The DP World Tour will finish its season on the championship in Dubai, which begins on Thursday, because it has executed for greater than a decade. However just like the previous a number of seasons, the winner of the Race to Dubai championship will likely be somebody who has performed sparingly on the tour itself. Actually, this can be its most anti-climactic finale but.
This stands in stark distinction to the PGA Tour, the place its FedEx Cup collection funnels golfers into enjoying as many occasions on that tour as potential to build up factors.
It wasn’t all the time this manner. The Race to Dubai is an honor that dates well-before the FedEx Cup. It started in 1937 because the Order of Advantage. Charles Whitcombe gained the inaugural one. Subsequent winners are a who’s who of European golfers, together with a number of winners just like the Ryder Cup stalwarts Colin Montgomerie with eight and Seve Ballesteros with six.
However this 12 months is one other through which the closing occasion seems like a showcase for stars who’ve been largely absent from the tour. Rory McIlroy, a four-time winner of the Race to Dubai, and Jon Rahm, who gained it in 2019, are in first and second place, however after final weekend’s Nedbank Golf Problem in South Africa, nobody can catch McIlroy.
And that makes the disconnect with the season-ending race even starker. The 2 gamers are ranked second and third on the planet golf rankings. They usually’re stalwarts of the European Ryder Cup group. However McIlroy of Northern Eire and Rahm of Spain have hardly performed this season on the DP World Tour. And whereas McIlroy is about to play within the occasion, he might skip it and nonetheless be topped the winner for the fifth time.
Of the 43 occasions on the tour, McIlroy has performed 9 and is in first place within the Race To Dubai; Rahm has performed seven to take a seat in second and the drama has turned as to whether they are going to repeat as champion of the match itself. In third place is Adrian Meronk of Poland, who has performed 23 tournaments on the DP World Tour.
Meronk is a lock to win one other prize: full membership on the PGA Tour. This goes to the highest 10 finishers within the Race to Dubai who are usually not already on the PGA Tour, which has increased purses and earns extra factors for the world golf rankings; it additionally means Meronk will most likely, like McIlroy and Rahm, play extra on the PGA Tour than on the DP World Tour subsequent season.
Welcome to the brand new irregular of golf, through which European Tour champions barely play on the tour. How did we get right here? It’s difficult.
Within the scrambled world {of professional} golf, with the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour working collectively to stave off the risk from LIV Golf, the brand new Saudi Arabia-backed league, new incentives abound. They usually’re upending the prevailing order.
Whereas there’s a tentative settlement with LIV to pause litigation between it and the excursions, one among their massive issues is gamers being lured away with extra profitable LIV contracts. However on the coronary heart of the present settlement between the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour is a system for the highest-ranked gamers in Europe to play in the US on the PGA Tour.
The leaderboard for the Race to Dubai is the results of two components: how sure occasions, just like the 4 majors, are sanctioned by the 2 excursions and thus earn extra factors; and the upper variety of factors awarded to different elevated occasions. As a result of dominant gamers like McIlroy and Rahm compete in occasions with stronger fields, they find yourself incomes extra factors by enjoying effectively in fewer occasions.
In McIlroy’s case, solely 4 of his 9 occasions that obtained credited towards the Race to Dubai have been DP World Tour occasions; the others have been on or sanctioned by the PGA Tour. With Rahm, it was fewer: solely two of his seven tournaments.
It’s not the primary time this has occurred. Final 12 months, McIlroy gained the Race to Dubai (and Rahm gained the DP World Tour Championship) with an identical quantity of play on the DP World Tour.
In 2021, Collin Morikawa, a full member of the PGA Tour, grew to become the primary American to win the Race to Dubai. He additionally gained the British Open, however solely performed in two different occasions exterior the US: the Scottish Open (which can be sanctioned by the PGA Tour) and the Omega Dubai Desert Traditional. In neither occasion did he end inside the highest 50.
In contrast, this 12 months Meronk performed the 4 majors and the opposite 19 occasions on the DP World. Whereas he’s third within the Race to Dubai, he’s ranked solely forty sixth on the planet as a result of he earned fewer factors from the European occasions.
Victor Hovland of Norway is ranked 14th within the Race to Dubai, however is the fourth-best participant on the planet rankings. Once more, it’s the worth of the factors. He’s credited with seven DP World Tour occasions, however all however one, the BMW PGA Championship, are additionally sanctioned by the PGA Tour.
At its core, the listing of contenders for the Race to Dubai is a mixture of gamers who did effectively in DP World Tour occasions and can transfer as much as the PGA Tour, and gamers who’ve performed effectively on the majors and different co-sanctioned occasions. The result’s a season-ending match and season-long prize that may very well be extra complicated than climactic.
Actually, the actual drama could lie with the ultimate participant on the P.G.A. promotion listing, Rasmus Hojgaard of Denmark, who jumped 5 spots into sixteenth place.
That spot had been held till the final match by Joost Luiten of the Netherlands, who dropped 5 spots after final week and is now in twenty second place. Each Hojgaard and Luiten have performed over 20 occasions every on the DP World Tour to get a possibility to play extra on the PGA Tour and thus much less on the DP tour subsequent season.
On the flip aspect, present PGA Tour gamers who end exterior the highest 125 on the cash listing get full membership on the DP World Tour, for numbers 126 to 200.
When this was introduced final month, David Howell, chairman of the DP World Tour’s Event Committee, categorized the demotion to that tour as a optimistic for gamers. “Once we introduced our strategic alliance with the PGA Tour in November 2021, one of many prime goals was to present as many alternatives as potential to members of each excursions,” he mentioned. “That is one other good instance of how that is working.”
An agent who represents gamers on the DP World Tour and LIV Golf mentioned that elevating one group to the PGA Tour and demoting one other group onto the DP World Tour was additional dividing skilled golf ranks. It has made it harder, the agent mentioned, for a lot of gamers to achieve the world golf rating factors to get them into the majors and different marquee tournaments.
“All these PGA Tour occasions sit manner above the European Tour in world golf rating factors,” mentioned the agent, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to keep away from the ramifications of talking publicly in regards to the Tour. “They’d an argument that the depth on the PGA Tour was higher than wherever else, so how might you be prime 100 on PGA Tour and three hundredth on the planet. I get it. However that pushed the European Tour right into a nook. It made it into this feeder tour.”
Subsequent 12 months the format will change and be extra just like the FedEx Cup, the place gamers qualify for an occasion after which the sphere shrinks with every match. So will probably be 70 gamers on the Abu Dhabi Championship and 50 gamers on the last DP World Tour Championship in 2024.
What it comes right down to is getting the game’s stars to play in these last European Tour occasions, no matter how a lot they’ve performed on the tour through the season.
“The season-long narrative is for the die-hard golf geeks,” the agent mentioned. “The typical sports activities fanatic simply needs to see superstars. The business product lives and dies by it.”
