Golf to pilot six-hole tournaments

European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley plans to create six-hole tournaments to help create a new generation of golf fans.

The Canadian, who succeeded George O'Grady last year, cites the success of Twenty20 cricket as a template for modernising the sport.

"There would be a shot clock, yes there would be music being played, and PA announcements, and players would be dressed a little differently, and maybe they would only play with five or seven clubs" he told BBC Radio 5 live.

"Our leaderboard is always filled with a bunch of different flags and it would probably be a country competition, so you could probably see England playing Scotland in a six-hole matchplay with time clocks and music and so forth going on and it would be an aspirational goal to be even remotely as successful as Twenty20 cricket."

Pelley says 18-hole tournaments struggle to interest young people, who he thinks would prefer a shorter form of the sport.

"Attention spans are decreasing as opposed to increasing and it's completely different when the choice people have to consume content now is so different than it was 35-40 years ago."

"So you have to change, people's time is so precious that golf - I think every golf course being built needs to be six holes, six holes, six holes - so that people can go at the beginning before they go to work."

The European Tour hope to pilot the six-hole tournaments next year, but Pelley insists they will not replace the 72-hole game.

"The tradition, the integrity of the game, the 72-hole tournament will always be there in some form but if you catapult ahead 10 or 15 years the game of golf will be consumed completely differently and there will be different formats that will be successful as content entertainment makers," he continued.