European Tour considers going global

The European Tour is considering a change of name as it looks to forge even closer ties with the rest of the world in battling the strength of the American circuit.

Europe's players already find themselves travelling to Australasia, Asia and the Middle East, but many of the tournaments at home and abroad now take place with weaker fields because of conflicting events in the United States.

'The idea of amalgamating with other tours to put on a really attractive schedule by whatever name we call it is one that we are in the final stages of refining,' European Tour executive director George O'Grady said today.

'Certainly it won't be a world tour - that's far too grand for me to come up with.

'We're the European Tour and we're working with all our partners to make, I would say, a hugely strong alternative to the PGA Tour.

'We will be administering it and there might be a name change, yes.'

The need to act has been hastened by the fact that the World Golf Championship events are not global. The three tournaments are all in the United States for the foreseeable future and the World Cup in China for the next ten years is no longer under the WGC banner.

That is the case despite the US Tour being part of an international federation of all the tours.

'The rest of the world knows how good all European Tour players are in terms of the charismatic appeal. We are not a bunch of faceless nobodies.'

Last week's Irish Open took place with only two of the world's top 50, while the recent Spanish and Italian Opens were even weaker than that.

But this week the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, the Tour's flagship event, had five of the world's top ten in Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, Henrik Stenson, Retief Goosen and Luke Donald.

On Wednesday Singh said it was a shame that American players were not in the field as well.

'I'm just saddened by the fact that when you have the TPC (now the Players Championship) in the US you have a lot of Europeans going over there and playing.

'I would like to see a lot more Americans coming over and trying to play this tournament. They are so spoiled in that they have so many golf tournaments over there.

'They could have made this a World Golf Championships event. They have three in America (plus three of the four majors, of course).

'Then you'd have a lot more players coming over. I don't know why they didn't do that. They could have done it in conjunction with the European Tour. Maybe in the future they can do that.'