In the moment his week went without a headline. Charles Howell III finished his 54-hole trek around the Old Course, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns one shot on the wrong side of the cut line at the Alfred Dunhill Links earlier this month. No offense to Howell, who has put together a good career, but at 47 his results stopped being notable long ago. Except that performance is newsworthy now, because it appears those rounds were an audition. And that he’s being considered at all has irritated DP World Tour regulars, hinting at a larger mess. LIV Golf has imploded, and the European circuit must sift through the debris without cutting itself.
Interestingly, it is rubble the DP World Tour helped cause. While LIV has had too many self-inflicted wounds to list, what hindsight might consider the nascent league's knockout blow came from the DP World Tour CEO Guy Kinnings when he announced his league would no longer grant conditional releases to LIV players next year. “Players need to make a choice,” Kinnings told the BBC. “We have rules and regulations which are there to protect our tour and which our members must all abide by. Players who are not willing to comply with our rules and regulations should not be seeking to join our tour.” LIV golfers could no longer double-dip, and European players like Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton would lose Ryder Cup eligibility if they did not side with the DP World Tour. In turn, the bulk of LIV’s already-thin roster of formidable players have since signaled their intention to leave.
The old-world circuit’s move was partially defensive. Despite LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil saying his league wanted to “complete, not compete” the professional golf landscape, LIV had scrambled to poach DP World Tour events and sponsors for its next iteration, and that was after raiding the DP World Tour’s roster since 2022. Enough was enough. There was an upside to this calculus, too. The PGA Tour has no appetite to lift its LIV suspensions, which leaves those players desperately searching for a landing spot. A half-dozen of them would bolster DPWT fields depleted in the last few seasons by the LIV exodus along with the tour’s best players graduating to the PGA Tour.
Frankly, the DP World Tour needs the help. The tour’s 2025 numbers show a pre-tax profit of a little more than $4 million. Beneath it runs an operating loss of $85 million, sheltered by the PGA Tour helping with roughly $77 million in cash. Worse, the DP World Tour’s media-rights deal plummeted. The PGA Tour owns 30 percent of European Tour Productions, with a clause at the end of 2027 that lets the PGA Tour hand those shares back or allow the DP World Tour to buy them.
Meaning, the DP World Tour is struggling to pay its bills, and the entity helping them cover its costs could be out of the arrangement in 14 months.
Stars sell broadcast rights and sponsorships, and the DP World Tour has few of them to spare. Rahm, Hatton and Bryson DeChambeau in a field during the lean summer months are worth real money to a tour that can no longer assume someone else will cover the shortfall. The strategic alliance between the PGA Tour and DP World Tour is strong, and Kinnings (below) and new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp have a good rapport. But does a post-LIV world challenge that relationship?
Richard Heathcote
LIV’s Lee Westwood, who since settling his fines with the DP World Tour has appointed himself its civics teacher, wrote on social media that anyone who believes the PGA Tour is a DP World Tour partner instead of a rival is “either blind or fools.” Westy has been a bad-faith actor on many of golf’s issues during the schism he helped instigate. On this front, though, he has a point. Partners don’t usually come with exit clauses. If the PGA Tour can walk away from its stake next year, the DP World Tour has every reason to build a product that can stand without it, and the quickest way to do that runs through the players the PGA Tour still won’t let back in.
However, the bill for all this lands on those who stayed. Since a number of LIV players don’t have DP World Tour status, they will need sponsor’s invitations, and word among members and agents is the tour may offer 10-plus exemptions to certain LIV players. Understandably, this has not gone over well with those already on the DP World Tour, who risk getting squeezed out should LIV players get those invites. Joost Luiten said that LIV players “didn’t give a s***” about the DP World Tour when they left, and that they should have to go to Q-School. Ewen Ferguson found it comical that those who spent golf’s civil war torching the establishment act like they are coming home. Richard Mansell agreed, although he said that some should be allowed back and others should not. Basically, the rank-and-file want to know why is their tour turning from the men who stayed loyal to welcome back those who didn’t mind burning it down?
"As someone who has gone through the wringer this game provides (mostly due to my own shortcomings of course) in recent years, and who has gone back to Q School and had two immensely divergent experiences, betrayal feels like the right word," wrote DP World Tour player Eddie Pepperell in a thoughtful piece over the weekend. "And unfortunately when one feels that way inevitably what follows is a loss of respect, and what tends to fill the void left behind is resentment and contempt."
Amid this debate lies an undercurrent of value—or lack thereof. Guys like Rahm and Hatton, Cam Smith, Joaquin Niemann and DeChambeau, sure, their appearances give tournaments competitive merit while bringing extra attention. It’s others—the past-their-primes, the rank-and-file, the never-wases—that are problematic. Howell is an easy target. In exiting LIV, Howell reportedly is choosing to play in Europe. The Dunhill was his first regular DPWT start (not counting majors or the defunct WGCs) in more than 25 years. He has just three PGA Tour wins over his career and is close to being PGA Tour Champions eligible. How, exactly, would Howell getting an exemption help the DP World Tour?
Yes, Luiten and Mansell and Ferguson and Pepperell (below) speak from self-preservation as the middle class. That doesn’t make them wrong. That class lives on starts, and starts are finite. LIV spent the past five years teaching the sport that it could be bought, and that lesson isn’t ending with its demise.
Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images
Kinnings is acting on the same instinct. He framed his LIV ultimatum as principle, though survival sits closer to its heart. The DP World Tour has spent too long living off decisions made by others, and if it wants a future of its own making, helping finish off LIV—and strengthening its brand in the process—is a sensible place to start. The trouble is that it runs against everything the tour told the players who stayed. In 2022, when more than a dozen of its members who had defected to LIV threatened legal action, then-leader Keith Pelley answered that those players knew there would be consequences if “they chose money over competition.” It was a catchy line that folded meritocracy and moral architecture into a few words and provided a foundation of loyalty to those that turned down the Saudi offer.
Four years later, those who chose money are seeking competitive security, and the tour, while softening its stance, is getting a little of its own in the trade.
The decision should be simple. If the PGA Tour is holding its line on suspensions, the DP World Tour should send LIV members to Q School and make them earn their way back—event those with multiple DP World Tour titles. Except nothing about golf’s civil war has been simple. The tour that asked its members to stay is holding the door open for the men who left, and even for some who were never there to begin with.
Howell’s audition in Scotland ended a shot short, and the tour’s middle class knows exactly what one shot is worth: the gap between a paycheck and an early flight home. For Howell and other LIV members, it may not matter at all.