On an episode of Business of Sport podcast, the host recalled how Mike Ashley once renamed Newcastle United’s ground the sportsdirect.com arena, and how supporters kept calling it St James’ Park anyway. The signage changed, but the habit did not. Golf now faces its own version of that test, because the DP World Tour sold its naming rights and a professional golfer believes the tour’s heritage paid for it.

That golfer is Eddie Pepperell, a guest on the same episode. He pointed to the deal Keith Pelley, then the tour’s chief executive, struck with DP World, which took effect in 2022 and was reported by SportBusiness to be worth at least $400 million over a decade. Pepperell said the money benefited the players, and Pelley through the mandate the board gave him, but he saw a long-term problem.

“My view back then was that’s a massive risk for the business moving forward in the long run,” Pepperell said on the same episode.

A naming rights deal gives a sponsor’s brand a place in a competition’s title, and the goodwill, meaning the recognition built over decades, goes with it. Pepperell argued that goodwill can only be sold once.

How badly that risk plays out depends on how fast a new name takes over, and the host thinks it takes longer than most people expect. The host, who still calls the circuit the European Tour, said its older, traditional following is unlikely to shift soon.

That changes with age, though. Someone who was 10 rather than 32 at the time of the rename would grow up knowing only the DP World Tour, and that generation would eventually reshape how the tour’s history is seen. Newcastle shows the pattern, and the host said heritage is “often the thing that is most compromised by money.”

Pepperell Reassesses the Pelley Deal

The host’s reasoning changed how Pepperell judged the deal. He called Pelley a maligned chief executive and said he now saw how forward thinking Pelley had been in recognizing that naming rights carry less relevance than assumed. On that reading, Pelley took the sponsor’s money knowing little would be lost in return.

The host also played down most of the noise around the deal. Roughly 80% of what fans complain about, the host said, is not worth the head space, and a rename changes only the label above the golf, not the golf itself.

Pepperell then moved from the name to the funding model behind it. He said a contradiction is inevitable for any organization that is always trying to grow, because you can only extract something from so many sources so often. Naming rights are one such source the tour has already used, and he said sport more broadly may be at that point.

The tour’s accounts show why that pressure is real. According to figures from its 2025 accounts shared by the golf account Irish on Tour, the tour recorded an EBITDA loss of £54.5 million, a measure of operating earnings before interest, tax and accounting charges. Most of it came from a £43.6 million fall in media rights revenue compared with 2024.

That loss arrived in a year of record prize money, $153 million outside the majors. The PGA Tour has also paid $85 million for a 15% stake in European Tour Productions, the tour’s media business, and DP World has extended its title deal to 2035. Naming rights are one of several sources the tour already leans on.

The DP World payment is easy to count, but the goodwill it may have cost is not, so Pepperell’s warning needs other ways to be checked. The first is which name fans use when they talk about the tour, since that shows whether the heritage survived the rebrand. The second is what sponsors will pay for the assets that remain, which shows whether buyers still value them. The third is how many revenue sources the tour has left untouched, because that decides how hard it will lean on its heritage next. The last is whether younger fans share the loyalty of older ones, and that will show if the heritage carries forward.