Welcome to Issue #38
"I don't think he could find the fairway today if he was standing in the middle of it with a map and a flashlight”
David Feherty
What’s on my mind this week
Jake Knapp with as close to an ace (without being an ace) as possible at the 3M, Ryan Fox challenging Aaron Rai for the nice-guy major winner of the year award, DP World Tour’s phone is hopping this week, ‘de-greened’ is definitely a thing, the rules of golf have never been a hotter topic this week, maybe all my game is missing is a Miguel style warm-up, my stowaway strategy is underway for the €17k Ryder Cup cruise liner.
In the news
Why it matters: The Asian Tour, PGA Tour and DP World Tour announced a multi-year strategic partnership on the 21st of July, formally integrating the Asian Tour into the mainstream professional golf ecosystem after five years of alignment with LIV Golf, which had funded the Asian Tour's International Series and used its top-two-player pathway as a development pipeline into LIV.
Our Take: The governance implications for LIV are significant. The International Series, launched in 2022 with $300 million of PIF funding, was structured as a Chapter One qualifying tier for LIV Golf, with the top two players each season earning promotion to the main league. That pathway is no longer under LIV's control. Under the new arrangement, the Asian Tour retains its schedule but reorients its development route through the DP World Tour and PGA Tour cross-eligibility framework, which materially reduces the Asian Tour's dependency on Saudi capital. The strategic calculation for the three tours is straightforward. Rolapp and Kinnings gain a formal Asia-Pacific development pipeline into their unified system at the exact moment LIV is under fundraising pressure. For LIV, the loss is not just the pathway itself but the credibility of running a self-contained golf ecosystem. A disruptor tour with no feeder league and no viable promotion mechanism reverts to being an exhibition product with 54 salaried players. The next question is what the Asian Tour's existing International Series contracts look like from 2027 onwards, and whether LIV retains any operational tie to the schedule.