The DP World Tour’s season-ending event provided plenty of drama, with Matt Fitzpatrick prevailing over Rory McIlroy in a playoff, McIlroy securing a fourth straight and seventh overall Order of Merit title, and 10 players earning a spot on the PGA Tour in 2026.
That latter aspect remains controversial, three years into the arrangement that sees the top 10 players in the final Race to Dubai standings who are not otherwise exempt on the PGA Tour earn a fully exempt position, meaning starts in just about all regular full-field events.
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Marco Penge, who was the best player on the DP World Tour outside of McIlroy, winning three times and finishing second at the Scottish Open, will now be taking his talents to America, where as the No. 1 player on the list he will be exempt for the Players Championship as well as the first two signature events at Pebble Beach and the Genesis.
That can certainly be viewed as a blow to the DP World Tour, which won’t see the Englishman as much, although he said he will retain membership and still play the European-based tour often. Penge played 26 DP World Tour events this season, a number that is likely to be cut in half, if not more.
“I will miss it here,” said Penge, who finished second to McIlroy in the overall standings after a tie for 22nd at the season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai. “I’ll miss the players, the staff, just the tour in general. This is where I’ve started and a place I’m not going to forget. Hopefully I’ll be playing as much as I can back on the DP World Tour when that season is finished. It won’t be the last time you see me.
“I’m looking forward to playing the big events over on that side of the pond. Obviously looking forward to playing in all majors next year and play against the best players in the world like we are this week. The standard is different when you’re playing against the best guys.”
Losing the “best” players is something that understandably rankles many who support the DP World Tour. It gave off the vibe of selling out or admitting to being a feeder circuit to the PGA Tour. The sentiment is understandable.
The other side of the argument: European and international players have been striving to get to the PGA Tour for decades. For every Colin Montgomerie, who never made the move, there have been numerous European-based players who became PGA Tour members, including major winners such as Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer, Sandy Lyle, Ian Woosnam, Padraig Harrington and Sergio Garcia. Many more sought to play the PGA Tour and hold dual membership.
This exemption category has made the path easier, obviously, and it perhaps might go down better if the PGA Tour in its alliance with the DP World Tour did more to support golf in Europe.
The co-sanctioned events around the British Open are welcome—the Scottish Open the week prior with two opposite events in successive weeks in the United States—but the Tour could do more.
A signature event following the Open would be one nice added benefit. For those who play the Scottish Open, it would mean a three-week run of tournaments in Europe. It seems an easy way to spread the golf talent to Europe for a longer stretch.
An early-season co-sanctioned event would help, too. Why not one of the Middle East tournaments? Yes, that would be a quite a departure from the West Coast cadence that PGA Tour fans and players have been accustomed to over the years.
But new CEO Brian Rolapp seems intent on shaking things up. Perhaps that is part of the plan or at least under consideration.
Of course, extending the strategic alliance with the DP World Tour might also be on Rolapp’s list of things to do. The agreement that was announced in 2020 is through 2027 and sees the Tour provide financial assistance by subsidizing purses, among other things.
For now, that includes the exemption category that will see nine players follow Penge on a regular basis on the PGA Tour. Joining him will be Laurie Canter, who will become the first player who competed full-time for LIV Golf to be a member of the PGA Tour.
Laurie Canter is about to become the answer to a trivia question: the first full-time LIV Golf member to then become a member of the PGA Tour. / Kyle Terada-Imagn Images
The others are Kristoffer Reitan, Adrien Saddier, Alex Noren, John Parry, Haotong Li, Keita Nakajima, Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen (who played the final round on Sunday with McIlroy) and Jordan Smith.
(It should be noted that four of the top six players on the final Race to Dubai standings were already members of the PGA Tour: McIlroy, Fitzpatrick, Tommy Fleetwood and Robert MacIntyre. A fifth, Tyrrell Hatton, had also played the PGA Tour before joining LIV Golf.)
For those new players, there are no guarantees. There were six of nine players who kept their cards following the 2024 season but so far this year just two of nine are within the top 100 for fully exempt status.
The reason there were just nine players is that in both years a player who qualified—Adrian Meronk in 2024 and Tom McKibbin this year—elected to sign with LIV Golf instead.
But Neergaard-Petersen is an example of a player who is taking advantage of the system. A year ago, he played on the Hotel Planner Tour, formerly known as the Challenge Tour (akin to the Korn Ferry Tour) and earned his way onto the DP World Tour this season.
Now he’s performed well enough to get a shot at the PGA Tour.
It was a big week for the DP World Tour. It got word that DP World, a Dubai-based company, has renewed its overall sponsorship through 2023. It also signed an extension with Sky Sports.
“The DP World Tour, with everything that’s gone down in the game of golf, it’s somehow found itself in a very strong position,” McIlroy said after pulling within one of Montgomerie’s record Race to Dubai titles. “Look, the world of professional golf is still a little weird and who knows what the future is going to look like, but to have the commitment of DP World for 10 years; and to see Ryder Cup team doing so well and to see how much it means to every single one of the players that’s on the team.
