DP World Tour Events In England: A Full Season Rundown

For most of the twentieth century a British golfer who wanted to make a living at the game had a difficult choice: cross the Atlantic, or piece together a season from club professional work, exhibition matches and a scattering of tournaments run by regional PGAs. The circuit that removed that choice was formalised in the early 1970s, when the British PGA's tournament arm was reorganised into a properly scheduled European tour with its own order of merit. Everything that follows — the Wentworth flagship, the season-ending event in Dubai, the qualifying ladder, the alliance with the American tour — grew out of that reorganisation.

Fifty-odd years later, the English portion of that circuit is smaller than many British followers assume. The Tour is genuinely global, with a schedule that runs across the Gulf, southern Africa, continental Europe, Asia and Australasia before returning to Britain in the summer months. England hosts a handful of weeks, and they are consequential weeks. This page sets out what the Tour is, where in England it plays, how the season is scored, and how a player gets onto it in the first place.

From European Tour to DP World Tour: what actually changed

• 2017Rolex Series introduced
• 2020Alliance with the PGA Tour announced
• 2022Renamed the DP World Tour

Fixed dates for the three changes described on this page, not a full chronology of the Tour.

The circuit was renamed the DP World Tour from the 2022 season, after the Dubai-based logistics company DP World, already the title sponsor of the season-ending championship, became the Tour's overall title partner. The name of the tournament-organising body did not change in the same way; the organisation continued to operate as the European Tour group, which is why the two names appear side by side in official documents and why older records are still described in European Tour terms.

What is worth being precise about is that this was a naming and sponsorship change rather than a structural one. Career win totals carry across unbroken. A player who won eleven European Tour titles before the rebrand did not have that figure reset. The order of merit, which had already been branded the Race to Dubai for well over a decade, kept its name. Membership categories, the qualifying pathways and the tournament regulations continued in the same form.

The changes that did carry real structural weight arrived around the same time and had nothing to do with the sponsor's name. The strategic alliance with the PGA Tour, announced in 2020, altered the relationship between the two circuits in ways that continue to work through the sport. The arrival of a rival, heavily funded league then produced a period of litigation, suspensions and disciplinary action across professional golf whose consequences are still being resolved. Anyone reading about the Tour's structure should treat the details of eligibility and sanction as a moving picture rather than a settled one; the regulations have been amended repeatedly and are likely to be amended again.

The English stops on the schedule and the venues that host them

England's place on the calendar is best understood as three distinct categories rather than a list.

The first is the fixed flagship. The BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth is the one English tournament that does not move, does not rotate and is not in any doubt from season to season. It has been played on the West Course at Wentworth Club since the 1980s, and it functions as the Tour's home tournament in a way no other event does. The detailed guide to the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth covers the tournament itself.

The second is the rotating national open. The British Masters is England's other regular Tour week, and it deliberately does not have a permanent home. It moves between host clubs, and in its modern incarnation it has usually been attached to a host player who lends their name and involvement to the week. Its venues have included Woburn, The Grove in Hertfordshire, Close House in Northumberland, Walton Heath in Surrey, Hillside on the Lancashire coast and The Belfry in Warwickshire. That rotation is the point of the event, and the British Masters guide goes into how the host model works.

The third is The Open Championship, which is co-sanctioned rather than owned by the Tour. When the rota brings The Open to an English links — Royal Liverpool, Royal Birkdale, Royal Lytham and St Annes or Royal St George's — it is an English week on the DP World Tour schedule as well as a major championship. The English venues that host The Open are a distinct subject in their own right, because the rota is a long-standing arrangement run by The R&A rather than by the Tour.

Category	Event	Venue arrangement
Fixed flagship	BMW PGA Championship	Wentworth Club, West Course, permanent
Rotating national event	British Masters	Host club changes, often with a host player
Co-sanctioned major	The Open Championship	R&A rota, English links in some years

Beyond those three the picture is genuinely variable. The schedule has at different times carried additional English weeks, and sponsors have come and gone, so a definitive list would be out of date within a season. The Tour's published calendar is the only reliable source for a given year.

The BMW PGA Championship and its standing on the Tour

The tournament now known as the BMW PGA Championship began as the PGA Championship, the British PGA's own title, and it predates the organised European circuit by some years. BMW took title sponsorship in the 2000s, and the event has carried the manufacturer's name since.

