Spanish golf tours head for bunker
WITH its array of courses and short-sleeves climate, Spain made a natural home for professional golf. In 2011, the land of Seve Ballesteros hosted seven European Tour tournaments, more than any other country.
Next year, that could plummet to just one, the Spanish Open.
Deep in recession, with unemployment near 25%, putting up purses to entice golf’s big names is a luxury Spain can ill-afford. Government tourist boards that once bankrolled tournaments to sell Spain as a destination and companies that provided sponsorship often no longer have the money or do not want to be seen spending it on golf when Spaniards are so squeezed financially.
The €1m Iberdrola Open, won in 2011 by Darren Clarke, vanished from the tour schedule this year, with the Madeira Islands Open in Portugal filling its slot. Also gone are the €2m Castello Masters and the €3m Andalucia Masters. Replacing them next month are the $7m (€5.4m) BMW Masters in Shanghai, China, and the Perth International in Australia. The Madrid Masters was also cancelled, leaving a hole in the tour schedule last week. No replacement could be found for Bankia, the bailed-out Spanish bank that had sponsored the event.
“It’s just tough times, really, there’s no money,” said Javier Gervas, CEO of MatchGolf, which promoted Iberdrola and Castello. “Salaries are not going up, the cost of life is increasing, and people are just holding tight.”
The indebted government in the eastern coastal region of Valencia, through its tourist board, was the Castello’s main sponsor. The tournament got 1,500 hours of international television coverage in 2011, “pure advertising” for Spain, with enticing images of golfers playing in autumn sun in late October, Gervas said. But Valencia “cannot be seen spending money on a tournament, on a golf event, when people are suffering, when they are laying off people in various areas of the administration”, he said.
“I do believe that golf is good for Spain and for the different regions. I just think that, at the moment, everyone has had to cut on the budgets and the sponsorship has been very easy to do [away with]. You look at a chart and you say, ‘Right, how much are we spending here? Four million? Right, take it off’.”
Golf isn’t the only sport hurting in Spain, by some measures the sporting leader of Europe. From 2013, formula one is expected to visit Spain just once a year, alternating between Barcelona and Valencia, instead of racing in both venues.
Spain’s soccer players are the world and continental champions, and Real Madrid is the soccer world’s most lucrative club. But other Spanish teams are so strapped for cash that they can’t pay their taxes, owing some €750m to the government.
A year ago, 119 golfers played the Madrid Masters, not replaced this year. At the Castello Masters, Garcia beat 112 competitors. Its replacement, the new BMW Masters in Shanghai, has a bigger prize fund but a smaller field, just 78 players. “What is disappointing for our membership in the whole is that we have lost full- field events,” said Keith Waters, the European tour’s chief operating officer and director of international policy.
“The guys coming through the qualifying school in the last year have not had as many opportunities to play on the tour this year as they have done in previous years.”
The Volvo World Match Play Championship is leaving Spain, Waters also confirmed. He said he doesn’t know if the Open de Andalucia Costa del Sol will happen again in 2013.
Spain’s only tournament currently confirmed on next year’s schedule is the Open de España next April.
Because the tour is so spread geographically, visiting 21 countries in 2012, it has been able to fill its schedule with tournaments elsewhere. South Africa has six tournaments in the first three months of the tour’s preliminary schedule for 2013, up from four in the whole of 2012.
“We’ve tended to lose the smaller tournaments,” said Waters. “The very big international events still will have an appeal, still will have an opportunity to succeed, but anything kind of a step below that and lower, I think life is going to be very challenging in the next three or four years. The small events go first and I don’t see them coming back in the short term.”
