The European Tour today announces that the BMW PGA Championship will move from its current date in May to a new September slot from the 2019 season onwards.
The Championship, which is part of the European Tour’s Rolex Series, will be played at Wentworth Club from May 24-27, 2018, before moving to September for its 65th anniversary edition the following year.
The move comes following news announced earlier today that the 2019 US PGA Championship will move from its traditional August date into May, with The Players Championship on the PGA Tour moving from May to March.
The specific date of the 2019 BMW PGA Championship will be released in due course but it will be central to a strong and robust end of season schedule on the European Tour.
Keith Pelley, Chief Executive of the European Tour, said: “Significant changes to the global golfing calendar have given us the opportunity to move the BMW PGA Championship to a more favourable date from 2019 onwards.
“Wentworth Club is an iconic location in the realm of British sport and the BMW PGA Championship is always hugely popular with the public as was seen in May when it launched our Rolex Series with 110,000 spectators in attendance over the course of the week.
“This is a new chapter for the event but we expect similar interest in the autumn, as was shown historically by the World Match Play Championship when it was played at Wentworth Club at that time of the year.”
The BMW PGA Championship was the first of eight Rolex Series events to be played on the European Tour’s International Schedule in 2017, all of which are part of the Race to Dubai. Sweden’s Alex Noren claimed the title in May, overturning a seven shot deficit with a stunning final round of 62 to win by two strokes over the West Course, which had undergone a multi-million pound revamp in the period between the 2016 and 2017 Championships.
Noren joined an illustrious Roll of Honour for the Championship which includes Seve Ballesteros, Arnold Palmer, Tony Jacklin, Sir Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer, Ian Woosnam, José María Olazábal, Colin Montgomerie, Luke Donald and Rory McIlroy.
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