Its status derives from three things that reinforce each other. It is played at the Tour's own doorstep in Surrey, close to the organisation's Wentworth headquarters. It attracts a field stronger than almost any other regular Tour event, because it is the week most European-based players will build their season around. And it carries an elevated points and prize allocation, which pulls players who might otherwise be committed elsewhere.

The West Course at Wentworth, laid out by Harry Colt in the 1920s and nicknamed the Burma Road for the toughness of its early character, has been reworked substantially for modern tournament play. The most significant redesign was led by Ernie Els, himself a multiple winner of the event, with further amendments to greens and bunkering afterwards. The finishing stretch of par fives has produced a long run of dramatic closes, which is a large part of why the tournament televises so well. The Wentworth West Course guide covers the architecture in detail.

The British Masters and the host-club rotation model

The British Masters occupies an unusual position: an event with a long and interrupted history that was consciously revived as a modern property.

The tournament ran for decades under various sponsors before dropping off the schedule, and it was brought back in the mid-2010s with a specific design. Each edition would be attached to a host — a leading British player who chose or was matched to a venue, took an active promotional role, and gave the week a personality that a straightforwardly sponsored tournament lacks. Ian Poulter, Luke Donald, Lee Westwood, Justin Rose and Tommy Fleetwood have all been associated with editions in this way.

The rotation has a practical benefit beyond marketing. It brings Tour golf to parts of England that would otherwise never see it. Close House sits outside Newcastle, Hillside on the Southport coast, The Grove in Hertfordshire, Walton Heath deep in the Surrey heath belt. Each of those venues plays entirely differently, and a Tour that visits a heathland course one year and a links-adjacent one the next produces a wider variety of golf than a fixed venue can. The heath courses in particular have their own character, described in the Surrey heath belt guide and the Walton Heath guide.

The trade-off is continuity. A tournament without a permanent home builds attachment more slowly, and spectators who travelled to one edition cannot assume the next will be within reach. The Tour has clearly judged that the reach is worth the trade.

There is a cost to the host club as well, and it falls in the year before anybody arrives. A course that has never staged a Tour event has to be brought up to a standard of conditioning it may never have needed, which means investment in drainage, in irrigation and often in a larger green-keeping staff for a season. Members give up their course for the best part of a fortnight and play a different one for months beforehand while the rough is grown and the greens are pushed. Clubs that have done it once tend to talk about it in two registers at the same time: proud of the week, relieved when the compound was dismantled.

The host-player model has an unadvertised benefit too. A tournament attached to a player who actually wants it there is far easier to fill, because the host makes calls that a sponsor cannot. Fields at a revived event are the hardest thing to build, and the quickest route to a strong one is a well-liked professional asking his contemporaries directly.

Rolex Series events and what elevated status changes

The Rolex Series was introduced in 2017 as a tier of premium events within the schedule, distinguished by substantially larger prize funds and correspondingly larger Race to Dubai allocations. The number of events in the series and their locations have varied since, so the specific composition in any season is best taken from the Tour's calendar rather than assumed.

What elevated status changes, in practice, is the calculation a player makes about their schedule. A professional's season is a resource-allocation problem: a limited number of weeks, travel costs, form, rest, and the need to accumulate enough points to keep a card and enough world ranking to reach the majors. An event with a larger points allocation shifts that calculation, because a strong week there is worth several ordinary weeks elsewhere. The consequence is that elevated events draw deeper fields, which in turn strengthens the world ranking points available, which draws deeper fields still.

For a spectator, the practical effect is straightforward. An elevated event in England will have a field with more recognisable names, more television infrastructure, larger grandstands and a bigger tented village. It will also be more expensive to attend and harder to move around. An ordinary Tour week is a better day out for anyone who actually wants to watch golf shots close up.

There is a secondary effect on the courses themselves. An event with elevated status is set up harder — narrower fairway lines, faster greens, rough grown longer in the weeks beforehand, and hole locations placed closer to run-offs than a members' committee would ever contemplate. Green staff at a host club typically begin preparing eighteen months out, and the club's own members will have played a different golf course for most of the season leading up to the week. The tournament setup is a temporary condition imposed on a permanent design, which is why a professional's score at a venue tells you very little about what a visitor will find there in October.

