The LPGA Tour ended partnerships with Kroger and Procter & Gamble for its Cincinnati-area event and declined to commit to hosting a 2026 tournament in the market. The tour's statement used language familiar to operators who've watched events quietly disappear from calendars: "evaluating options" and "exploring opportunities." Translation: the phones are ringing, but no one is picking up yet.
The Cincinnati stop, most recently called the Kroger Queen City Championship, carried a $3.5 million purse in 2025 and played at Kenwood Country Club in suburban Cincinnati. Kroger held title sponsorship since 2022. P&G, headquartered 15 miles away in downtown Cincinnati, served as presenting sponsor. Both companies ended their arrangements after the 2025 event. Neither issued a statement explaining the exit, standard practice when a brand wants to avoid the "why did you leave women's golf" conversation.
The timing matters for two reasons. First, the LPGA is mid-negotiating its next media rights cycle, and sponsor defections in mid-tier markets create leverage problems when networks calculate inventory value. A tour with 34 official events in 2025 can absorb one loss, but the pattern is what allocators watch. Second, Cincinnati sits in a gap year for the tour's regional strategy. The tour added a Dallas event for 2026 (Bank of Hope Match Play), locked Aramco money into a $4 million Las Vegas stop, and now carries an open question about Midwest presence outside of Michigan and Illinois.
The LPGA's non-committal language suggests the tour is pricing what it would take to replace $3.5M in purse funding without title-sponsor economics. That math doesn't work in most markets. A presenting sponsor might cover $1.5M-$2M. Local business coalitions can sometimes cobble together another $500K. But replacing dual Fortune 500 backing usually means the tour itself underwrites the gap or the event moves to a market with a single anchor willing to write the full check. Worth noting: Kroger's headquarters sits 12 miles from Kenwood Country Club. When the grocer in your backyard walks, the tour's pitch to a replacement gets harder.
What to watch: The LPGA typically announces its full schedule in late October or early November. If Cincinnati is missing from that release, the tour will either announce a replacement Midwest date or acknowledge it's operating at 33 events in 2026. Separately, watch whether P&G or Kroger shift budget into LPGA player endorsements or the tour's Drive On campaign, a quiet way to stay in the women's golf conversation without writing an eight-figure tournament check. Finally, Kenwood Country Club's calendar: if the club books a PGA Tour Champions event or a regional amateur championship for late summer 2026, that's the signal the LPGA isn't coming back.
The tour drew 75,000 fans to Cincinnati across four days in 2025, solid but not irreplaceable attendance. The question now is whether the LPGA treats this as a one-time sponsor mismatch or the start of a broader renegotiation about which markets earn tour stops without anchor Fortune 500 backing.