Ben Coley has four contenders heading into the final round of the DP World Tour Championship, but one big problem: Rory McIlroy.
Golf betting tips: DP World Tour Championship
3pts Tyrrell Hatton to win his two-ball at 5/6 (bet365, 4/5 generally)
1pt double Hatton and Jayden Schaper at 3/1 (BoyleSports)
0.5pt treble Hatton, Schaper and Johannes Veerman at 10/1 (General)
Sky Bet odds | Paddy Power | Betfair Sportsbook
Those who bemoan the current state of the DP World Tour have taken beating after beating this autumn and Sunday at the DP World Tour Championship by rights ought to be the knockout blow.
While Scottie Scheffler has his feet up along with most of his vanquished Ryder Cup colleagues, while LIV is on holiday and the PGA Tour’s lesser lights are scrapping for cards in Bermuda, we’re treated to another fabulous renewal of a tournament which has not even suffered for the absences of Viktor Hovland and Jon Rahm, nor the likes of Joaquin Niemann, Collin Morikawa and Sungjae Im from recent renewals.
Stars do matter in golf, but let’s be realistic: right now, Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are on another planet and in this department, McIlroy still leads the world number one by quite a long way. There is nobody like him, not active at least, and his commitment to playing a worldwide schedule could do more for his ‘home’ tour than any amount of money, any change to the schedule, any new sponsor, could ever dream of.
Third in those superstardom rankings is Bryson DeChambeau, in fact some would say he’s second, but whereas he’s divisive, Tommy Fleetwood has never been more popular and more visible. We have to leave it to chance to see if DeChambeau and Scheffler pop up in contention together in one of the four events they play each year. McIlroy and Fleetwood enter the final round in Dubai as the top two in the market, one week after they finished third and second respectively.
This is on the heels of Fleetwood winning in India and McIlroy before that in Ireland. Between those two performances came a dazzling one by Robert MacIntyre, at least as popular as his world ranking if not more so. Things such as Alex Noren winning twice, Marco Penge completing his coming-of-age hat-trick, even Fleetwood’s defeat to Aaron Rai in Abu Dhabi have been made to look somewhat ordinary in this most golden of autumns.
After this tournament has finished, the top 10 in the Race to Dubai who do not hold a PGA Tour card will be rewarded with one. Some will tell you this is a travesty, yet here we are, a year after the same thing happened, the Tour even stronger now than it was then. Few will even remember who earned those cards in 2023, and who knows who will win them in 2026. Tom McKibbin confirmed with his recent Hong Kong win that he’s a huge talent, but does his decision to join LIV Golf substantively harm this product? No. Few have the power to do that.
Anyone good enough to be a loss to the DP World Tour will likely be back. The rest will give it a try and if they fail they’ve the safety net of returning with full status to this circuit. It is, by a distance, the second-best tour in men’s golf. From September to November, it is the best. And to bring us back to the 18 holes of the 2025 season which remain, the worst-case scenario in terms of spectacle, of drama, is McIlroy, golf’s biggest star, winning by a distance.
He may well do that. My feeling is that McIlroy, tied for the lead with Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen, has been some way below his best so far, a scary proposition if you’re hoping to get him beaten. He’s gaining a mere half a stroke per round off the tee, as little as a third of what we might reasonably have expected, and has missed more greens than he’d like to have. Yet here we are again: on the cusp of his seventh Race to Dubai title, McIlroy is 2/1 to win this title for a fourth time.
Historically, he’s won at almost 40% when tied for the lead through 54 holes, but seldom has the leaderboard been this congested. And, with all four pre-tournament selections among the top 10, there’s no great temptation to add McIlroy in-play now. If he finds top gear he’ll probably win, but this is a ridiculously strong leaderboard and more modest ball-striking could easily see him passed.
The angle I think we should be taking concerns the three-balls where those in pursuit of PGA Tour cards face a monumental test of their mettle, including joint-leader Neergaard-Petersen. Permutations are too many to list but he really can’t afford a level-par final round; anything like that will surely see him fall back out of the top 10, even if he’s currently projected to sail into the top five.
McIlroy is very short at 8/15 though whereas we can take 5/6 on TYRRELL HATTON beating Angel Ayora, which forms the first leg of a 10/1 treble. Ayora is a huge talent but he made a mess of the 18th hole having hit the front and he has no margin for error.
Given that Hatton needs to win to have any chance of passing McIlroy to capture the Race to Dubai we can expect aggression from the outset and there’s even a scenario where he plays badly and wins. Hatton is probably quite difficult to be paired with if things go wrong for him and however highly I rate Ayora, 5/6 Hatton would look good on a Thursday. On a Sunday as big as this it’s very generous.
Next is JAYDEN SCHAPER, a rock-solid, bang in-form youngster who has next to no chance of earning PGA Tour membership and can hopefully relax into the round having been bogey-free on Saturday.
Daniel Hillier has performed very well to get himself in the mix for those cards and loves the desert, but he has made nervy, expensive mistakes late on in Abu Dhabi and India of late and was poor in round three until salvaging things with a closing eagle.
There’s very little between these two but Schaper is a nice type for the situation as he’s very steady and free from the pressures facing his playing partner. He could win this without doing much if Hillier does succumb, which I fear he might.
Finally, JOHANNES VEERMAN is probably the riskiest one of this treble but he does have the right game for the Earth Course and has improved his score each day, putting better than has been the case for most of the year.
For playing partner Daniel Brown this is right up there with the biggest rounds of his life and after a horrible double-bogey at the 18th hole on Saturday, he remains under real pressure in that battle for PGA Tour cards.
Part of the fun of this subplot is that we’ll see some players step up, as Matthieu Pavon and Antoine Rozner have done over the past two years. But I’d be more inclined to believe Jordan Smith or even Neergaard-Petersen do that and the aforementioned trio of Ayora, Hillier and Brown are all drawn alongside players who hit it very well and simply look ideal for this kind of bet.
Posted at 1600 GMT on 15/11/25
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