The elevated tier has also changed how English clubs think about hosting. A week of elevated golf brings a course to an international television audience, and the resulting demand for tee times and green fees can persist for years. Clubs that once regarded a tournament as an inconvenience to be tolerated now bid for them. That competition is why host rotations have become more fluid, and why venues invest in the practice facilities, access roads and drainage that a modern tournament requires before anyone will consider them.

The Race to Dubai and how a season is scored

The Race to Dubai is the season-long ranking that determines the Tour's order of merit and its champion. Points are awarded at counting events according to finishing position, with the allocation scaled to the status of the tournament, so that a major or an elevated event carries far more than a standard week.

The mechanism matters more than any particular number, because the allocations are periodically revised. The structure works roughly like this:

Element	How it functions
Points per event	Scaled by event status and awarded by finishing position
Counting events	Members must play a minimum number of Tour events to be eligible
Season finale	The DP World Tour Championship in Dubai closes the season
Finale field	Restricted to the leading players in the standings
Outcome	Determines the season champion, card retention and playing categories

Two features are worth understanding. First, the standings do more than crown a champion — they determine who keeps a card, who moves up a playing category, and who has to return to Qualifying School. For most of the membership the Race to Dubai is a job-retention table rather than a title race. Second, the closing tournament in Dubai has at various times carried a bonus pool and weighting arrangements designed to keep the title live into the final round. Those arrangements have been adjusted more than once, and the Tour has been open about experimenting with them.

Under the strategic alliance with the PGA Tour, a set number of the leading players in the final Race to Dubai standings who are not already exempt earn PGA Tour cards for the following season. The number has been ten in recent seasons, but the terms of the alliance have been revised since it was announced and should be checked rather than assumed.

Qualifying School, the Challenge Tour and the routes onto the Tour

1. 1Keep what you haveFinish inside the retention threshold on the Race to Dubai and the card carries into the next season.
2. 2GraduateHead the Challenge Tour's season-long ranking, which concludes at a grand final, and move up a tier.
3. 3Qualifying SchoolA first stage, a second stage and a final stage over multiple rounds, with cards to the leading finishers.
4. 4Everything elseInvitations, sponsor exemptions and results in specific tournaments buy starts without buying a card.
5. 5Playing categoryWhere the card came from sets the category, and the category decides whether you get into an oversubscribed field.

The structure of the routes. The number of cards each awards is set by the Tour and has been revised, so take the figures from the current regulations.

There is no single door onto the DP World Tour. There are three, and they suit different kinds of player.

Retention through the Race to Dubai. The most straightforward route is to already be there. Finishing inside the retention threshold in the season-long standings keeps a card for the following year, and finishing high keeps it comfortably, with a better playing category and earlier access to fields.

Graduation from the Challenge Tour. The Challenge Tour is the second tier, with its own season-long ranking that concludes at a grand final. The leading players on that ranking graduate to the main Tour — the number has been twenty in recent seasons — and the Challenge Tour has become the dominant supply line. It is a genuine developmental circuit rather than a consolation prize, with events across Europe and beyond, and a substantial proportion of established Tour winners came through it.

Qualifying School. Q-School is the open door, and the hardest one. It runs as a multi-stage tournament, with a first stage, a second stage and a final stage played over multiple rounds, and the field narrows sharply at each. The leading finishers at final stage earn cards. It is available to anyone who meets the entry requirements and pays the fee, which means an amateur turning professional and a former Tour winner who lost his card can find themselves in the same field. The pressure of final stage is a recurring subject in golf writing for good reason.

Beyond the three main routes, cards and starts are also available through invitations, sponsor exemptions, the outcome of specific tournaments, and the Tour's various affiliated circuits. Playing categories then rank everyone who holds membership, and the category number determines who actually gets into a field when a tournament is oversubscribed. A player with a card in a low category may find that in practice he is playing on reserve lists.

Where the English amateur game connects

The amateur pathway feeds this system rather than sitting apart from it. Leading English amateurs are frequently given sponsor invitations to Tour events, and a strong performance as an amateur is a recognised route towards a professional career. The structure of the domestic amateur game — county golf, the national championships, the international matches — is covered in the guides to English amateur championships and to county golf.

How a field is filled and what the cut does

Holding a card and getting into a tournament are two different things, and the gap between them is where most professional careers are actually decided.

