EXECUTIVE chair Mark Lichtenhein said yesterday that the Ladies European Tour (LET) was on the right track despite a lack of events leaving players struggling to make ends meet.

And in addition to six tournaments due to be added to the schedule later this year, two events bringing men’s and women’s golf together are “in the pipeline” for 2019.

Earlier this month, England’s Mel Reid said that it was “pretty much impossible” to make a living on the tour and that some players were having to take part-time jobs to boost their income.

The LET has no tournaments scheduled in June and just one in July, while no player outside the top 50 earned more than £25,000 last season.

“In a world where 99 per cent of all sponsorship money is going into men’s sport it’s hardly surprising that not all women are able to make a career out of professional sport, that’s not just in golf,” Lichtenhein said.

“Clearly all the girls want to earn more money and they are a bit frustrated when they can’t. We know that this part of the schedule is our most challenging at the moment.

“We had a good start to the season in the southern hemisphere and from July onward we are reasonably strong, it’s just the confidence of the northern European countries that we seem to have lost after the financial crisis and we don’t seem to be able to get that back at a time when ironically 50 per cent of our new players are coming from the five Nordic countries.

“We’ve been through some challenging times and hopefully are coming out of that now, but you can’t pluck new tournaments off the trees unfortunately. It takes time to establish budgets etc; but we’re on a good track to introduce some new events on to next year’s schedule at least.”