Interview with Ben Bye, General Counsel of The European Tour group

Graham Dunn interviewed Ben Bye, General Counsel of the European Tour group (which manages the DP World Tour and the European aspects of The Ryder Cup).

What was your route to becoming General Counsel of the European Tour group, a role which brings a lot of responsibility given it is such a pivotal period in the organisation’s history?

I did a degree in Latin and Modern Greek at the University of Birmingham. After graduating, law school appealed to me, so I went to the College of Law in Guildford. I trained at Harbottle & Lewis, a West End media and entertainment firm, and qualified into the Sports and Sponsorship Group, which was phenomenal. I spent time on secondment at Comic Relief (where I was involved with Sport Relief) and at Live Nation (now Live Nation Entertainment), one of the world’s biggest concert and live events promoters. I also spent a year or so on secondment at the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) in Canary Wharf, which was fascinating.

These secondments led me to think that staying in private practice and pushing for partnership might not be quite what suited me. After nearly 10 years at Harbottle, a law school friend told me about a job at the International Cricket Council in Dubai. Despite my wife and I having just bought a house and expecting our first child, I went to Dubai for 24 hours for an interview and got the job.

We moved to Dubai in November 2010, and I spent six years at the International Cricket Council (ICC) handling commercial contracts. My first tournament was the Men’s Cricket World Cup in 2011 hosted by India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. After six happy years in Dubai, a job came up at the European Tour. When I was at Harbottles I had done a lot of legal work for both the European Tour and the Ladies European Tour and I knew my golf, so I jumped at the opportunity. I started as Deputy General Counsel in 2016 and, fast forward nearly nine years, I'm still here and now Interview with General Counsel  managing a team of eight.

Golf, like all sports, is becoming increasingly reliant on external investment to remain competitive in a crowded sports and entertainment market. What are the main challenges in attracting external investors whose goals align with the long-term growth and sustainability of the game?

The most difficult challenge for us is probably that we are a members’ organisation. Our members are our players and PGA European Tour – the corporate legal entity – is a company limited by guarantee, so it doesn't issue shares for investors to buy. We are essentially a not-for-profit organisation, so all our sponsorship, commercial and broadcast revenue supports the operations of the organisation and, ultimately, whatever is left is returned to members as prize funds. It’s about trying to find the right balance with private equity, which will one day require a return on its investment. 

With the increasing financial pull from other tours and organisations, how can the DP World Tour effectively retain its top young talent and prevent its brightest young stars from being lured away by bigger pay cheques elsewhere?

We have a very strong relationship with the PGA Tour that allows our top ten players not otherwise exempt at the end of each season to earn dual membership on the PGA Tour for the following season. This pathway offers players the potential for greater prize funds week in and week out, but playing in the US does not suit every player. We have some great international tournaments, including historic national opens that players want to play in, and we offer players the opportunity to play a variety of golf, with our global schedule visiting 25 countries throughout the course of this season. That has a lot of appeal.

If you also look at golf more widely, playing on the DP World Tour is a goal for some players playing on tours like the Sunshine Tour or the Australasian Tour, for example. There are routes up through a pyramid structure if that's what a player wants to do.

With participation in women’s golf continuing to grow, what initiatives is the DP World Tour implementing to support this growth and create more opportunities and visibility for female players, building on the success of the Ladies European Tour and the Solheim Cup?

We have had a lot of collaboration with the women’s game but at the same time we are an organisation primarily for our members – male professional golfers.

We have had several mixed events, whether that be men’s and women’s tournaments taking place at the same venue, or in the case of the Scandinavian Mixed where men and women competed on the same course, for the same trophy and for the same prize fund. That was a first for our sport. Linn Grant won the tournament in 2022, making her the first female winner on the DP World Tour, and did so again in 2024.

How is the DP World Tour working to expand into new countries and regions and to increase crowd sizes, while balancing the challenges of sustainability, course length limitations and infrastructure constraints?

There are challenges, absolutely, and space constraints are probably primary among those. A site can only support so much infrastructure, including people, TV trucks and kilometres of cabling, as well as the accommodation and transport needs. We are sometimes approached by golf course owners, national federations, or wealthy individuals with ideas for existing and new courses, but a lot of infrastructure needs to be in place.

So when choosing venues, we obviously look at the course and how it will challenge our players, but also the infrastructure around it and whether that can support the requirements of an international sporting event. Our Rolex Series events, in particular, have an elevated fan experience both for those watching at home and on-site.

For example, the Genesis Scottish Open, which we co-sanction with the PGA Tour, is very well attended and has a lot of activities outside the ropes for families. It's the week before the Open Championship, which makes it a real draw. The BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth is another tournament that has grown exponentially over the past nine years I have been at the European Tour, with people embracing it as a family day out, with concerts and the fan village being central to that.

Sustainability is also a key consideration for us as part of our commitment to leaving a positive social and environmental impact in the communities we visit. GEO (Golf Environment Organization or the GEO Foundation for Sustainable Golf) provides us with support and guidance so we can meet our sustainability goals. We are also part of the United Nations Sports for Climate Action and have signed up to its pledge, with the aim to reach net zero by 2040.

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© Farrer & Co LLP, July 2025