Euro Tour future in jeopardy?

The sun may have set on the final major of the year but the world’s leading golfers have already switched their attention to the PGA Tour’s lucrative FedEx Cup play-offs.

This week marks the final tournament of the American tour’s regular season at the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, North Carolina, where Padraig Harrington will be among those scrambling to break into the top 125 in the FedEx points standings and qualify for the first play-offs The Barclays, beginning in two weeks.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, European Tour members sit idle, their schedule having thrown up a blank week in the height of summer. In fact, for those not fortunate enough to have qualified for the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational or the PGA Championship, the last opportunity a rank and file member had to tee it up was at the M2M Russian Open, which ran July 22-25.

When the Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles begins on August 22 it will have been a month without the opportunity to win prize money or expose their sponsor-branded shirts, caps and bags to worldwide television audiences.

The European Tour is in a bind in the ongoing economic downturn. Only last week, the Tour confirmed the Hong Kong Open would continue on its schedule with its prize fund down to US$1.3m (€990,000) and without the backing of long-term title sponsor UBS, a victim of the recessionary climate.

Such continuing strictures are clearly not good for the European Tour but with no clear end in sight to the downturn could the Wentworth-based organisation become exposed to a takeover?

The expansionist PGA Tour, for example, has already purchased the flagging Canadian Tour and renamed it the PGA Tour of Canada, has a strong foothold in Latin America, an annual $5m (€3.75m) event in Malaysia and yesterday announced it had appointed an experienced executive to a newly created role to help the PGA Tour “increase its efforts in China”.

The PGA Tour, lead by its commissioner Tim Finchem, clearly has ambitions on a global scale and has no competition when it comes to economic golfing muscle.

Selling out to the Americans would be the last resort for many, including Irish Open champion Paul Casey, a member of the Tournament Players Committee who is pushing hard for a high-flying corporate executive to be appointed to the European Tour that might help ward off prospective bidders.

“I want to help and I want to inject my ideas,” Casey said. “There are so many good things about the European Tour and it can it be such an unbelievable product given the places we go to, and the players we have.

“But we are so far from maximising what we have and we need to freshen things up.

“It should start at the top which is the European Tour Board of Directors. Neil Coles has stepped down (as chairman) so we now need to know what’s going on in there as I would like to know who is going to be the new chairman of the Tour Board.

“It also really frustrates me that we’ve just announced on our website we’ve appointed a global search firm to find a new chairman, when Neil retired in May, so why on earth would that simple step take three months?

“We need to do this as the European Tour has the opportunity to be an even better product.”