With the total prize fund for The European Tour in 2001 worth more than £60 million KEN SCHOFIELD, its Executive Director, explains to International Sports Writer, GRAHAM OTWAY how sponsors receive value for their money from golf.
Our most important business from day to day is finding and then retaining event sponsors because without them, or indeed without co-sponsors and the back up sponsors of all facets of our Tour, we really would not have the tournaments.
It is all very well for those at the top end of the game. The great individual golfers starting with Tiger Woods can attract individual endorsements worldwide. So, too, can our own great European players like the Volvo Order of Merit winner Lee Westwood and our Ryder Cup players. Their success in tournament play is very attractive to sponsors.
But, quite frankly, it all starts with the tournaments because the individual golfers must have a theatre in which to practice their skills, perform and develop.
Those events need the sponsors whether it is the Volvos and the Victor Chandlers here, Linde and Deutsche Bank-SAP in Germany or worldwide with Greg Norman and the Holden car company in Australia.
Why do they do it? How do we entice them to do it when we want a full schedule of regular Tour tournaments as well as full schedules for the Seniors and Challenge Tours? We try to entice them by giving them value.
There are two main types of value. Firstly there is the televisual, broadcast and media exposure through the identification of their company and its products with our sport.
We are fortunate that nowadays there are dedicated sports channels which means that our golf, wherever it is played, is now live on television and virtually ball by ball. We think it is a great attraction for sponsors to know TV is there at whatever time of day, anywhere in the world and that their banners are on screen, together with logos on tee boards, caddies and video graphics.
All this can be valued. It can be analysed against the benefits of a direct buy of advertising be it on screen, in magazines or newspapers. So I think for companies in the retail sector that are trying to sell their cars and quality goods we provide a real target market.
There is a second value to sponsors provided by golf which we like to think is pretty unique. And that is where the sponsor and key clients can actually participate inside the ropes in our Pro-Ams.
It's golfs great drawing card because there are very few other sports where the nature of the game allows ordinary people to participate directly. They are not going to be able to keep a yorker from Darren Gough out of their stumps, they are not going to be able to beat David Seaman or Fabien Barthez regularly from 12 yards and they certainly would not go into the ring with Lennox Lewis.
In golf they can play and compete with the best. If golfers get enough shots they can beat Tiger in the same arena on a given day. Now that is a dream for those who run corporate giants who would not only love to do it themselves but perhaps more importantly to put their biggest clients into the field.
And we as the Tour make sure the top players are available for the Pro-Ams. Like our friends in America and Australia we insist that if a player enters a Tour tournament and his ranking is at the top end of the pros playing that wee -, say the top 40, a minimum of 30 but occasionally as many as 56 - he is also committed to play in the tournament’s official Pro-Am.
With very few exceptions the players honour that commitment because apart from the fact that it’s a regulation they also realise and accept that, after the media value, the Pro-Am day with the associated hospitality and interaction with sponsors is almost certainly the second biggest reason why the sponsors
commit themselves to golf.
A day at the Pro-Am, particularly with our Senior players, is a great attraction. With the Seniors they can play with the great past champions. Their fire might not burn so bright, but after 25 years of having to hole putts every Friday and Sunday for their livelihoods and having been intense over all of those years their approach is now different. As Walter Hagen put it so well, they now have time to smell the roses as they play before going on to join their guests for dinner.
If you put it all together, the ability to play in the Pro-Am and to feature around the 18th green in the hospitality boxes on the days of the tournament, they are the reasons why the sport has always, and always will, attract quality sponsors from all segments of industry. But there are evolving patterns in the type of sponsors that are coming to the sport.
Over the years the sports manufacturing companies like the Dunlops and Uniroyals have moved away from tournament sponsorship. At one time even clothing companies like Pringle used to have their own event but nowadays, and I think it's connected with ball by ball TV coverage and the cameras focusing close up on the players, the golfing trade has gone very much for sponsoring the golfers, their headgear, clothes, shoes and bags.
In its place there has been a big increase in the number of golfing venues that have become involved in sponsorship and their owners’ logic is quite simple. If anyone trying to establish a new venue can get the Tour to visit it with its cast of top players and the media, then the public perceives that it has arrived as a great new golfing facility.
There cannot be a better way to fill the tee times and advertise the club. And those that have got permits for building either small condos or multi million pound houses on site have a wonderful outlet to show off their assets in the best light.
The key question of course is how much does it all cost? And, because no two tournaments are ever exactly the same the simple answer is - how long is a piece of string?
Sponsors come to golf for so many different reasons. Some may plan a campaign just around golf, others may want a three, five or seven year hit with a view to flooding the particular categories of audience they can reach through any sport, ours included.
