EXCLUSIVE: Pelley eyes growth on the continent to rival mega-rich US

by Graham Otway

European Tour chief Keith Pelley has drawn up a blueprint of big-money tournaments for 2017 to rival the US Tour.

At the weekend Pelley travelled to the Spanish Open for talks about a new €6 million event to be held at Valderrama late in the season. And he hopes that by adding half a dozen more to the annual schedule he can reverse the current trend of Europe’s top stars, like Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose and now Danny Willett, playing most of their golf in the United States.

“I believe that at the moment there is a significant growth opportunity for our Tour,” said Pelley. “And I will be disappointed if we only have three or four new big tournaments next year. I hope there will be more.

“The challenge we face is to stop the migration of some of our best players to the US Tour. For us to provide them with a viable alternative to the US Tour, we have got to be providing world-class tournaments regularly in 2017.”

Europe does already have huge prize pots with the season-end schedule, which this year sees the WGC-HSBC Champions event in Shanghai followed by the Final Series of  The Turkish Airlines Open, The Nedbank Golf Challenge in South Africa and The DP World Tour Championship.

But Pelley is hoping that by staging the new event in Spain the week after the British Masters at The Grove in Hertfordshire in October, there will be another fortnight when Europe’s stars play at home. In addition, the Valderrama club committee has agreed to upgrade the iconic Robert Trent Jones-designed course, which staged the Ryder Cup in 1997.

Plans have been drawn up to completely dig up nine of the greens later this year, replacing the uneven and unpopular poa anna grass strain, imported on the golf shoe soles of visitors to the course over the years, with the bent variety which is natural to the southern Spanish coastline.

On the way out too will be the thick rough surrounding the putting surfaces, which came in for heavy criticism during the Spanish Open last weekend.

In most cases it prevented players who had missed greens with their approach shots from playing deft reco-very shots to try and save par.

That went a long way to explaining why the winning score of Englishman Andrew Johnston was just one-over-par, while the nine-over-par halfway cut line was the highest on the European Tour this year.

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