There should be no special favours for Ryder Cup stars

View From The Fairway by Derek Clements

After the winning putt is holed at the Genesis Championship, an elite field of 70 will head to the Abu Dhabi Championship, the first of two season-ending playoff tournaments that will result in the Race to Dubai champion being crowned.

Barring a major upset that will go to Rory McIlroy for a seventh time. 

Under normal circumstances the field in Abu Dhabi would consist of the top 70 in the rankings. And that is the way it should be. You work your socks off all season with the intention of a) keeping your card, and b) making it to the playoffs.

Not this year. 

The DP World Tour wants the strongest possible field for its final two events. No surprise there.

To achieve its goal it has extended an invitation to Europe’s 2025 Ryder Cup team. Now you could be forgiven for believing that they would all be in the field as a matter of course. How else would they possibly make the team if they didn’t figure in the top 70 in the Race to Dubai rankings?

And here comes the rub - most of them have spent the majority of their year playing on the PGA Tour. You might expect that their play in the majors would have been enough to get them all into the top 70. Not the case.

Tommy Fleetwood won the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup and is now ranked fifth in the world but he played poorly in the majors and has failed to set the world alight in his few appearances in Europe this year. Ahead of the India Championship he was 94th in the Race to Dubai standings, Sepp Straka was 147th, Shane Lowry 155th and Ludvig Aberg was 72nd.

(Image Credit: Kevin Diss Photography)

There are those who will believe that all of the above have earned their right to be in Abu Dhabi. I don’t agree. 

My view is that the rules are clear and that they should not be bent for any golfer. Had Fleetwood, Straka, Lowry and Aberg played well enough when it counted or had they played in sufficient tournaments there is no doubt that they would have easily qualified for the playoff events. That they failed to do so is nobody’s fault but their own.

As it turned out, Fleetwood did the DP World Tour a massive favour by winning the India Championship and thus leapt to 25th place in the standings. Lowry’s third place took him to 107th place in the rankings.

If you are the golfer who finishes in 70th place in the Race to Dubai after the Genesis then you can travel to Abu Dhabi with your head held high, knowing you have followed the rules and have given yourself every chance of making it to the DP World Tour Championsip. 

I understand why our best golfers spend so much of their time on the PGA Tour. 

It is where the world’s best players compete, it is where the most money is there to be made and it is where many of the sport’s most iconic tournaments are played. I celebrated wildly when Fleetwood won at East Lake. He is one of my favourite golfers - but that doesn’t mean that he should be shoe-horned into the playoff events regardless of how he played on his rare outings in Europe.

You will know that there are now 10 PGA Tour cards handed out at the end of every DP World Tour season, and it has led to it being labelled as little more than a feeder tour. 

One of those who will be heading to America next year is Marco Penge. This is a golfer who held on to his playing privileges by the skin of his teeth 12 months ago, holing a crucial six-foot putt. He has since gone on to win three times in 2025. It is a remarkable achievement. Penge is a thrilling golfer and I believe he is going to enjoy tremendous success on the other side of the pond in 2026. But that means we are going to see cry little of him on the tour that gave him his break.

Players such as Matt Wallace and Thriston Lawrence have attempted to perform an increasingly difficult balancing act, splitting their time between both tours. Lawrence has had a disastrous time in America but returned to Europe and immediately won again. And of course Rory McIlroy picks and chooses his schedule - as he is perfectly entitled to do. The Northern Irishman looks like a shoo-in to win the Race to Dubai for a seventh time next month.