As a normal rule of thumb for a tournament where the prize fund is £1.5-2 million or £1.5 million, you would be talking of a minimum of two and a half to three times that in terms of the overall spend.
The infrastructure from one tournament to another does not change very much, so there are some costs that are there regardless of the size and we accept that a number of events will be run perhaps on the bare bones of the prize money and a contribution towards the cost of the television production and that is expensive.
It is one of the negatives of the sport that a golf course is a difficult playing area to cover. It is not a tennis court, a snooker table or a darts board but 7,000 yards of tree lined turf or beach front and it has to be cabled.
I know, because the European Tour Productions tv company covers the majority of the European Tour events on a live basis for four days, that wherever we play we do not get out with less than a quarter of a million pound spend.
So the sponsor as well as making his prize money commitment does also have to commit to say paying 50 per cent and sometimes even more of the broadcasting costs. In return, however, we do often give the sponsor or promoter the right to find his own host broadcaster in his home country.
Other costs do change also from time. When the Tour used to stop off at members’ clubs like the Sunningdales and Walton Heaths some charged us a fee. It was to compensate for their members not being able to play their own course, the inconvenience caused during the erection and dismantling of the tented village and to cover the cost of restoring the ground around the edges of fairways where the galleries have walked in poor weather.
At the new proprietory venues, however, they are quite happy to put up with the disruption and they will also sometimes ante up lets say around £250,000 to stage an event because they see the value of putting themselves on the map.
As I see it at the moment we have three Tours and three different principles in our approach to sponsorship.
With the regular Tour our aim is to have at least seven tournaments with prize funds of around £2 million each. That is important because we do not want our European professionals to believe they are part of a two speed Tour with the Americans and that unless they are in the Majors and the World Golf Championships they are going to be left behind.
It is not an unrealistic ambition - several years ago we were talking of getting a certain number of tournaments to £1 million and it was not so long ago we got there. Now we have The Volvo Masters which went to £2 million last year, the conversion of the Alfred Dunhill Cup to the Links Championship (Pro-Am format), which will be $5 million this autumn and of the others, The Smurfit European Open, The Volvo PGA Championship, The Scottish Open at Loch Lomond and the two big German tournaments are within touching distance of £2 million. (NB: Since publication of this article, The Scottish Open at Loch Lomond prize fund has been announced at £2.2 million; the Volvo PGA Championship at £2 million).
The Seniors Tour is on a different level. If their Open and this year’s new Welsh tournament are taken out we are looking to establish £250,000 events with the same spend again on other costs and that is great value.
For half a million pounds the sponsors get the course, two Pro-Ams because the Seniors play twice and while they do not get live television there is one hour of filmed highlights which goes on air all around the world.
If there is an area of difficulty it is with the Challenge Tour and we are currently in a huge debate about how to fund it in the future. It began in 1985 when we abandoned Monday qualifying for tournaments and the all-exempt Tour came into being.
Qualifying had always been popular because everyone wanted to play with the big guys, but it was expensive. There were sometimes 400 guys playing 18 holes on a Monday for maybe only 30 places and those golfers who didn’t make it just spent more money to move on to try to qualify the following week.
There had to be a better way and when we abolished Monday qualifying we had the opportunity to establish a secondary Tour. We have been helped all along by the structure of golf on the European mainland which is probably more centralised than in Great Britain and Ireland.
Golf Federations on the continent tend to control the game at all levels, with men, women, juniors, seniors and pros all playing under one body. They have realised that all their good young players cannot get on to the regular Tour every year with 700-800 golfers trying to get the 35 cards available through Qualifying School. So they have seen the need to subsidise a secondary level of tournament to produce a training ground for their best youngsters.
It is why the Challenge Tour tends to travel to places likes Finland, Austria and the Czech Republic. The industries in those countries may not see the golf base as wide enough to back regular Tour events but with their Challenge Tour events the Federations are still making a vital contribution to European Golf.
Sometimes it is a heavy burden for them and it's where we are looking for ways to help. We have identified one area – we think the financial success of this year’s Ryder Cup will be greater than ever before.
From the surplus created by having six huge companies linked to the Ryder Cup we hope we can reinvest, in a tax beneficial way, in the professional game's grassroots. The money will go hopefully to the Challenge Tour and maybe in the case of the UK The MasterCard Tour and the Nordic Tour in Scandinavia.
But as I said at the start, finding and retaining sponsors for our Tours is our most important day to day task and it is one that is forever ongoing.
Reproduced by kind permission of Corporate Golf World.
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