The AIG Ladies’s Open has elevated its prize fund for a sixth successive 12 months regardless of not being a worthwhile match to stage.
This 12 months’s championship, which is being held from 30 July – 2 August at Royal Lytham & St Annes on the Lancashire coast, may have a document purse of $10m (£7.4m).
It’s not the one one of many 5 annual girls’s majors making the most of sponsorship offers to supply growing prize cash. The US Ladies’s Open – which final 12 months had the biggest prize fund within the girls’s recreation at $12m – has the backing of Ally Monetary.
“For the time being it is not worthwhile,” stated R&A chief govt Mark Darbon.
“We deal with it as an funding into the sport, however a fully crucial funding.
“Our focus really is round viewers development. We expect if we’ll be true to that notion of inspiring hundreds of thousands of individuals all over the world, we have to develop the viewers for this championship and the ladies’s recreation extra broadly.”
Round 50,000 spectators are anticipated to attend throughout the week of what would be the fiftieth Ladies’s Open, whereas Darbon pointed to elevated tv protection as a means of boosting the sport’s profile.
The $10m prize fund lags behind the $17m shared out between the gamers finally 12 months’s Open Championship and whereas Darbon want to see that levelled sooner or later, he stated the R&A needed to “assume sustainably”.
“There’s a business actuality. We’re investing collectively, AIG and the R&A, vital sums into the championship, and we wish to do this in a accountable means.
“So we’re not able to have equal prize funds in the mean time, however we’ll look to proceed to raise our prize fund over time.
“We wish to reward the celebs of our sport. We have now to try this in a sustainable trend.”
Darbon stated it will be attainable to make the championship worthwhile by chopping again on the spend however that was not on his agenda.
“If profitability was our primary ambition for this occasion, there are a selection of issues we may do to place us on a path to reaching that outcome.
“For the time being, profitability shouldn’t be a principal goal for us. We wish to ship sensible venues and a beautiful expertise for the gamers.
“We wish to have a significant and rising prize pot, and we wish to ship a spectator expertise each stay and thru broadcast and digital channels that evokes and excites individuals.”
Darbon additionally introduced that the 2028 Ladies’s Open could be held at Sunningdale’s Outdated Course in Surrey.
In contrast to the lads’s Open Championship, the ladies’s visits inland programs in addition to hyperlinks programs on the coast.
“The Open and Ladies’s Open have their very own discrete identities,” he stated.
“We do not deal with them as one, and subsequently we do not deal with the venue choice course of as one both.
“We’re very targeted on taking this occasion to what we regard as a few of the world’s easiest programs.”
