The Premier Jumping League launches with a record $300m guaranteed prize pot

The Premier Jumping League (PJL) has launched with a guaranteed prize pot of $300 million across its first three seasons — the largest purse in the history of showjumping. Backed by McCourt Global and its executive chairman Frank McCourt, the league is designed to move the sport from a fragmented calendar of individual classes toward a structured, professional, team-based circuit.

Sixteen teams will compete across fourteen international venues spanning Europe, North America and the Middle East. Riders will be drawn from a pool of 250 of the world's leading athletes through an industry-first selection process, and each event will run outdoors across three days. The inaugural season runs from March to October 2027, with $100 million on the line in year one.

The commercial architecture is as notable as the purse. A free-to-view broadcast model, a production partnership with Emmy award-winning Box to Box Films, and a stated commitment to radical transparency are aimed squarely at bringing new audiences to a discipline that has historically been closed and hard to follow. Welfare standards and merit-based qualification sit at the centre of the format.

For riders, the significance is straightforward: guaranteed, contracted prize money makes a full-time professional career viable without dependence on owner patronage alone. That changes the economics of the yard, and with it the economics of the horse.