PGA Tour Scraps FedEx Cup Format, Will Decide Its Champion With Match Play Starting in 2028

The PGA Tour is done pretending its playoffs matter the way stroke play makes them matter. Starting in 2028, the Tour Championship will be decided by match play, not medal play, in a format that borrows straight from the World Cup.

CEO Brian Rolapp made it official Tuesday morning at East Lake Golf Club, hours before this week's Tour Championship tees off in Atlanta. The announcement builds on the two-tier Championship Series and Challenger Series structure the Tour rolled out in June, according to CBS Sports.

How It Actually Works

The regular season will end with the Championship Series Finale, a 72-hole stroke-play event for the top 90 players on the season-long points list. That event crowns the season-long points winner and locks in Tour cards for the following year.

From there, the top 32 players in points move on to the new two-week Tour Championship. Week one is a group stage: 32 players split into eight groups of four, playing round-robin match play over three days. Top two from each group advance. Ties get settled with a playoff, not some tiebreaker on paper, according to Fox News.

Week two moves to a different course entirely for a 16-player bracket. Every player competes all four rounds regardless of whether they've been eliminated from title contention, with final standings determined by win-loss record. Two undefeated players meet in the final to decide the Tour Champion.

Golf hasn't used individual match play on Tour since the WGC-Match Play Championship in Austin was scrapped in 2023, per Golf Digest.

Why Rolapp Says He's Doing This

Rolapp didn't dress this up as a minor tweak. He told ESPN's Mark Schlabach, as relayed by TheScore, that the old Tour Championship never actually crowned "the best golfer in the world" in a way fans believed. Calling it "the playoffs," he argued, was doing the event a disservice by making it feel like a bolted-on second competition rather than golf's real answer to a title fight.

Speaking to Golf Channel's Rich Lerner and Brandel Chamblee, Rolapp put it more bluntly: "Let's be honest, I think calling the Tour Championship the playoffs doesn't really land in golf. It's not the same as the NHL or the NFL."

According to The New York Times, Rolapp created a Futures Competition Committee when he took over as CEO a year ago specifically to rethink the Tour's structure from scratch. He reportedly told The Athletic that when his committee canvassed media partners including CBS, NBC, ESPN, Netflix and Amazon on how to make golf more interesting, match play came up almost universally.

The Money and the Venues

Venue rotation is a big piece of the sell. East Lake has hosted the Tour Championship every year since 2004, according to Golf Digest. Under the new format, smaller 32-player fields let the Tour move the event to historic courses it has never used before. Sports Business Journal has flagged Los Angeles Country Club, Interlachen Country Club in Minnesota, and Sleepy Hollow Country Club in New York as early possibilities, per Golf Channel.

Rolapp said the full slate of 2028 dates and hosts will be announced February 22, 2027.

This all sits inside the broader Championship Series overhaul the Tour unveiled in June: a roughly 120-player top tier with $20 million purses and 36-hole cuts, and a separate 140-plus player Challenger Series feeding into it through promotion and relegation, according to the Times.

What's Still Unresolved

The Tour hasn't figured out seeding for the 16-man bracket. TV networks have historically been wary of straight knockout match play because a marquee name can get bounced in round one, so the Tour built in a system where every player finishes all four rounds and final standings are set by record, essentially a placement bracket. Officials avoid the word "consolation," per the Times and Golf Channel.

Player buy-in is also an open question. The Times reported that while fans and broadcast partners pushed hard for match play, "many players publicly voiced reservations" during the process, without detailing the specific objections.

One thing this announcement did not touch: LIV Golf. Rolapp told reporters at the same press conference, according to Yahoo Sports' Jay Busbee, that LIV players are not returning to the PGA Tour anytime soon. That leaves the sport's biggest structural fracture, one that predates this playoff redesign, fully intact heading into 2028.