“And to have amazing events like this; to have from the start of September all the way through to, I would say, to the end of January, the DP World Tour is the sort of shining light of golf during course of that time frame. It’s amazing that all of the players that are coming to play in those events, and hopefully that continues for a long time.”
The DP World Tour season is complete—only to begin next week again. The BMW Australian PGA is the first event of the new season, followed by the ISPS Handa Australian Open—where McIlroy begins pursuit of a record-tying eighth Order of Merit.
No sooner had the DP World Tour announced an extension of its overall sponsorship deal with DP World—the Dubai-based company that backs the tour—that a company executive was calling for a global circuit that brings together the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV Golf.
Sound familiar?
That has vague similarities to what was supposed to come out of the June 2023 “framework agreement,” a deal to make a deal that seems a long way from coming to any sort of conclusion.
While DP World Group deputy CEO Yuvraj Narayan described the sponsorship extension as “belief in the tour’s future,” another executive called for the fracture in the game to end.
“I’m still of the belief that the only solution to the golfing world is for all three major parties to come together,” said DP World Group communications officer Danny van Otterdijk in an interview with reporters in Dubai on Saturday. His comments were reported by The Scotsman newspaper.
“So LIV/Asian Tour, European Tour [DP World Tour] and the PGA Tour. Because, if nothing else, golf fans want that. And don’t forget, it’s the golf fans who pay for all of this, right? If there are no fans, then there is no sponsor, there is no tour, there is no nothing.
“And it’s overwhelmingly true that golf fans want to see a unified golfing platform. Because even now, when you talk to some of the golf fans, you know, Scottie Scheffler is No. 1 in the world. But is he? How do you know? You don’t know. Where’s Jon Rahm? Where’s Brooks Koepka? Where’s Bryson DeChambeau? They could be No. 1, for all we know, if they played in an equal number of events and they didn’t have all the penalties and all the other nonsense that goes with it, then it might be different.
“It feels a little bit like the boxing world. You’re the world champion at WBA. But not WBC. So is he better than you are? And it’s only really when you’re the unified world champion that you can claim that you’re truly the world champion, right? Well, nobody can claim that right now. So, even to the players it must feel a little hollow, right?”
DP World has extended its sponsor agreement but its executives are calling for unity in the pro game. / Andrew Redington/Getty Images
As it stands, those who participate in LIV Golf events are banned from the PGA Tour for a minimum of a year. DP World Tour members are subject to suspensions and fines but are able to compete if they can work around those penalties.
LIV Golf will begin its fourth season in February having announced it will go to 72-hole events for the first time.
And yet, Van Otterdijk believes it needs to be worked out—interesting comments from the executive of a company who is supporting a tour that is still not in line with LIV Golf.
“Whether you like their products or not, to me that doesn’t really matter,” he said of LIV Golf. “They’ve brought something different—they’ve tried to disrupt. And I think [PIF chairman] Yasir Al-Rumayyan should be congratulated for that if nothing else. But I’m sure that even he would want to see the world of golf come together in a way where all these products that have been created can coexist.”
Meanwhile, approximately 40 players are competing in this week’s PIF Suadi International, the final event of the International Series where two LIV spots are to be determined based on the nine-event points list.
The Saudi International was Golf Saudi’s first move into big-time golf, started in 2019 as a European Tour event which went for three years before becoming part of the Asian Tour. The last two years, it has been part of the International Series.
Interestingly, several of LIV’s big-name captains will not be participating: Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson, Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood are not entered.
Among the captains in the field are Joaquin Niemann, Sergio Garcia, Cam Smith, Martin Kaymer, Louis Oosthuizen, Dustin Johnson and Kevin Na.
This week’s RSM Classic in St. Simons Island, Ga., is the final official event of the PGA Tour season and the last of seven as part of the FedEx Fall. Bottom line: if a player is not among the top 100 in points after this week and doesn’t have some other exemption, he will not be fully exempt in 2026.
(For example, Max Homa, who dropped to 101 this week, is fully exempt due to a multi-year exemption; but top 100 would get him into the Players Championship. Homa is not in the field this week.)
Joel Dahmen is among many players at the RSM Classic looking to finish the year inside the top 100 in points. / Allison Lawhon-Imagn Images
So far, nine players who started the fall outside of the top 100 have moved in, displacing seven who are not otherwise fully exempt, including Joel Dahmen.
That is not exactly a doomsday scenario for anyone who finishes 101 to 110 and even for those from 111 to 125. All will have a reasonable number of starts next year, but it’s subject to the whims of other players and how tournament fields will fill out.
This week will also determine the Aon Next 10 and who gets into the first two signature events. Those players who finish 51 to 60 get spots at Pebble Beach and Genesis. Jordan Spieth has managed to hang among the top 60—now 58—despite not playing this fall. Wyndham Clark has dropped to 61st but is not in the RSM field.
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