Why the Scottish Open needs protecting under the new PGA Tour

What the Scottish Open actually is

The Scottish Open is a men’s professional golf tournament played on a seaside links course in Scotland, traditionally held the week before The Open Championship. It has been co-sanctioned by the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour since 2022, which means members of either tour can enter the 156-man field provided they hold a sufficiently high ranking. The tournament sits inside the DP World Tour’s Rolex Series, the circuit’s premium set of events, and in recent years has attracted most of the world’s top players as a warm-up for links golf at The Open the following week.

What the new PGA Tour plan changes

PGA Tour chief executive Brian Rolapp has approved a structural overhaul that creates a top-flight “Championship” tier. According to BBC Sport, that tier is designed to feature fields of about 120 players competing for prize funds of at least $20m (£15m). The plan is the latest step in the PGA Tour’s post-2022 restructuring, which has already reshaped the tour’s signature events and purses. Critics inside and outside the United States have long argued that the revamp pushes the tour further toward a closed, top-heavy product.

What the players are actually saying

At this week’s Scottish Open, Rory McIlroy, a two-time Masters champion, used his pre-tournament media session to argue that national opens must be treated as a distinct category. “We’ve got to be careful with that because then these national opens lose the fabric of what they are,” McIlroy said, according to BBC Sport. “You can’t call yourself a national open any more if it’s a closed-off tournament and there’s a certain number of guys. These events need to be treated differently than the Travelers Championship or RBC Heritage or whatever else is going to be in the Championship series.”

World number one Scottie Scheffler, the reigning Open champion, stopped short of endorsing McIlroy’s position in full but agreed that the tournament should remain part of the top tier. “It’s an important one that we keep it in the Championship Series just because you get so many guys that come over here and play the week before [The Open],” Scheffler told BBC Sport. He added that it is “hard to tell” whether the new structure should still include DP World Tour members and warned that “golf is so difficult to rank players when they are not playing together all the time.”

Scotland’s Robert MacIntyre, a DP World Tour stalwart, took a more upbeat line. “I personally think the Scottish Open is going to be totally fine,” he said, per BBC Sport. “I don’t see it being a $20m event. I see it being a Rolex Series/European Tour event. It would be a bit mad to put a $20m event in Scotland given the world we live in today. It’s not the same as America.” His view implies the tournament could remain outside the PGA Tour’s Championship tier without losing its prestige.

Why the purse gap matters

The numbers frame the entire debate. The Scottish Open’s £6.7m purse is less than half the floor that Rolapp’s plan sets for the Championship tier. BBC Sport reports that McIlroy’s argument is structural rather than purely financial: if the PGA Tour reserves its biggest cheques and invitation lists for a 120-player closed field, tournaments that rely on cross-tour co-sanctioning risk being squeezed out of the calendar’s premium slot. The two teesheets already show the pull: Scheffler goes off at 13:43 BST on Thursday alongside Matt Fitzpatrick and Tommy Fleetwood, while McIlroy tees off at 08:28 with MacIntyre and Chris Gotterup at the Tom Doak-designed East Lothian links.

Why it matters beyond this week

The Scottish Open is a useful test case for the wider question the PGA Tour’s revamp raises: which tournaments count as elite. National opens, by tradition, mix local heroes with global stars and reward high finishes with ranking points and Open-week preparation; that role does not fit neatly inside a tier defined by a 120-player field and a $20m purse. If the Scottish Open is excluded, the precedent would extend to other co-sanctioned national opens and to events on the DP World Tour that American players currently use to prepare for majors. If it is included, the PGA Tour will have to decide whether non-members can still earn a place — the question Scheffler flagged as “hard to tell.”

Where the players disagree, and where they do not

The three golfers quoted in the BBC’s reporting converge on the view that the Scottish Open should retain some kind of top-tier status, but they differ on the mechanism. McIlroy wants the tournament treated as a separate category, not assimilated into the Championship tier. Scheffler wants it kept inside the tier so Americans continue to travel to Scotland the week before The Open. MacIntyre argues the tournament will survive as a Rolex Series/European Tour event without any PGA Tour upgrade. None of the three addresses directly whether the co-sanctioning arrangement itself survives a fully closed Championship field of around 120 players, and BBC Sport does not report any PGA Tour statement on that point.

Comparisons that put the numbers in context

The $20m Championship-tier floor is roughly three times the Scottish Open’s current purse and is comparable to PGA Tour regular events such as the RBC Heritage and the Travelers Championship, the two US tournaments McIlroy singled out. A 120-player field would also be markedly smaller than the Scottish Open’s 156-man format, which is itself built to accommodate tour members from two circuits. The implication, which BBC Sport’s reporting leaves implicit, is that absorbing the Scottish Open into the Championship tier would change not just the prize money but the size and composition of the field.

What to watch next

The most concrete near-term signal will be how the PGA Tour’s 2026 schedule is announced: whether the Scottish Open is listed inside the Championship tier, outside it, or as a separately classified event, and whether its 156-man, cross-tour field is preserved. The longer-running question is whether the co-sanctioning arrangement with the DP World Tour is renegotiated as part of the revamp, given that the framework alliance between the tours already sets the rules for non-members’ access to PGA Tour events. Sponsorship and broadcast decisions that follow the schedule release will indicate whether the tour is willing to underwrite a smaller-purse, larger-field national open as a strategic exception. Until then, the BBC’s reporting suggests the players, the tour and the DP World Tour remain publicly divided on the answer.

What remains unconfirmed

BBC Sport does not report any direct comment from Brian Rolapp or from DP World Tour leadership on McIlroy’s remarks, nor does it set out a timeline for the Championship tier’s rollout. The size of the 2026 Scottish Open field and the prize fund beyond the current £6.7m purse are also not specified. Readers should treat the structural details of the revamp as the plan BBC Sport attributes to Rolapp rather than as a final, ratified schedule.