‘Credibility' only flag mission for new MENA Golf Tour commissioner
KUUMAR SHYAM (ABU DHABI)The MENA Golf Tour is set to return stronger and better, this time under the stewardship of Keith Waters, who was recently appointed Commissioner and Chairman. Waters, a veteran administrator with decades of experience at the DP World Tour (formerly European Tour), says the priority is not immediate expansion or grandeur, but to restore trust after the Tour took one and two years' break in 2018 and 2023 respectively.'Creating the credibility and the integrity is absolutely critical in the first place,' he said. 'We have got to deliver exactly what we say we're going to do in terms of our schedule and paying out the prize money precisely every week after the tournament. So we're doing the very basic stuff first.'The tour, founded in 2011, understandably had teething problems. It was suspended in 2018 for a season, while a strategic move in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to align with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf, backfired despite good intentions. That partnership attempted to use the MENA Tour's world-ranking status to support LIV's push for ranking points, but Waters explained why it unravelled, 'David Spencer was trying to find a way to generate some more interest in the MENA Tour… He tried to reverse engineer the fact that the Tour had world ranking points to help the LIV Tour. But that wasn't possible. The rules and regulations in place didn't allow the MENA tour events to actually transfer their points in any way to the LIV events.' COVID-19 had already left the Tour reeling, just like sporting events all over the world grappled with the effects. 'The financial challenges they had, it just wasn't a viable product at the time,' Waters said. Cut to the start of the 2025-26 season, the new avatar of the Tour is backed by new investors and a formal company structure based in the Dubai World Trade Centre Free Zone.The roadmap now is a modest but steady rollout: 12 tournaments with $100,000 prize funds for each, starting with the first event in Portugal and a qualifying school at the end of November. 'We've committed to the schedule and prize money. The players will pay a membership fee and an entry fee to play in the tournaments. And we do have some interested sponsors,' Waters confirmed. Discussions are ongoing with venues in Morocco, Portugal, and across the region, with an eye on sustainability and reducing travel costs by clustering events in the same location. Waters also sees the Tour as a developmental pathway. Talks are underway with the DP World Tour and the HotelPlanner Tour (formerly Challenge Tour) to provide progression routes, while grassroots integration is on the agenda. 'Our ambition is now to create a programme where the children from the schools in Dubai, for instance, will have a pathway onto the MENA Tour. Even if they are 16 or 17, one or two of them will qualify for the tournaments. They may not be professional, but it creates the pathway and the opportunity,' he said. Partnerships with national federations, including the Emirates Golf Federation, are also being lined up. The Tour's international appeal, he noted, will also be strengthened by its calendar. 'There are very few tours that play tournaments in December, January and February at this level,' he said. 'You can't play in Europe at this time of year. The weather is not good enough. So we're creating an opportunity for a large number of players who can't play elsewhere during the winter.'While the ambitions extend to eventually adding a women's circuit and deepening ties with established tours, Waters is determined to avoid overreach. 'I'm 100% confident we will deliver,' he said. 'We have a very experienced team. We have the funding. We've built the platform from a legal and commercial point of view already. It is now about purely delivering from an operational point of view.'
For now, the MENA Golf Tour's future rests on whether it can rebuild the trust of players and sponsors alike. 'We're just trying to create credibility, integrity. That is the key.'
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