The FedEx Cup Playoffs open this week – the PGA TOUR’s three-tournament, three-week elimination run that trims the field from 70 players to 50 to a final 30, ending with the TOUR Championship and its staggered, strokes-based leaderboard at East Lake. The playing field gets smaller every week. For fans trying to answer “where do I watch it,” in at least one major market, the opposite just happened – the answer got more complicated, and it happened for the first time this year.

The bracket

• FedEx St. Jude Championship – Aug. 13–16, TPC Southwind, Memphis. Top 70 in the FedEx Cup standings play; the top 50 advance.
• BMW Championship – Aug. 20–23, Bellerive Country Club, Missouri. Top 50 play; the top 30 advance.
• TOUR Championship – Aug. 27–30, East Lake Golf Club, Atlanta. Final 30, playing to decide the season’s FedEx Cup champion.

What’s at stake

The money climbs as the field shrinks. The FedEx St. Jude Championship and the BMW Championship each carry a $20 million purse, with $3.6 million going to that week’s winner. The TOUR Championship’s purse jumps to $40 million, with $10 million to whoever wins the tournament outright – since 2025 a standard 72-hole, even-par-start event, no longer the strokes-based staggered leaderboard used in prior years.

Separately from those three tournament purses sits the FedExCup bonus pool: nearly $100 million, split among the top 50 in the season points standings once the BMW Championship ends. The points leader at that moment takes $22 million (plus $1 million deferred); second place takes $12 million (plus $1 million deferred); the bonus still reaches as far down as 41st–50th, worth $50,000 cash plus more than $225,000 deferred. It’s decided by the season standings entering the TOUR Championship, not by how that final event plays out, so the points leader and the tournament’s eventual winner aren’t guaranteed to be the same player.

United States: the same three-way split, three weeks running

Every one of the three events follows the same pattern – coverage opens on ESPN in the morning, hands off to Golf Channel through the afternoon, then the weekend’s final two rounds move to CBS. Streaming runs alongside all of it: PGA TOUR Live on ESPN+ for early and featured-group coverage, Paramount+ simulcasting the CBS windows. It’s a stable, repeatable shape: the same three-network handoff, the same streaming pair, all three weeks of the playoffs.

United Kingdom: nothing changed

In the UK, all three events sit exclusively on Sky Sports Golf, the same channel that has carried the PGA TOUR for years. Coverage runs from mid-afternoon into the evening UK time across all three tournaments. One subscription, one channel, three weeks, the simplest case in this piece.

Germany: the same sport, a different platform than it had in July

Germany just went through the biggest shake-up in its golf broadcasting market in years. Through 2025, Sky held the PGA TOUR outright. Starting this year, Deutsche Telekom’s MagentaTV – via two new linear channels launched in January – took over the PGA TOUR’s and DP World Tour’s regular tournament schedule, roughly 130 events across both tours in 2026. Sky kept only the men’s and women’s majors (the Masters, the US Open, the PGA Championship, The Open) plus LIV Golf and the Asian Tour.

The FedEx Cup Playoffs are PGA TOUR tournaments, not majors, which puts them squarely in the package that moved to MagentaTV. A German fan who had Sky sorted for the Open Championship a few weeks ago needs a second, different subscription to follow the Playoffs now. Same sport, same season, different platform than it had in July and this is the first time that split gets tested on one of the TOUR’s biggest three-week stretches of the year.

Why the shape of the problem matters more than any one schedule

A tournament field narrowing week over week is a clean story: 70, then 50, then 30, one round of golf at a time. Broadcast rights don’t narrow on the same clock. They move on their own contract cycles, mid-season in some markets, and a rights holder that covered a sport in July can be out of the picture by August. That’s exactly the gap a broadcast-discovery dataset has to close: sports data (the standings, the cut lines, who advanced) is stable and easy to source; broadcast data (who’s actually showing it, on which platform, this month) isn’t. And for platforms serving fans across the US and Europe, getting that answer wrong for even one market is the difference between a session and a bounce. Get in touch.