In 2021, a deal was ignored. In 2022, lines were drawn for LIV Golf. Now, with a 2027 break clause approaching, Ian Poulter is no longer just defending his choices. He is questioning whether the DP World Tour made the right ones, and his reasoning is harder to dismiss.

In an Insta Q&A session recently, a fan asked Poulter whether the DP World Tour and PGA Tour should have embraced LIV Golf from the beginning. To which, Poulter said, “European Tour were offered a deal in 2021 by PIF and they failed to respond to that deal. Instead they chose to do a deal with the PGA Tour.”

“I hope for the ET Tour that they don’t get dumped by PGA Tour when that contract expires. As the rumblings don’t look good. Or that they don’t have to sign over a big part of the Ryder Cup which is the only thing that actually makes any money in the business.”

Those warnings are not entirely without structural backing. In June 2022, the PGA Tour and DP World Tour signed a 13-year joint venture through 2035, giving the PGA Tour a 40% stake in European Tour Productions. And the break clause that sits in 2027, now less than 18 months away, has turned the Ryder Cup into the central question. It is the most commercially valuable event in European golf outside the majors, and the one property the DPWT cannot afford to lose leverage over.

Also, this is not the first time Poulter has taken this line.

Back in June 2022, when the PGA Tour banned 17 golfers, including Poulter himself, for joining LIV Golf’s inaugural event at Centurion Club, Graeme McDowell publicly urged the DP World Tour not to follow the PGA Tour’s lead, calling it a fantastic opportunity for the European Tour to align with LIV players instead.

The DPWT ultimately sided with the PGA Tour, issuing fines to LIV players, including Poulter, who still has $1.1M outstanding for playing the first eight LIV events.

Poulter hasn’t yet paid those fines, and hence can’t go to events like the Alfred Dunhill Links. In the same Q&A, he said that he would like to go back to events like the Scottish Open, the Irish Open, Wentworth, and tournaments in the Middle East. The 50-year-old said that if LIV and DPWT were completely compatible, he would play in the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, the Scottish Open, Dubai, and the Irish Open.

So, his closing statement was straightforward: “Golf with the biggest investor in the world on your side would be good for everyone. The fans and the players.”

PIF, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which backs LIV Golf, has the financial firepower that no tour can match on its own. The DPWT’s decision in 2021 is now being revisited in that context. What happens at or before that 2027 break clause will determine whether Poulter’s warning turns out to be prescient.

And he isn’t the only one in the queue siding with the LIV Golf.

Other voices, same question

Former Open champion Ian Baker-Finch sees the current chaos differently. While Poulter warns about the DPWT’s vulnerability, Baker-Finch sees an opening. He believes the ongoing PGA Tour and LIV Golf battle has handed the DP World Tour a genuine chance to build something the PGA Tour never will: an actual world tour.

He was direct about why the PGA Tour cannot fill that role. “The top players, especially the American players or those that live in America, they want to go home on Sunday night, and they don’t want to travel around the world.”

The PGA Tour’s structure, he argued, keeps it permanently US-centric.

The numbers support that. The DP World Tour schedule for 2026 includes events in 25 countries on five continents. Many of the markets LIV Golf has presented as breakthroughs had already featured on the DPWT calendar long before. There was always a global footprint.

However, that footprint will matter as long as the tour takes care of what it has built. Baker-Finch’s hopefulness and Ian Poulter’s caution are both pointing to the same thing: the DPWT is worth something. The question is whether its current partnerships help it grow that value.