For years the Asian Tour was the quiet on-ramp for LIV Golf. LIV reportedly pumped around $300 million into the circuit to build up events and give unproven talent a runway into the big-money breakaway league. That relationship is over. The Asian Tour has signed a multi-year deal with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour that cuts LIV out entirely, and by most accounts LIV didn't see it coming.
Another MASSIVE blow for LIV. The Asian Tour just announced a multi-year partnership with the PGA Tour & DP World Tour, and will no longer serve as a pathway to LIV Golf. This move could put LIV's OWGR points in jeopardy.
The deal reportedly runs through at least 2029 and is designed to expand playing opportunities for Asian Tour members, with the DP World Tour set to resume co-sanctioning select events starting in 2027. That also opens a real pathway for top Asian Tour guys to earn cards on the DP World Tour or the developmental HotelPlanner Tour. In other words, the players LIV used to funnel toward Riyadh now have a much more traditional route to the sport's mainstream tours.
What makes this sting even more for LIV is the timing and the blindside nature of it. The three sides reportedly hammered out the framework during last week's Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, and LIV wasn't looped in until after the fact. That's a brutal look for a league that's spent 4 years trying to convince golf it belongs at the big-kids table.
Statement from the PGA Tour ⬇️
There's a bigger domino here too: Official World Golf Ranking points. LIV only started earning OWGR points at all with its 2026 season opener in Riyadh, and even then only for top-10 finishers because of the league's small no-cut fields. Losing the Asian Tour as an ally chips away at LIV's case that it deserves full standing in the ranking system, since the Asian Tour partnership was part of the connective tissue LIV pointed to when arguing it belonged in the golf establishment.
None of this happens in a vacuum, either. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has already signaled it plans to stop bankrolling LIV after the 2026 season, so the timeline lines up with a league that's suddenly looking a lot more isolated than it did a year ago. LIV built its whole model on poaching stars and building infrastructure around them, but if the traditional tours are actively locking arms to route talent away from that pipeline, the league's runway just got a lot shorter.
Nobody's saying LIV folds tomorrow. But between the PIF pulling funding and now its closest developmental partner bailing for the other side, this is as bad a week of headlines as LIV has had since it launched. The Asian Tour just picked a team, and it wasn't the one with all the cash.