While those European players who made it to East Lake for the FedEx Cup finale were lining their pockets with greenbacks, the Ryder Cup qualifying for Luke Donald’s team for the 2025 match at Bethpage got off to a quiet start at the British Masters where Niklas Norgaard’s win saw the Dane jump to the top of the rankings.
The next few weeks, however, will likely see a significant change in those qualifying standings. No fewer than nine European players were at the money-fest in Atlanta and, apart form Ludvig Aberg who is scheduled for surgery on his knee injury, they will be flighting their way back across the Atlantic for a number of big-money events and Ryder Cup points packed into the autumn scheduling.
Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry emerged as the top Europeans in the FedEx Cup – both finishing in tied-ninth – and their busy itineraries of the next few weeks are in stark contrast with those of many American players, although there is the matter of the President’s Cup in Canada at the end of the month.
McIlroy, the world number three, has played more this year than at any time in his professional career and will have next week’s Amgen Irish Open at Royal County Down, the following week’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth and, a fortnight later, the Alfred Dunhill Links in Scotland to flesh it out even further before taking a break and finishing up at the DP World Tour’s finale in the United Arab Emirates.
The rationale behind McIlroy’s busier than ever playing schedule was to end his Majors win drought. That plan, however, didn’t pay off as 2024 again saw him fail to add to his four career Majors (his last being the 2014 US PGA) and that near-miss/collapse at the US Open proved more damaging to his psyche than he would have liked or believed.
The consequence is that McIlroy will drastically reduce his playing schedule for 2025 to one, it would appear, closer to that once adopted by Tiger Woods in his prime. By year’s end, McIlroy will have played 28 tournaments. Next year, he will cut that back to “18 or 20 a year going forward.” In doing that, McIlroy’s season will centre around the four Majors, the Players, the signature events on the PGA Tour and the top DP World Tour events which will see him shift away from the so-called regular tournaments.
In Lowry’s case, making it to the Tour Championship for a first time concluded his best ever season on the PGA Tour, certainly financially. Lowry’s official prize money of $6,095,881 on the PGA Tour – he played 20 events, missing just two cuts – and he also got a $2m bonus for finishing 10th in the Comcast 10 standings at end of the regular season ahead of the FedEx Cup playoffs.
Like McIlroy, Lowry is headed back to Europe for the next few weeks starting with next week’s Amgen Irish Open at RCD and onwards to the BMW PGA at Wentworth and, in his case, also to the Spanish Open in Madrid with the ancillary aim of building up Ryder Cup points.
This is mainly a quiet week for Ireland’s touring professionals – men and women – with only Gary Hurley in the field for the Omega European Masters in Switzerland.
On the Challenge Tour, it is busier. There six Irish players – Liam Nolan, Jonathan Caldwell, Dermot McElroy, John Murphy, Conor O’Rourke and Mark Power – in the field for the Big Green Egg Challenge in Germany.
Conor Purcell, who is 11th in the Race to Mallorca standings and on course to claim one of the 20 full DP World Tour cards available off the order of merit, is not playing this week. McElroy has had a terrific run of late – 4th-7th-2nd in his last three events – and the Ballymena man has moved to 26th in the latest standings.
