The Asian Tour has joined a strategic alliance with the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, the circuit formerly known as the European Tour, according to ESPN. The partnership takes effect immediately and runs through 2029.
Its practical content, per that report, is co-operation on commercial and playing opportunities and, specifically, pathways for Asian Tour members onto the European circuit. The DP World Tour will co-sanction at least two Asian Tour events a year over the next three years.
Why this is about LIV
The reason a three-tour co-operation agreement is news is what it means for a fourth tour that is not part of it.
LIV Golf, the league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, has had a relationship with the Asian Tour since before its own launch in 2022. ESPN reports that LIV invested $300 million in the Asian Tour, using it to create a set of events called the International Series. The Asian Tour was, in effect, LIV's route into the region and part of its claim to be building an alternative structure for professional golf rather than merely poaching from the existing one.
The Asian Tour now aligning itself with the two established tours instead is therefore a strategic loss for LIV. A partner it had paid to cultivate has chosen the other side of golf's schism.
The wider split
For readers who have not followed the dispute, the background is short and bitter.
Since 2022, professional golf has been divided between the traditional tours, led by the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, and LIV, which used enormous Saudi funding and large guaranteed payments to sign leading players and set up a rival, team-based league. The result has been years of litigation, division among players, and repeated, inconclusive talk of reunification.
This alliance is a move in that longer contest. By drawing the Asian Tour closer, the established tours strengthen their position in a growing region and narrow the territory LIV can call its own.
The timing
The setback lands at an already difficult moment for LIV, which is the part worth watching.
As we reported yesterday, a court filing indicated that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund stopped funding LIV on April 30, and that the league's chief executive has been seeking $300 million to keep it running. Set against that, losing the alignment of a tour it spent $300 million to cultivate compounds the pressure: LIV is trying to raise money to continue at the same time as one of its strategic assets moves toward its rivals.
The reaction
The announcement drew the predictable statements of mutual enthusiasm from the parties, and one notable outside voice.
The Asian Tour's commissioner, Cho Minn Thant, said it was "the time is now right to collaborate with the DP World Tour and PGA Tour to enhance the Asian Tour." The PGA Tour's Christian Hardy framed it as part of building "a more connected global golf ecosystem."
More telling was Rory McIlroy, long one of the most prominent critics of the LIV project, who posted that it was "positive news, and great to see the respective tours working together for the good of international golf." That a leading player greeted a commercial alliance as good news is itself a small marker of where the momentum in this dispute currently sits.
None of this ends the schism, which has survived many such moments. But it moves a piece, and it moves it away from LIV at a time when LIV can least absorb the loss.
