DP World Tour Championship 2026: What to Watch and Expect in Dubai

While the rest of us spend mid-November peeling mud off a Srixon semi frozen, 50 pros are in Dubai playing in polo shirts for $10 million. Life isn't fair, and golf doesn't pretend to be.

The DP World Tour Championship runs from Thursday 12 to Sunday 15 November at Jumeirah Golf Estates, the 42nd and final stop of the season.

The Race to Dubai gets decided on Sunday afternoon, with Rory McIlroy chasing a record-equalling eighth crown (wow). Don't forget there is also: a $3 million winner's cheque, Jon Rahm back in ominous form, ten PGA Tour cards on a knife-edge, and the defending champion watching from home.

The course

What to expect at the Earth Course

Only the top 50 available players in the Race to Dubai rankings get through the gate, playing four rounds of stroke play with no halfway cut. Turn up, get round 72 holes without losing your head (easier said than done), and you leave with a cheque that would cover your club membership fee until retirement, plus or minus a few hundred pints.

Everyone goes out in groups of two rather than three. Thursday's opening round runs in reverse Race to Dubai order, putting the season leaders out last. A redraw from Friday onwards is then based on tournament scores.

Greg Norman designed the Earth Course and, unsurprisingly, for a man who spent his career trying to launch drivers into orbit, it favours big hitters. It's a long track with generous fairways if you behave, 99 bright white bunkers waiting if you don't, and water creeping in across the closing stretch. The par-5 18th is split straight down the middle by a creek, for context, I would be reloading a provisional before my tee had time to land.

Expect low numbers. Every winner here over the past decade has finished somewhere between 15 and 21 under par.

The title race

Can Rory catch Chacarra (and equal Monty)?

Nine players can still win the Race to Dubai on paper, with 2,000 points going to Sunday's winner, 1,335 for solo second and 752 for third. In reality, only two men control their own fate.

Position	Player	Points
1	Eugenio Chacarra	4,243.79
2	Rory McIlroy	3,709.86
3	Patrick Reed	3,528.62
4	Casey Jarvis	2,892.98
5	Aaron Rai	2,560.15
6	Jon Rahm	2,525.45

Full standings before Thursday's opening round: Official Race to Dubai rankings.

McIlroy trails Eugenio Chacarra by 533.93 points going into the final week. He's won the last four season-long titles, and an eighth Harry Vardon Trophy on Sunday would draw him level with Colin Montgomerie's record.

Last week in Abu Dhabi was peak Rory: a Thursday rules penalty, an 11-birdie 63 on Friday, a double bogey on Saturday followed immediately by four birdies on the spin, and solo third at 19 under to nudge past Patrick Reed into second. Never dull, if nothing else.

His maths this week is clean enough. Win the tournament and the Race to Dubai is his, regardless of what Chacarra does. Solo second is enough too, provided neither Chacarra nor Reed wins. Finish third and he needs Chacarra outside the top 11.

Standing in his way is a 26-year-old Spaniard in his first full DP World Tour season after his LIV contract expired in 2024. Chacarra has won three times this year (including beating Rory in India a few weeks back), not long after finishing runner-up in Spain on a fractured toe, ouch.

The catch for Chacarra is course knowledge. He's only played the Earth Course once and admitted this week it didn't go well, whereas Rory has won around it three times. A win guarantees Chacarra joins Seve Ballesteros and Rahm as only the third Spanish Order of Merit winner, and solo second does the job as long as Rory doesn't lift the trophy.

Reed sits third, 715 points off the top. He walked away from LIV in January right after winning the Dubai Desert Classic, won again in Qatar, and watched Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund pull the plug on LIV three months later. Whatever your feelings on Reed, leaving the casino five minutes before the lights went out is tidy timing. He's cooled off since withdrawing injured at Wentworth in September, finishing tied 43rd of 70 in Abu Dhabi, so he needs a win (without Chacarra finishing solo second) or a runner-up finish and favours from both men ahead of him.

The contenders

Who else to watch for the trophy

Not everyone in the field is losing sleep over Chacarra's points buffer. With $3 million up top, plenty of heavyweights are just there to nick the tournament trophy.

Jon Rahm

Having left north of $100 million on the table to exit LIV, Rahm turned up at Yas Links last week and won on debut at 23 under. Now he heads down the road to a venue where he already has three wins (2017, 2019 and 2022), sharing the tournament record with McIlroy and Matt Fitzpatrick. Win on Sunday and either Rahm or Rory becomes the first four-time champion here.

Technically, Rahm can even steal the Race to Dubai from sixth if he wins, Chacarra finishes outside the top eight and Rory and Reed both finish third or worse. Even Rahm admitted on Sunday he had no idea he still had a horse in that race.

Tyrrell Hatton

Hatton pushed Rahm all the way to 21 under in Abu Dhabi to climb 43 places into 12th. His record in the UAE is superb, I'd argue he remains essential viewing.

Tommy Fleetwood and Aaron Rai

Fleetwood, ranked seventh in the world, lives in Dubai and runs his academy at Jumeirah Golf Estates. Calling it a home game is an understatement.

Rai starts fifth in the standings after winning his first major at the PGA Championship earlier this year. Still sporting the double gloves, he goes out alongside Rahm on Thursday morning, though after a long transatlantic schedule you wonder how much is left in the tank.

