Is the DP World Tour a third-tier league? Pablo Larrazabal has an opinion about it. The European Tour expanded its strategic alliance with the PGA Tour in 2022 in response to LIV Golf, upgrading it to a 13-year joint venture. The agreement gave the DP World Tour substantial financial backing, helping secure its long-term stability and support growth in prize money. But that was not the only significant change.
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The DP World Tour also created a pathway for its top 10 eligible players to earn PGA Tour cards. However, this resulted in the perception that the European Tour had taken a back seat to its American counterpart. According to Larrazabal, LIV Golf’s emergence did little to improve the European circuit’s standing. In fact, he believes the DP World Tour has slipped further down the pecking order.
“Now it is definitely the third tour after LIV and the PGA Tour,” Larrazabal told Bunkered.
That argument may have held until the early months of 2026. However, LIV Golf’s fortunes have since taken a dramatic turn, with the breakaway league filing for bankruptcy after Saudi Arabia’s PIF withdrew its funding in April. The league is now hoping to survive into 2027 with a revamped format, a reduced schedule, and lower prize money.
These uncertainties have prompted several LIV players to leave, with at least a dozen LIV players entering the DP World Tour’s Q-School. Yet, despite LIV Golf’s decline, the DP World Tour continues to occupy a lower rung in the pecking order, at least compared with the PGA Tour. Not to mention, the influx of LIV golfers into the European circuit has done little to ease Pablo Larrazabal’s concerns.
The nine-time DP World Tour champion, for the first time in 20 years, is forced to go back to the tour’s Q-School to keep his tour card in 2027. Of course, Larrazabal’s woes are the result of 17 missed cuts this season, with the last one coming at the Genesis Championship in South Korea. Nevertheless, he will have to face increased competition from the LIV players in the grueling six-round final stage of the Q-School.
“With LIV players coming in, there [are] a lot of players who want to play, but not too many spots available,” Larrazabal explained. “There’s a lot of DP World Tour players like me who will need invites. In this case, I have to be very selfish [with] myself, but on the other hand, the tour needs names for sponsors to keep believing in us.”
It runs from November 6 to November 11, 2026, at Infinitum Golf in Tarragona. Only the top 15 players and ties on the final stage of the Q-School will get DP World Tour cards for 2027. The only good thing for Larrazabal, however, is the fact that he won the 2022 ISPS Handa Championship on the same course.
“Well, it is a golf course that I played only once,” he said. “I played four rounds of golf and ended up winning the golf tournament!”
That being said, Pablo Larrazabal isn’t the only one who is concerned about the DP World Tour.
PGA Tour’s 2028 overhaul sparked fear for DP World Tour
The PGA Tour’s planned 2028 overhaul has sparked concerns for DP World Tour, as the European circuit could become a de facto third-tier tour. Despite Brian Rolapp’s assurances that the DP World Tour will continue facilitating international events, uncertainty surrounding the new model has raised questions about its future.
“The new system means in total more than 270 of the best players from around the world (130 on the Championship Series and 144 on the Challenger Series) will be regularly playing across PGA Tour events between February to August,” Flushing It Golf wrote on X. “That’s double the current system and it is inevitable it will significantly weaken the strength of fields on the DP World Tour during the peak golf season.”
The new structure will feature the Championship Series and Challenger Series from 2028. Even the second-tier events will offer at least $4 million in prize money, putting them on par with the average DP World Tour purse. Players are also concerned about whether Race to Dubai qualifiers will receive direct entry into the Championship Series. Meanwhile, negotiations over the tours’ strategic alliance are expected to resume in 2027.
Although Rory McIlroy has backed the overhaul, concerns remain that fewer elite players competing internationally could weaken fields and limit opportunities for DP World Tour members to earn valuable OWGR points. Clearly, there’s some truth to Pablo Larrazabal’s claims, but it would be interesting to see how the European circuit deals with it going forward.