The perilous future of LIV has dominated discussion since it emerged last month that Saudi Arabia’s trillion dollar Public Investment Fund would be pulling its funding from the breakaway league. Yet during this fraught period, ongoing talks among those at Wentworth and the PGA Tour appear just as important as the men’s professional game reaches another critical juncture.
The DP World, formerly European, Tour, and the PGA Tour are currently renegotiating their strategic alliance, which runs until 2035 but has a break clause for 2027. They first signed up to be partners in November 2020 and extended their deal not longer after LIV’s launch in 2022. Under the agreement, the PGA Tour annually underpins DP World Tour’s prize funds. The fee was listed as £21.5 million as an “annual investment payment” in the European Tour Group’s accounts back in 2024. The US-based circuit also invested an initial $85 million to obtain 15 percent of its media arm, European Tour Productions, a stake that will increase to 40 percent by the end of 2027.
But since the deal was first struck with then DP World Tour CEO Keith Pelley, the PGA Tour has changed direction entirely. The organization is now under the scrutiny of private equity after the $1.5 billion investment of the Strategic Sports Group in 2024. A total of 56 PGA Tour staff, four percent of the workforce, have lost their jobs with the purse strings tightening across the business.
New CEO Brian Rolapp, meanwhile, is working on a streamlined schedule for 2027. It has not been entirely clear where a European collaboration fits into this new for-profit approach, particularly with LIV now seen as a diminishing threat. Kinnings, however, is hugely encouraged by his talks with the new PGA Tour leadership, which are understood to have been positive.
“Brian made it very clear in his speech at The Players,” Kinnings says. “He said we want to work together in the future.” Kinnings and Eric Nicoli, the DP World Tour’s chairman, were both present at TPC Sawgrass in March for Rolapp’s polished address, where he declared he wants to ‘create an even more mutually beneficial relationship’ than the current alliance with Europe.
“We’re in discussions already about what the future could look like,” Kinnings explains. “There’s a recognition, and I have confidence in Brian and the team who work there, to make the very best for the PGA Tour and the FedEx Cup.
“Recognizing they will make the most of it during that February to August period gives us a huge opportunity to focus on international golf between September and August and do it properly, do it the way we’re doing it now, working with them, with those international players, hopefully with some of the American players as well.
“That ability to have strength in the US at the right time of year, strength internationally at the right time of the year for us. I think the stars are aligning at the moment for that to work out in the right way.”
As part of the current strategic alliance, 10 DP World Tour players progress to the PGA Tour each season via the Race to Dubai Rankings. Some argue that is an unnecessary talent drain, but Kinnings paints a very different picture.
“We want to give opportunity to players,” he stresses. “Genuine opportunity. Meritocracy.
“We allow pathways from around the world. The job of a pro is tough. Giving them the opportunity to go and play on the biggest stage – the PGA Tour and the FedEx Cup – is fine, but with the players coming back, our dual members are unbelievable. The minimum is four and Rory McIlroy played double that last year. He’s going to play more this year.
“Our statistics show that in the past, about five or six guys a year would find a way of going to get to the PGA Tour anyway. Instead of doing it that way, through different routes, they now know the way to play. Play through this system. If you’re good enough, go through on that level. And the guys are showing they are good enough. At the moment, I think it works well. We should be the funnel for global talent.”
There has been concern among some European players about how an emboldened PGA Tour would choose to move on from LIV Golf’s existential threat. Ian Poulter argued after this interview that the DP World Tour could suffer if the league was to fold as the Americans would no longer need to prop up his former domain’s purses without the threat of another global circuit.
“I fear that they can’t afford for us to go away,” Poulter told the Telegraph on Wednesday. “Because if we go away, it does not look very good for them.”
Bernd Wiesberger shared similar concerns to his former Ryder Cup teammate in an interview with TG. “It worries me a little bit,” said the Austrian, who spent two seasons on LIV but is now a full-time DP World Tour player again. “If LIV should go away, that it could be very quickly that maybe our subsidies from the PGA Tour, the support from the PGA Tour could go away.”