Kristoffer Reitan and Casey Jarvis

Two worth keeping half an eye on if you enjoy contrasting routes to the top. Reitan came through the Road to Mallorca in 2024 and hits the ball into a different postcode, which is handy on a Greg Norman course and mildly depressing if your own driver is misbehaving (yes, no need to look at me).

Jarvis sits fourth in the standings despite missing seven cuts in ten regular DP World Tour starts between May and September. Wins in Kenya and South Africa plus big weeks at The Open and the Dunhill Links did the heavy lifting. Proof, if you needed it, that golf makes zero sense.

The cards

Ten PGA Tour cards on the line

Away from the leaders, there's a brutal bit of admin being settled further down the leaderboard. The top ten players in Sunday's final standings who aren't already exempt earn PGA Tour cards for 2027.

Chacarra, Reed, Jarvis and Jayden Schaper have theirs sewn up. Daniel Hillier, Jacob Skov Olesen and Bernd Wiesberger are all in strong shape too. Along with Brooks Koepka earlier in the year, Chacarra, Reed and Wiesberger mean the PGA Tour is about to welcome four former LIV players back inside the ropes for 2027. Expect a few polite nods on the range in January.

The sweat is around spots eight, nine and ten, currently held by England's Andy Sullivan, Finland's Oliver Lindell and Sheffield's Joe Dean.

Right behind Dean sits a four-man Spanish queue of Angel Ayora, Nacho Elvira, Angel Hidalgo and David Puig, with South Africa's Hennie Du Plessis and England's Dan Bradbury just behind them. Whoever wrote Thursday's tee sheet knew what they were doing: Dean and Ayora have been paired together at 7.25am. Exciting.

The absentees

Eight big names giving it a miss

Remember the word ‘available’ in "top 50 available players"? It's earning its keep again this week. Enough qualifiers have stayed away to drag the cut-off down to 56th, handing Dutchman Joost Luiten the final spot while Alejandro Del Rey (57th) and Nathan Kimsey (58th) wait on the reserve list.

The biggest absentee is the defending champion. World No. 3 Matt Fitzpatrick beat McIlroy in a play-off here last November for his third Dubai title, and sits 14th in the rankings, yet won't be back to defend it. Fitzpatrick became a dad in August and said at Wentworth he wasn't comfortable travelling to the Middle East amid ongoing tensions in the region. Can't blame him, decent enough excuse there.

Robert MacIntyre (61st), another new father this year, skipped the Play-Offs for the same reason and misses Dubai for the first time since 2018. Shane Lowry (20th), who won the Irish Open by 11 shots in September, has also stayed at home.

Elsewhere, Min Woo Lee (48th) and Ludvig Åberg (53rd, tied third here last year) both had spots waiting and chose to wrap their DP World Tour seasons up early.

Spare a thought for Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen in 51st. The Dane finished tied third here on debut last year and would have walked into this week's no-cut $10 million field, except he sits 108th in the FedEx Cup Fall standings over in America. Instead of guaranteed sunshine money in Dubai, he's grinding it out in Texas trying to crack the top 100 and keep his PGA Tour card. Rough trade.

Justin Rose (75th) and Viktor Hovland (102nd) miss out for a simpler reason: neither played enough on the DP World Tour this year to qualify.

Watching

How to watch and Thursday's tee times

Sky Sports has live coverage of all four rounds in the UK and Ireland, starting at 7.00am GMT every day from Thursday 12 November to Sunday 15 November on Sky Sports Golf and Sky Sports Main Event. Civilised timing for a peruse before work, or before heading out to lose two balls in the wet rough.

(If you're reading from the US, Golf Channel has Rounds 1 to 3 from 2.00am to 8.00am ET, and Sunday's final round from 1.30am to 7.30am ET.)

The first two-ball of Joost Luiten and Victor Perez tees off at 4.25am UK time on Thursday, strictly for insomniacs and anyone doing a night feed. The groups most people will want on the telly start rolling out from 6.30am.

Tee times

Selected Round 1 pairings (Thursday 12 November, GMT)

UK time	Pairing	What's on it
06:30	Davis Bryant, Tommy Fleetwood	Home game for Fleetwood
06:55	Dan Bradbury, Adrian Meronk	Bradbury chasing a late PGA Tour card run
07:25	Angel Ayora, Joe Dean	10th vs 11th in the PGA Tour card race
07:35	Oliver Lindell, Andy Sullivan	8th and 9th on the PGA Tour card bubble
07:50	Tyrrell Hatton, Bernd Wiesberger	Abu Dhabi runner-up out early
08:10	Ryan Fox, Jayden Schaper	7th and 8th in the Race to Dubai
08:20	Jon Rahm, Aaron Rai	Three-time winner alongside the 5th seed
08:30	Casey Jarvis, Patrick Reed	3rd and 4th in the standings
08:40	Rory McIlroy, Eugenio Chacarra	Final group: top two in the Race to Dubai

Full tee sheet and live scoring: Official DP World Tour Championship leaderboard.

McIlroy and Chacarra going out together in Thursday's final two-ball is as good a pairing as the Tour could have asked for. Whether Chacarra holds his nerve on a course he barely knows, Rory draws level with Monty, or Rahm wanders past both of them on the back nine, we'll have a much clearer idea by the time Sunday's cuppa goes cold.