PGA Tour to conclude season with two-week matchplay tournament from 2028

PGA Tour to conclude season with two-week match-play tournament in 2028

The PGA Tour announced Tuesday a sweeping overhaul of its postseason, introducing a match-play format for the Tour Championship that will debut after the 2028 regular season.

The new structure begins with a Championship Series Finale, a 72-hole stroke-play event featuring the top 90 players in the season-long points standings. That event will crown a season-long winner and set the field of 32 for the new-look Tour Championship.

World Cup-style format

The Tour Championship itself will be a two-week, World Cup-style match-play competition. In the first week, the 32 qualifiers will be split into eight groups of four for round-robin matches across three days at a rotation of "prestigious venues." Each player faces the other three in their group, with a playoff serving as a tiebreaker if needed.

The top two from each group — 16 golfers in all — advance to Week 2, played at a different venue, where they compete in a head-to-head match-play bracket. Players advance based on their win-loss record, with the final two undefeated players facing off to be crowned Tour Champion. Final standings will be determined by each player's record across the four days of competition.

The new format marks the first time match play will be used in the Tour's postseason. Match play was last used on Tour in 2023, when the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play was still on the calendar.

PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp said the changes address long-standing criticisms of the current system, under which the FedEx Cup finale could crown a winner who did not win the final event. "I think one of the issues with the Tour Championship was that I don't think anyone really felt that it was culminating in crowning the best golfer in the world," Rolapp told ESPN. "I feel like calling it the playoffs was almost doing it a disservice because it was just a separate competition."

The new format will abandon the controversial starting strokes system that has been used since 2019, where the points leader began the Tour Championship with a significant head start. Last year, Scottie Scheffler entered the event with a lead and went on to win the title.

Rolapp praised the Future Competition Committee, a nine-member group chaired by Tiger Woods, for its work on the new format. Woods said on social media: "The conclusion of the season should be worthy of the journey it takes to get there. Today’s announcement is the result of the hard work and dedication of our players."

NBC Sports executive producer Sam Flood, who previously expressed support for a match-play postseason, also welcomed the change. The Tour's broadcast partners, including NBC and CBS, are expected to embrace the new format, which is designed to be more TV-friendly and eliminate the "dead time" between matches.

Details of the new format

Under the new system, the top 90 players in the season-long points standings will qualify for the Championship Series Finale, a 72-hole stroke-play event. That event will crown a season-long champion and determine the 32 players who advance to the Tour Championship.

The Tour Championship itself will be a two-week match-play competition. In Week 1, the 32 players are split into eight groups of four for a round-robin group stage, with playoffs used as tiebreakers. The top two from each group, 16 players, advance to Week 2.

Week 2 consists of a 16-player match-play bracket played over four rounds. The final two undefeated players will face off to determine the Tour Champion, with all eliminated players continuing to compete to fill out the final standings and television time.

The Tour said the venues for the new postseason will rotate annually among a selection of prestigious courses.

Golf broadcasters react

NBC Sports, which holds one of the Tour's media rights deals alongside CBS, has long advocated for match play in the postseason. Sam Flood, the executive producer at NBC Sports and a key figure in the Tour's $750 million broadcast agreements, suggested the idea 16 months ago, saying match play could be "great television."

"There is a lot of interest from the players and from the networks to make this better," Flood said at the time. "Match play is great drama on television."

The new format also addresses concerns about the difficulty of following the current three-week postseason, which uses a points system that has been criticized as complicated. The new structure, with its group stage and knockout bracket, is intended to be easier to follow.

The Tour will announce the venues for both the Championship Series Finale and the Tour Championship at a later date, with the match-play event expected to rotate among several prestigious courses.