US golf’s elite PGA Tour has announced record sponsorship revenue this year, with a new major partnership renewal with Swiss luxury watchmaker Rolex helping drive the total beyond $1 billion.
As first reported by news outlet Bloomberg, the PGA Tour said its sponsorship revenue rose 14% this year to more than $1 billion, led by a newly announced multi-year sponsorship renewal with Rolex, as well as its agreements with e-commerce giant Amazon Web Services, investment bank Raymond James, and pharmaceuticals company AbbVie.
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The organization’s renewal with Rolex sees the watchmaker retain its position as official timekeeper of the PGA Tour, PGA Tour Champions, Korn Ferry Tour, and PGA Tour Americas, extending a long-standing partnership that has been in place since 2005.
This year’s high sponsorship income comes with the PGA Tour having survived a tumultuous time after being challenged in the market by the now-bankrupt LIV Golf Tour.
Pushed to innovate in the face of competition from its rival, the PGA Tour announced a new competitive model in June that will split the competition into two separate series.
Addressing the increased sponsorship revenue, PGA Tour’s chief commercial officer Dhruv Prasad told Bloomberg: “The marketplace seems to be validating the future direction of the PGA Tour.
There was a lot of painstaking work done over the last year to develop the new competitive model. We’re all anxious to see how fans and commercial partners will react to it, and by all indications that we have seen, there’s been a lot of enthusiasm.”
The 2027 PGA Tour campaign will be the first with a reshaped two-tier competitive structure that will institute promotion and relegation between two event tracks: a top-tier elite player track competing at prominent, high-purse events, and a second tier ‘Challenger Series’ from which top performers may gain promotion to the top-tier ‘Championship Series’.
This effectively makes the Championship Series a potential money spinner for the PGA Tour, with a condensed field of the very top golfers in the world competing against each other with more regularity, naturally making for a valuable and, potentially, highly sought-after broadcast product.
The PGA Tour has already signed sponsorship deals for almost every event in the Championship Series. Prasad, meanwhile, said the PGA Tour is also in active conversations with multiple sponsors about Challenger Series tournaments.
Meanwhile, the PGA Tour has not yet spent the $1.5 billion invested in its commercial arm, PGA Tour Enterprises, by Strategic Sports Group, which is led by Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, Fenway Sports Group’s John W. Henry and Tom Werner, and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen.
The additional capital is a major boost for the tour, which Prasad told Bloomberg could be used to improve facilities for different courses, hospitality, catering, and ticketing.
In contrast, its rival LIV Golf is facing liquidation, having lost its lifeline earlier this month when investment fund BC Partners dropped its plans to fund the league in 2027 and held its relaunch into LIV 2.0.
It is the second time the league’s main financial backer has pulled out, after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) shock announcement that it would no longer fund the competition in April, having spent approximately $5 billion over five years to set up the league’s calendar across five different continents.
