The conversation about reuniting golf under one banner has resurfaced repeatedly throughout 2026, and if history is any guide, it never really goes away. It just finds a new voice to carry it. This time it belongs to Sir Nick Faldo. Speaking to Today’s Golfer, the six-time major champion didn’t hold back on what he sees as a missed chance to unite the sport.
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Speaking in the interview, Faldo said, “It’s such a shame” that the game never got its true world tour off the ground, adding that America’s determination to stay on top killed any real appetite for one. “We’ve had that vision for 40-odd years. It’s such a shame we didn’t. But America wants to be number one, and they have no interest in a world tour.”
Faldo’s comments land just a week after PGA Tour pro Matt Fitzpatrick used an interview with CBS to voice a similar frustration. The 14-time winner across both tours argued that several DP World Tour events, including the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, the Italian Open, and the BMW International Open, deserve a place in the PGA Tour’s revamped calendar. He also pointed out that Europe hosts tournaments that would be better than a lot of tournaments on the PGA Tour. Sir Nick Faldo’s statements make it clear that he’s fully behind that argument.
The timing of this conversation matters, especially when the PGA Tour is currently overhauling its entire structure ahead of 2028. As reported previously, the tour will be splitting into the Championship Series and the Challenger Series, with promotion and relegation between them. As a part of that shakeup, the tour has confirmed it wants to work more closely with DP World Tour on selected international events during the fall. However, the details remain unresolved. So far, the Genesis Scottish Open is still the only traditional European event that’s co-sanctioned on both tours.
Looking at the other side of the story, the PGA Tour has never framed its resistance to a unified global tour as stubbornness. It positions itself as a matter of business survival. CEO Brian Rolapp has said on many occasions that the schedule will stay “mostly American-based.”
That’s despite the tour deepening its ties with the DP World Tour and Asian Tour this year. Rolapp’s case rests on media economics. With leagues like the NFL pushing to double their international footprint, he says the PGA Tour needs to win domestically first, building “the most compelling product” at home, before it can compete for attention in a crowded global sports market. Spreading into more countries now, in his view, would only thin out that product.
Faldo went further than just criticism, though. He sketched out what he believes should have happened: a top 120 global tour moving through Australia, the Middle East, America, and back to Europe.
“It’s not going to happen,” he admitted. “But I really thought there was an opportunity to create a true world tour.”
It’s a vision, he says, that traces back to his own playing days when Faldo, Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer, and other European stars regularly won majors without needing to base themselves in the United States.
Faldo isn’t the first to chase the idea
The push for a unified golf circuit is nothing new, and history shows how hostile the PGA Tour has been towards it. Back in 1994, Greg Norman tried to launch his own World Golf Tour with the backing of Fox Sports, offering a $25 million purse across eight events. The PGA Tour, under then-commissioner Tim Finchem, threatened to bar any member who signed up, and the plan collapsed even before it got a chance to tee off. The one lasting legacy of that failed attempt was the creation of the World Golf Championship, a watered-down compromise that folded back into the PGA Tour’s own system rather than existing independently.
Norman tried again with LIV Golf decades later. Same result. The PGA Tour resisted it just as hard as it did his first attempt back in the ’90s, and it’s still fighting anything that looks like a rival world tour today.
Faldo’s timing is worth noting. LIV isn’t exactly thriving right now. Saudi Arabia’s PIF is pulling its funding after 2027, and the league has already cancelled events and slashed prize money as a result. That’s part of what pushed the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Asian Tour closer together this year, a move McIlroy welcomed publicly. So the current wave of “unity” talk probably has more to do with LIV falling apart than any real appetite for the kind of world tour Faldo has in mind.
On paper, 42 events in 25 countries looks like a global tour already. But the money tells a different story. The DP World Tour’s purse reached a record $157.5 million in 2026, still a fraction of the PGA Tour’s $450-565 million. Most years the European tour operates at a loss. It survives on outside cash, including a $400 million naming rights deal with DP World and an $85 million stake the PGA Tour itself bought into the tour’s media business.
Sir Nick Faldo believes the infrastructure for something bigger already exists. He’s just not convinced the will to build it does. For now, his hope rests on smaller fixes, like using events such as the Husqvarna British Masters, which already opens the Ryder Cup qualification window, to lure star names back into Europe.