The European Tour is on hiatus until at least the end of May, with six European Tour-specific events postponed in addition to the co-sanctioned Masters Tournament and PGA Championship.
While the major championships, which are run by separate organizations, will reschedule their tournaments, the European Tour will have a lot of tournaments it hopes to still fit in at some point in 2020. With so many tournaments still to be played in theory, the European Tour has been looking at playing golf almost every day of the week at the end of the year.
According to the Daily Mail, the European Tour may be running concurrent tournaments in different locations in the world to give players the maximum amount of playing opportunities possible.
One of the reasons for potentially cramming tournaments into a shortened functional season is to give players as many chances to make money as possible. However, the other key reason is fulfilling television contracts with Sky Sports and Golf Channel.
The European Tour's television deals have language which requires the European Tour to put on and televise a certain number of events to trigger rights payments.
The Daily Mail theorizes a schedule could have an event run from Monday through Thursday, then taking a one-day break before the next tournament that runs Saturday through Tuesday. Then there would be another one-day break and a tournament would run in the traditional Thursday through Sunday time frame.
The schedule would likely try to sprinkle in the events with lower purses with the fall events that tend to have bigger purses. Ultimately, the European Tour would likely want to make up as many events as possible before they get to the final three events of the season -- the Turkish Airlines Open, the Nedbank Golf Challenge and DP World Tour Championship in Dubai -- which would run on their own. However, there could be a scenario where postponed events with lower purses run concurrently as opposite-field events.
On the PGA Tour, most upcoming events have been cancelled outright rather than postponed. That means they won't be played this season and will look to return in the 2020-2021 season without a make-up.
