It’s been a tumultuous few years for the DP World Tour. The Coronavirus pandemic caused widespread problems and put a significant strain on finances and sponsorship. It wasn’t able to weather the storm anywhere near as well as its American ally, the PGA Tour.
Then, as things were settling back down, the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Tour arrived on the scene and threw the world of professional men’s golf into disarray. While the PGA Tour has undoubtedly been rocked and knocked, the DP World Tour finds itself in a far more precious position.
It’s almost become the forgotten tour. The much-maligned ‘strategic alliance’ with the PGA Tour has failed to bear any obvious fruit and the circuit’s best players in 2023 are all regularly competing in America this year.
Meanwhile, the tour’s legends, the likes of Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood and Graeme McDowell, remain exiled. What’s left is a collection of lesser lights and tournaments that fail to set the pulse racing.
Keith Pelley did a decent job in his time at the helm – often dealing well with unfortunate circumstances that were out of his control – but he’s now moved on to pastures new and left Guy Kinnings to pick up the pieces.
One thing the DP World Tour’s new chief executive will be looking at with increasing concern is the strength of fields on this proud and historic professional golfing circuit.
Incredibly, outside of the Majors, it’s been 136 days since a world top-20 player has competed in a DP World Tour event. That last happened at the Dubai Desert Classic in January, some four-and-a-half months ago.
What’s also very concerning is the fact only two top-50 players have made starts on the DP World Tour since Dubai – Shane Lowry and Matthieu Pavon at the Porsche Singapore Open and Pavon at the ISPS Handa Championship in Japan.
Of the 13 non-Major DP World Tour events to have taken place since the Dubai Desert Classic, only two of them have featured world-top 50 players. Even top-100 golfers are few and far between.
But why is the situation so dire? Well, the aforementioned legends of the circuit are plying their trade on the LIV Golf tour, as are the likes of Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton and Adrain Meronk – although it’s unlikely they would have played many, or any, tournaments on the DP World Tour in the stretch from February to May anyway.
The top-10 finishers from the 2023 DP World Tour rankings who weren’t already exempt earned PGA Tour cards for 2024, meaning we’ve not seen Ryan Fox, Bob MacIntyre, Victor Perez, Sami Valimaki and Thorbjorn Olesen since the Middle East.
What’s more, Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose, Matt Fitzpatrick, Shane Lowry, Rory McIlroy, Viktor Hovland, Nicolai Hojgaard and Ludvig Aberg have one DP World Tour start between them since January.
In truth, it would be a surprise to see any of them in Europe before the Scottish Open in mid-July. The stars have deserted their home tour and only use it when it suits them. The problem is the DP World Tour has no leverage.
If it wasn’t a requirement for European Ryder Cup players to be members of the DP World Tour – and therefore comply with the membership criteria – you wonder how many would abandon the circuit altogether.
The tour is trapped in an unfavourable cycle. Some of its stalwarts have left and many are playing elsewhere, meaning the field rating for DPWT events is not as high as it used to be. That means fewer world ranking points are on offer, which in turn reduces the attractiveness of competing on the former European Tour.
To give some recent examples, the field rating for 2023’s season-ending DP World Tour Championship was 153. The PGA Tour event that week was the RMS Classic – a PGA Tour Fall tournament and not traditionally one of the most prestigious. Its field rating was 217. The Dunhill Links Championship, meanwhile, had a worse rating than the Sanderson Farms Championship.
This season, PGA Tour opposite field events – such as the Myrtle Beach Classic and the Corales Puntacana Championship – have comfortably outranked DP World Tour regulars. In ranking week eight, the Asian Tour’s International Series tournament in Oman had a higher rating than the Magical Kenya Open.
Finally, the Dubai Desert Classic – arguably a top-five event on the circuit – had a field rating of 172 compared with 323 at The American Express, a non-signature tournament on the PGA Tour. The gulf is there for all to see.
It didn’t use to be like this. The change to the world ranking process in August 2022 and the introduction of the Strokes Gained World Rating seem to have had a detrimental impact on the DP World Tour.
In 2019, before the pandemic and the arrival of LIV Golf, events like the DP World Tour Championship, Nedbank Golf Challenge, Italian Open, Alfred Dunhill Links and BMW PGA Championship were comfortably outranking their American counterparts.
I’m not sure where the DP World Tour goes from here. The strategic alliance doesn’t seem to be yielding any tangible benefits – and has resulted in an exodus of talent to the PGA Tour – fields are getting weaker and TV audiences are declining.
In addition, very few Americans come over to play non-co-sanctioned tournaments and the top Europeans sign up for the bare minimum number of events. The DPWT can't compete financially with the PGA Tour or LIV Golf, either.
If more top players make the move to LIV and the circuit continues to be denied world ranking points, it’s easy to envisage a scenario where the Asian Tour leapfrogs the DPWT.
To get back remotely close to where it was, top Europeans need to sacrifice their earning potential in America and return. But who’s going to turn down a $20m purse – and the world ranking point that go with it – to compete in a middling DP World Tour event? This is the problem you face when money becomes more important than history, tradition and legacy.
The only move the DP World Tour could make – having effectively given up half the year to the PGA Tour – is to raise the minimum number of events members are required to play in. That would really reveal how much the Ryder Cup means to European players. But you’d expect significant pushback if anything like that were to be mooted.
The DP World Tour is stuck in the mud. In hindsight, perhaps partnering with the Saudis would have been the better move.