Kinnings was bullish, however, when asked how LIV’s status being plunged into uncertainty could impact relations Stateside.
“The way we work with the PGA Tour won’t change,” he insists. “You’ve got to remember, we started talking to the PGA Tour about working together way before LIV ever existed. It was because the two biggest tours in the world should be working together rather than against each other. Co-ordinating schedules, working around players, working as many ways as you can to make sure you benefit the members of both tours. We’ve always believed in that. I don’t think that’s changed.
“They’ve got some very good new management in there who know what they want to do to benefit their tour. That is absolutely compatible with what we want to do to elevate our tour and international golf. Our interests are aligned, and we’ve got to work out the best relationship we can have going forward post-2027. That’s what we’re doing right now.”
The consensus has long been that the elite game is unsustainable in its current form, with inordinate prize funds driven entirely by the LIV disruption. “Players on all tours have won big over the past four years,” Paul McGinley said recently, adding that “tours are now left with huge overheads” driven by LIV and then used as leverage against them.
“With LIV unlikely to re-emerge at current levels, a reset in the landscape is likely,” the former Ryder Cup captain concluded.
Kinnings is adamant the DP World Tour has laid the foundations to prosper in this brave new world. Despite competition from LIV in various territories, total sponsorship income for his circuit increased by 80 percent from 2019 to 2025, with more than $1 billion worth of sponsors currently under contract. A 10-year extension was signed last year with DP World.
“New sponsors are coming in all the time,” Kinnings says. “People have a choice. They wouldn’t be doing that unless they saw value and return on investment.”
While Kinnings says there have been successes his tour can’t control – “Rory doing what Rory does, the boys in Bethpage” – he points to momentum with TV audiences. Viewership for the season-ending Back Nine and Playoff events was up 35 percent on the Golf Channel and 16 percent on Sky in 2025.
“It’s been a period of disruption,” Kinnings says. “We’ve lived through Covid. When you are golf’s global tour and you go to double the number of countries, you have double the number of nationalities of any other tour, and that’s a great thing. But when you’re having to get through Covid, and you have different medical rules every week, that’s tough. We got through that. We got through a period of competition. We’ve come out stronger on the other side.”
Kinnings was speaking with TG at the Turkish Airlines Open, the seventh national open of the season. They are the tour’s cornerstone, but TG understands that LIV have also shifted their interests in recent times from snapping up elite players with lavish signing fees to attempting to acquire these historic events.
“You hear all the noise and all you can do is control what you can control,” Kinnings explains. “For a long time, we’ve focused on building up our tour as credible, sustainable, strong, and built around national opens. That’s not something you just come in and get like that. It’s decades of building a relationship with the federations. We’ve been elevating those and we’ll elevate them still further. The fact that we have support from Augusta and The R&A to give qualifying spots to those events, helps enormously. It’s very much the future.
“We play everywhere and we have done for 50 years. It’s real golf with titles that matter. Having that has put us in that really strong position. International golf is the future opportunity and we have a brilliant partnership with PGA Tour.”
The DP World Tour has now entered a European Swing which coincides with the thick of major season, but Kinnings and co will also be keeping an eager eye on goings on elsewhere.
As LIV’s CEO Scott O’Neil scrambles for alternate investment as part of a survival operation, TG has learned that several of the league’s players have begun sounding out the DP World Tour as part of contingency plans for 2027. The possibility of some of LIV’s biggest names finding a landing ground in Europe would undoubtedly be a boon to Wentworth HQ.
“We will wait and see how things evolve, but we’re obviously listening and we’re listening to players and agents and others who have questions about what the future may hold and we’ll handle it as we go forward,” he says. “But for sure, there’s opportunity for us to continue to grow the strength of the tour, which is my only job really.”