by Alternate Shot is a new segment of the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. It features two writers discussing a current event. Today, Brendan Porath and Joseph LaMagna talk about the news coming out of the European Ryder Cup team.
Brendan: On Tuesday, the European Ryder Cup team announced its qualification system for the next year. This objective points race became the latest benchmark in the subjective assessment of, and wailing about, the current and future world order of professional golf. In a prior era, such an announcement would seem like a pretty mundane, shoulder-shrugging bit of clerical business. But now it’s an opportunity to make some arguments that are a mix of bad faith and stuck-in-the-past delusions.
Some quick nuts and bolts:
- Luke Donald’s European team will consist of six auto-qualifiers and six captain’s picks.
- The auto-qualifiers will make the team based on points accrued from the end of this month to the end of August 2025.
- The points breakdown:
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- Major championships—5,000 points
- 2025 PGA Tour Signature Events/The Players/FedExCup Playoffs—3,000 points
- DP World Tour Rolex Series events—2,000 points
- 2025 PGA Tour regular FedEx Cup events—2,000 points
- DP World Tour ‘Back 9’ events—1,500 points
- DP World Tour ‘Global Series’ events—1,000 points
- 2025 PGA Tour opposite-field events—1,000 points
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- LIV is not mentioned anywhere in the announcement, so no points there.
- There are no points available on the PGA Tour the rest of this year, just on DPWT.
- There will be no points offered at events opposite the DPWT’s prized Rolex Series tournaments, a mild concession and elevation of its own tour over the U.S.-based tour.
Looking at the numbers, there is an obvious weight toward success in events played… not in Europe, but rather on the soil of its Ryder Cup adversary. Majors should be worth a lot of points. But now elite PGA Tour events come second in the pecking order, ahead of anything in Europe, and also-ran PGA Tour events are the equal of elite DPWT events.
This, of course, makes DPWT devotees, those who probably still (rightly) call it the European Tour, agitated. To them, these points allocations are a disgraceful admission and further subjugate the tour to its American counterpart. Historically, the Ryder Cup team has been the one great week to fly the flag of the European Tour, to show its strength and talent in a confrontation with the U.S. tour. Now you’re telling players to run elsewhere, someplace better and more valuable, to earn the most points.
The critics are not wrong. But suggesting some drastically different solution would be, too. The best players in the world play on the PGA Tour, including Europeans. This is not new. The greatest generations of European Ryder Cup players started the multi-decade migration to dual-tour memberships and McMansions in Florida suburbs. Now the PGA Tour dominates, and the DP World Tour is a feeder, as unfortunate and unjust as that may seem.
As I described in detail after an admirable run at The Open by Thriston Lawrence, the rare full-time DPWT member to contend at a major, there are some bad-faith shit-stirrers who would have you believe the PGA Tour is suddenly invading some sovereign territory. The truth is that the best golf is on the PGA Tour right now, and it’s not close. It would be stupid to build a team with six auto-qualifiers who got no points from the deepest, best events, ones that are now and have long been full of Europeans. Things change and evolve, for better or worse, and there are probably some Nebraska football fans out there thinking the Cornhuskers might run the table this year like it’s 1997.
While the points change is a policy guided by the goal of putting the best team together for a three-day event, it does dull the biggest remaining weapon in the DPWT’s arsenal. The tour has no money advantage, obviously. It has no convenience advantage, aside from a week or two around The Open. Its allotment of world-ranking points is dwindling. The prestige of certain events has waned as the schedule has gotten shuffled around from year to year. So the honor and value of making a Ryder Cup team is the DPWT’s last great stick to compel top European players to come home more often. Under the new qualification system, that stick will be less effective.
Perhaps there was a better middle ground between assembling the best team and maintaining the integrity of the European Tour. Still, the new policy seems rooted in reality—namely, an obvious, decades-long, multi-faceted power shift—not in the PGA Tour waking up one day and deciding to put a knife in the DPWT’s back. We don’t have to like how it is, but ignoring it would be obtuse.
Joseph: Brendan, I think any of the Euro Tour devotees you’ve mentioned who react with agitation are overreacting. Yes, this points qualification system reinforces the PGA Tour’s position in the game. As you say, the best golf in the world is on the PGA Tour, and this points system reflects that reality. But for anyone still upset about the change, I think it’s instructive to compare the new Team Europe qualification system to its previous approach.
For the 2023 Ryder Cup, Team Europe used two points lists: a European points list and a World points list. The three auto-qualifiers from the European points list, which was weighted heavily toward major championships, Rolex Series events, and World Golf Championships, were Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, and Robert MacIntyre, the first two of whom played nearly all of their golf on the PGA Tour. The top three finishers on the World points list, which was based on Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) and thus very PGA Tour-centric, were Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, and Viktor Hovland. I’ll also note that players auto-qualified first from the European points list and then the World points list, which actually devalued the European points list. For example, Yannik Paul finished fourth on the European points list but did not qualify for the team. Tyrrell Hatton finished fourth on the World points list, but he did auto-qualify for Team Europe because McIlroy and Rahm’s spots on the Euro points list took priority over their spots on the World points list. This subtle feature of qualification improved the strength of Team Europe while reinforcing a PGA Tour bias via the OWGR.
The point is: a PGA Tour-centric methodology is nothing new. When considering implementation of a points or ranking system, I’m always interested not only in the system itself but also in the second-order effects and the behavior the system incentivizes. In this case, as in the past, Team Europe’s goal is to field the best team possible, not to prop up the DP World Tour. Now, you could argue—I wouldn’t, but you could—that Team Europe’s methodology should prioritize the health of its own tour over fielding the best possible team, but that’s not the decision team leadership made. However, certain features of the qualification system actually do encourage players to play DP World Tour golf, like restricting available points in 2024 to DP World Tour events.
Finally, it’s notable that the OWGR is completely absent from qualification criteria. The OWGR has its benefits, but there is a case to be made that the golf world would be better off without it. I’m not saying that Team Europe’s qualification system is a step in the direction of a post-OWGR world, but it is worth considering the implications of Team Europe abstracting the OWGR from the process.
So overall, I think the qualification system will do a strong job of identifying the best players for Team Europe and reflecting the reality of where the best golf is played without crippling the DP World Tour. If the DP World Tour wants to reclaim its prominence and prestige, that would be great, but Europe’s qualification system isn’t going to be the means to that end.
This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
