If you’re anything like me, you struggled to find space on your plate Thursday, between the bird and the mashed and the green bean casserole. Thanksgiving dinner (and the ensuing seconds or thirds) is best when the meal just becomes a mess of everything, touching every corner of the plate.
But perhaps you also struggled to find space at the table. Maybe you were elbowed out of the way by Uncle Pete. Or maybe there was just a bit more room at the Kids Table, so you went there instead. Thanksgiving often serves that reminder — that there are more hungry people than there are placemats. Some people get relegated to the TV trays in the living room. It’s exactly what’s happening in pro golf, too.
The subdued, but no less important, news of the week came from a non-Thanksgiving part of the world — London — where the DP World Tour clarified it will be cutting the number of full status memberships on offer for 2027, following a very similar path recently charted by the PGA Tour. The European version of the Korn Ferry Tour, known as the Hotel Planner Tour, will also have fewer spots offered to graduates for the next step up in pro golf.
These moves mimic the same treatment made, quite controversially, by the PGA Tour, which cut its number of full cards from 125 to 100 this season. You probably have heard about all of that, so why should you care about this DP World Tour news? What does it tell us?
The move reiterates that, just two or three years ago, there were too many open seats at the dinner table. That there were too many spots on offer in the game’s biggest tours, and for tournament operations to be streamlined, and for the stakes to increase, and for the best players to benefit even more, a few placemats needed removing.
For many years, the DP World Tour has offered full status membership to 110 players from the previous year’s Race to Dubai standings, its equivalent to the FedEx Cup. But moving forward, that number will now be just 100. The feeder tour beneath it will decrease its number of graduates from 20 to 15. All of it serves as a cinching of access to ensure anyone who has earned full status absolutely gets into every tournament they want to for the upcoming season.
The biggest pro golf fans will have remembered that, in 2024, players will full PGA Tour status who had graduated from the DP World Tour or the Korn Ferry Tour were largely left on the outside looking in on popular spring events like the WM Phoenix Open. The unintentional message sent to these graduates was Congrats on joining the PGA Tour, now wait your turn for a tee time. DP World Tour CEO Guy Kinnings found his tour running into the same issue.
“We’ve had little working groups working on it all year,” Kinnings told Martin Dempster of The Scotsman, “and, if you can give those players who have earned their playing privilege through whatever different route it may be, that greater level of scheduling certainty and more balanced opportunities, that’s what we are aspiring to.”
When the PGA Tour dropped from 125 to 100, and the DP World Tour from 110 to 100, pro golfers on the margins were bound to dislike it, and Tour executives know it. Kinnings himself said the move, noted the “nothing we do will please everyone.” But there is a hidden purpose to these moves that those executives won’t often discuss: it further striates the ranks of the game in simple a way that raises the stakes. When there is an obvious hierarchy among the tours worldwide, with sharper edges than ever before, the golf played by individuals on those margins increases in entertainment value.
Players on the PGA Tour saw that just last week when those top 100 card-carrying members were finalized at the RSM Classic. Those on the outside looking in won’t find it difficult to earn their way into events, but they have surrendered full autonomy of setting their schedule. They’ll need to assess how many players ranked higher than them want to play, say, the Valspar Championship, before they know they can add it to their schedule. The same now goes for the DP World Tour and its popular events, like the Irish Open.
The main problem to some isn’t so much a problem to everyone. With less guaranteed to the players on the margins, some will entertain other options. Victor Perez, who played his way off the PGA Tour in 2025, recently committed to LIV Golf for his 2026 season. That’s no issue for the DP World Tour, particularly as Perez will retain his membership there, but Perez noted how he felt the goalposts were shifting on the PGA Tour. And to some extent, he’s absolutely correct. Pro golf at large has certainly shrunk the size of its dinner tables, all while the amount food on each continues to increase. All of which means is you better play well enough to guarantee yourself a seat.
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