We've not officially announced yet - but no trade secret that in Europe Adrien Saddier, Scott Gregory, David Dixon and Tom Gandy have signed up for 2020. That might not be the end of it.
In US - adding Rheine Gibson, Bo Hoag, Stephen Fisk.....and again possibility of more to come in coming days.
All of those players will have Mizuno driver in the bag for 2020 - in addition to Donald, Mitchell, Glover and Kirk who already have them in play.
A little bit of a shake up and refresh that was probably needed. We're going to commit to a model of taking players on earlier in their careers with the aim of developing with them. That doesn't mean they'll all be 19 - could be some late developers out there. But we'll be looking at players with their best years in front of them.
Bidding for players higher up the food chain doesn't make a lot of sense anymore - especially if they haven't been habitual Mizuno users. We'll never be the top bidder and established players habits / preferences are harder to change . If you look outside of Mizuno, world #1s have been signed to new club deals and its meant almost nothing at all to the golfing public. If the players maintains their form - its the player. If the player gets worse, its because of the clubs.
So we'll work if the other way round. If the world #1 chooses to play our clubs without a contract - great. If we have a top 10 player signed up, it will be because Mizuno helped to take them there.
The big upside is that the players we take on genuinely want and appreciate the support. In return they'll work with us on product development and not just play the irons (which they probably would have played anyway). Can see the results of that paying off already - we had 5 Mizuno drivers tee off yesterday on the PGA Tour at The Sony Open. Two years ago we had none.
We've been heading in this direction for a while.....but had a few distractions along the way. We're locked in now.