world. The league has retained boutique investment bank Ducera Partners and is actively soliciting investment. CNBC previously reported that the league is looking to raise $250 million to $350 million to help implement its revised schedule and format that will focus more on golf franchises and team competition in the future.
The PGA Tour’s revised structure is the product of much deliberation by the Future Competition Committee, which includes six player representatives from the tour ranks, and three business advisors.
The committee is chaired by golf legend Tiger Woods and includes fellow golfers Patrick Cantlay, Maverick McNealy, Keith Mitchell, Adam Scott and Camilo Villegas, as well as current chairman of the PGA Tour Policy Board and Chairman of the Board of PGA Tour Enterprises and former CEO of Valero Energy Joe Gorder, Founder of Fenway Sports Group and Major Owner John Henryo Major League Sports and Advocate Major League. Epstein.
“It was about bringing together different perspectives, having honest, hard conversations, and thinking about what’s best for the sport we all love,” Woods said at the event, his first public appearance since his DUI arrest in March.