An entry list is built in category order. Tournament winners and the leading finishers from the previous season's standings sit near the top; Challenge Tour graduates, Qualifying School finishers and the various affiliated categories sit below them; and the field fills downwards until it is full. A player whose category is low enters, waits, and finds out on the Monday or Tuesday whether withdrawals have moved him off the reserve list. Some weeks he travels and does not play. That is not a rare misfortune at the margins of the Tour — it is the ordinary condition of a career spent in the lower categories, and it is the reason players talk about category movement more than about prize money.

Sponsor invitations sit outside that queue. Each tournament has a small number in its gift, and they get used for local players, for leading amateurs, for a returning name recovering from injury and occasionally for a commercial obligation. For an English amateur, an invitation to an English Tour week is the single most valuable thing a domestic season can produce, because it is a chance to find out whether the standard is reachable without spending a year and a great deal of money to discover it. The Open runs a comparable but far more formal system, set out in the Open's exemption categories.

Then there is the cut. After 36 holes the field is reduced, commonly to the leading players and ties at a number set in each tournament's conditions, and everyone below the line goes home with nothing — no prize money, no ranking points, no points towards a card, and the entry fee and the week's expenses already spent. Two rounds is a very short sample on which to hang that. A player who hits it well for 36 holes in benign weather and misses by a shot in the wind is not worse than the man who drew the other half of the draw, but the draw does not care, and the standings record the same zero either way.

Which is why the weekend matters out of proportion to the money attached to it. Making cuts is what keeps a category, and keeping a category is what keeps a player in fields the following year.

How English players earn and keep their cards

England has produced a disproportionate share of the Tour's membership, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental. The country has a dense club network, a county competition system that identifies players early, a strong university and academy pathway, and a national governing body that runs performance squads. The result is a steady flow of players who arrive at professional golf having already played a great deal of competitive stroke play.

What English players then face is the same problem as everyone else, which is that keeping a card is harder than winning one. The Tour's schedule is global, the travel is relentless, and a player in a low playing category may not get into enough fields to accumulate the points he needs. The most common career shape is not a straight ascent but a sequence of moves between the Challenge Tour and the main Tour, sometimes over several seasons, with Q-School as the recurring safety net.

Career earnings figures and win totals are easy to look up and easy to misread. A player who wins once and has a long stable career may end up with more secure standing than one who wins twice and loses his card twice. Card retention is the metric that actually describes a professional's life.

The economics underneath this are rarely discussed and worth stating plainly. A Tour professional outside the top tier is running a small business with substantial fixed costs. Flights, accommodation, entry fees, a caddie's retainer and percentage, coaching, physiotherapy and equipment all have to be paid whether the player makes a cut or not, and prize money is only earned by those who do. A season in which a player makes half his cuts and finishes mid-field can be close to break-even once costs are met. That is the reason management companies, regional sponsors and player-backing arrangements matter so much at the margins of the game, and it is why the Challenge Tour, with its lower costs and shorter travel, is a more viable place to rebuild than the main Tour is a place to survive.

It also explains a decision that puzzles spectators: why a player with a card will sometimes skip an event he could enter. Playing a tournament he is unlikely to contend in, in a time zone that damages the following three weeks, is a worse use of a season than resting. Schedule construction is a genuine professional skill, and the players who last longest tend to be the ones who are good at it rather than the ones who play the most.

Attending an English tournament: tickets, access and what to expect

1. 1Buy a practice dayThinner crowds, looser ropes, and players working on one shot for twenty minutes at a time.
2. 2Arrive for the first tee timesThe early Thursday groups go out to almost empty holes.
3. 3Park and walkParking is off-site with a shuttle, and the walk from the drop-off is usually a long one.
4. 4Pick a spot where holes convergeStay put and let the field come past rather than following one group all day.
5. 5Spend time on the rangeWedge ladders, carry numbers into a headwind, a coach filming from behind.
6. 6Plan for weatherPlay stops for lightning and standing water, and the shuttle queue after a delay is the worst part of the day.

Practical habits rather than any event's published rules. Ticket types, bag limits and phone policies are set event by event.

Tour golf in England is a comparatively accessible sport to watch live, and it rewards a bit of planning.

