Brian Rolapp, CEO of the PGA TOUR, speaks, during an announcement of a new competitive model to the PGA TOUR, prior to Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands on June 23, 2026 in Cromwell, Connecticut.
Ben Jared | PGA Tour | Getty Images
Golf fans are finally getting details on a new chapter for the PGA Tour that’s designed to elevate competition and raise payouts for winners.
PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp unveiled the new competitive model for professional golf’s premier circuit ahead of the Travelers Championship taking place this week outside of Hartford, Connecticut.
Rolapp has prioritized modernizing the Tour since he was appointed as CEO in June 2025 following a 22-year career at the NFL. The Tour’s boards also approved Rolapp to succeed Jay Monahan as commissioner following Monahan’s retirement at the end of the year, the Tour said Tuesday. Rolapp will retain his role as CEO.
“We had a productive meeting yesterday where our boards approved the Future Competition Committee’s recommendation to establish a new competitive model for the PGA Tour that will begin with the 2028 season,” Rolapp announced Tuesday.
Instead of one main tour schedule of events, the new format will feature two distinct series of tournaments: one, a premier track called the PGA Tour Championship Series and a second that offers a pathway toward those elevated events called the PGA Tour Challenger Series.
The new format will be familiar to fans of other sports like soccer, where some leagues feature differentiated divisions that promote and retain the best performing teams, while relegating those who don’t perform as well to lower circuits.
In the press release, Rolapp called it a “new competitive model grounded in meritocracy, with clearer pathways, higher stakes and more consistency when the best players compete together.” He added that the focus will now shift to finalizing details and preparing to implement the system for the 2028 season.
Wyndham Clark, just off Sunday’s US Open win, applauded the changes Tuesday, telling CNBC in an interview that the Tour is in “an amazing spot.”
“I think this two-track system is going to bring meritocracy and it’s going to make it easier to follow the PGA Tour, and then match play should be a lot of fun to watch,” he said. “I think the Tour has made an amazing push to get better and improve their product.”
The proposed two-track system will create a schedule that has roughly 23 to 24 events for the season, including The Players Championship, golf’s major championships — The Masters Tournament, PGA Championship, US Open and The Open Championship — season-ending tournaments and any international team events that are contested each year, like the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup.
The season will run from around February through August of each year and will generally consist of tournaments with four 18-hole rounds where roughly half the field will advance to play the full event after a 36-hole cut.
The Tour will also bring back playoff events that feature so called “match play,” where winners are determined by a process of beating other players in head-to-head matchups, rather than by “medal play,” which determines a winner by best aggregate score over four rounds of play.
Match play most resembles other championship formats in sports like NCAA basketball, or the knockout rounds during World Cup soccer.
Another big distinction will be seen in the prize money at stake each week.
For the Championship Series, the minimum purse each week will be $20 million and the venues will be in higher profile locations and bigger media markets. Challenger Series events will feature purses of at least $4 million at a minimum of 20 events during the season at “distinguished venues that have traditionally hosted PGA Tour events.”
There will be separate point systems in place for both circuits, and that will drive a promotion and relegation construct where a minimum of 90 players will keep their spots on the Championship Series after each season, and 20 players from the Challenger Series will be elevated, while lagging performers will be relegated.
The announcement on the PGA Tour’s new format comes at a time where the competitive dynamic in professional golf is at a crossroads. The past few years have led to what some golf fans have called a “civil war” in the sport, after the upstart LIV Golf League debuted in 2022 with much fanfare and a seemingly endless bankroll of funding from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.
Some of the sport’s top players left the ranks of the PGA Tour to join LIV Golf for large payouts. But the future of LIV Golf was cast into doubt earlier this year after the Saudi sovereign wealth fund announced that it would no longer fund LIV Golf beyond the end of the current season.
LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil is in the process of raising fresh capital to fund the league’s operations in a post-PIF world. The league has retained boutique investment bank Ducera Partners and is actively engaged in soliciting investments. CNBC previously reported the league is looking to raise in the range of $250 million to $350 million to help execute its own revamped schedule and format that will focus much more heavily on team golf franchises and competition in the future.
The revamped structure for the PGA Tour was the product of much deliberation by its Future Competition Committee, which is comprised of six player representatives from the Tour’s ranks, alongside three business advisors.
The committee is chaired by golfing great Tiger Woods and includes fellow players Patrick Cantlay, Maverick McNealy, Keith Mitchell, Adam Scott and Camilo Villegas, as well as current PGA Tour Policy Board and PGA Tour Enterprises Board Chairman and former Valero Energy CEO Joe Gorder, Fenway Sports Group Founder and Principal Owner John Henry and Fenway Sports Group Senior Advisor and former Major League Baseball executive Theo Epstein.
“It was about bringing together different perspectives, having honest, hard conversations, and thinking broadly about what is best for the game that we all love,” Woods said at the event, his first public appearance since his DUI arrest in March.