European Tour in pursuit of PGA

European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley has laid out ambitious plans with hopes of becoming a “viable alternative” to the PGA Tour.

It starts with an increase in prize money, and Pelley went so far as to say that it would make more sense for the European Tour’s flagship event to be the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai ($8 million purse) instead of the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth ($5 million purse) because of the money.

Another measure of the mountain he has to climb is the world ranking.

The gap continues to widen in the average ranking points for PGA Tour events compared with Europe. Including the four majors and the four World Golf Championships, the PGA Tour averaged 56.4 points for the winner compared with 42.2 points for the European Tour. That’s a difference of 14.2 points, up from 13.3 points a year ago.

Pelley is aware he needs time to become a viable option, and his target is the next generation of players.

“That’s not going to happen necessarily in 2016,” Pelley said last month in Dubai. “You’ll start to see it happen in 2017. You’ll start to see it come to fruition in 2018. We definitely in three to five years will have a viable alternative, so that 17-, 18-, 19-year-old doesn’t necessarily need to go to America to be able to make as much money as they possibly can.”