Tickets are usually sold in day passes with a separate price for practice days, and practice days are the best value by a considerable margin. Crowds are thinner, ropes are looser, players are relaxed, and the opportunity to watch someone work on a specific shot for twenty minutes on a range is something a tournament round does not offer. Weekend tickets for the flagship event sell fastest and cost most.

Practical points that apply across English tournaments:

• Parking is usually off-site with a shuttle. Golf venues do not have stadium car parks, and the walk from the shuttle drop-off can be substantial.
• Ground conditions decide your footwear. English tournament weeks are frequently wet, and the walkways churn.
• Grandstands fill early on the closing holes. If you want a seat at eighteen on a Sunday, you take it long before the leaders arrive.
• Mobile phone policies vary by event. Most now permit phones on silent with restrictions on photography during competition rounds.
• Bag size is restricted. Most events publish a maximum size and prohibit folding chairs of certain types.

The best way to actually watch golf, rather than to watch a crowd, is to pick a spot at a hole where several groups converge — a par three with a nearby tee, or a green shared with an adjacent fairway — and stay there while the field comes through. Following one group all day means seeing a great deal of walking.

Two further habits separate people who enjoy a tournament day from people who endure one. The first is to arrive for the first tee times rather than the featured groups. The early groups on a Thursday go out to almost empty holes, and it is the only realistic chance most spectators get to stand a few yards from a professional hitting a full shot. The second is to use the practice ground properly. At most English venues the range is accessible to ticket holders and is where the technical detail actually happens — a player working through a wedge ladder, a coach filming from behind, a caddie stepping off carry numbers into a headwind. Ten minutes there teaches more about the standard of play than an afternoon behind a green.

Weather planning deserves its own note, because an English tournament week can deliver four seasons. Play is suspended for lightning and for unplayable standing water, and when it is, spectators are usually moved off the course entirely rather than allowed to shelter under trees. A delay of two hours will compress the day's finish into the evening, and the shuttle queues at the end will be worse than anything else about the day. Anyone travelling by train should check the last realistic connection before setting out.

The DP World Tour and the PGA Tour: how the two circuits relate

The relationship between the two main professional circuits has shifted several times, and it is the part of this subject most likely to change again.

Historically the two operated as separate tours with overlapping membership, co-sanctioning a handful of events and sharing the majors and the World Golf Championships. Leading European players took dual membership, played the American schedule for most of the year, and returned for the flagship events and the Ryder Cup.

The strategic alliance announced in 2020 formalised a closer relationship, including a mutual equity arrangement, joint commercial work and the pathway that sends leading Race to Dubai finishers to the PGA Tour. Supporters argued that it secured the European circuit's future; critics argued that it entrenched the American tour's position as the senior partner and accelerated the drain of talent westwards. Both readings have evidence behind them.

The arrival of a rival tour funded from outside the traditional structures then produced suspensions, legal proceedings and a long negotiation whose outcome has not fully settled. Anyone writing confidently about where this ends is guessing. What can be said is that the DP World Tour's English events have retained their standing through the disruption, and that the Ryder Cup — which depends on a functioning European tour to qualify a team — gives every party an interest in the circuit surviving in a recognisable form. The Ryder Cup from an English perspective covers that qualification link.

How English tournaments have changed over recent decades

The clearest change is concentration. English weeks on the schedule have reduced in number while growing in scale. Where the calendar once carried several modest English tournaments through the summer, it now carries fewer, larger ones with bigger prize funds, more television infrastructure and stronger fields. That is the same pattern visible across professional sport, and it has the same causes: broadcast money rewards scale, and sponsors prefer one large property to three small ones.

The second change is in the venues. The Tour now plays a narrower set of English courses than it once did, and it plays them with heavier temporary infrastructure. A tournament venue needs space for a tented village, grandstands, broadcast compounds and parking, which rules out a good many fine courses that simply have nowhere to put it. That is one reason The Belfry, Wentworth and the larger heathland clubs recur.

The third is in what a tournament week is. Forty years ago it was a golf tournament with a scoreboard. It is now a multi-day event with music, hospitality, food halls and a designed spectator experience, aimed at people who want a day out as much as at people who want to watch golf. Whether that has improved the sport is a matter of taste. That it has enlarged the audience is not really in dispute.

What has not changed is the thing that makes the English weeks worth attending: a links or heathland course in a British summer, played by professionals in wind that they cannot fully control. More on the wider English scene sits in the England section and across the golf coverage.