Sergio Garcia’s Ryder Cup hopes just got a major boost

The steps required for Sergio Garcia to play in next year’s Ryder Cup were simple. All that mattered was if he would be willing to take them. And thanks to recent (costly) developments in the past month, the idea of Garcia joining the European Team is once again looking very possible.

Garcia’s Ryder Cup plight began the day he signed the dotted line of a contract with LIV Golf, a rival golf tour that would require Garcia to compete 14 times a year. Each one of those weeks would require Garcia to request a conflicting event release form from both the DP World Tour and the PGA Tour. The instant he started playing for LIV Golf — June 2022 — without releases from the tours he was a member of, he incurred fines and suspensions. 

Garcia anticipated this from the PGA Tour and resigned his membership in America. But he held on to his European Tour membership for a full year, racking up more than $1 million in fines and refusing to pay them. There was belief that perhaps a U.K. sports arbitration panel would rule against the enforceability of the fines, but the DP World Tour won that case in April 2023. Months later, Garcia ended his holdout and resigned his European membership as well, surrendering an important thing in the process: his Ryder Cup playing rights.

To compete in the Ryder Cup, European players need to be a member in good standing with the DP World Tour. Garcia’s resignation took him out of the running to compete in Rome in 2023, which would have been his 11th-straight Cup. The Euros won without him, and captain Luke Donald was championed for his commitment to the DPWT while numerous players from Donald’s generation (Ian Poulter, Henrik Stenson, Lee Westwood, Graeme McDowell and Garcia) were uninvolved.  

In the year since that European victory, it’s clear Garcia wants back in.

The 44-year-old Spaniard has now fully repaid his fines and has applied for DP World Tour membership, the tour confirmed to GOLF.com. The deadline to do so was Sunday. Bunkered, a Scottish golf website, was the first to report on Garcia’s move. 

While plenty of time has passed in Garcia’ s LIV career, the accounting department at the DP World Tour never forgot those fines. They also haven’t forgotten the suspensions he will be required to serve — both back-dated to his previous membership as well as any ensuing suspensions he receives in the coming months when he makes starts on LIV Golf. 

The upper echelon of pro golf tours continues to exist in a bit of a stalemate where a merger of business interests — and likely the end of sanctions for competing at certain times — is on the table, but negotiations between the PGA Tour, the Saudi PIF and the DP World Tour remain ongoing, 17 months after they were promised to start. In the event of an agreement, it’s plausible that Garcia’s future fines and suspensions would be nullified, but there is little clarity on when an agreement could be expected. 

In the meantime, Garcia is a Category 1 member, which means he’ll be able to enter basically any event once he has paid his suspension time. That suspension time begins immediately, as the 2025 DPWT season kicks off this week in Australia. 

Despite Garcia starting to make amends, the road for him to join Team Europe would almost certainly hinge on him garnering one of Donald’s six captain’s picks next September. Garcia will be suspended for (or busy with LIV events) during too many weeks in the upcoming calendar to play much on the DP World Tour. He is qualified to play in the Masters as a former champion, but not for any of the other three major championships. The PGA of America did not issue Garcia a special invitation last spring to its PGA Championship, and he will have to advance through Final Qualifying into the U.S. Open and Open Championship.

In other words, the amount of tournaments by which Garcia could earn enough European Ryder Cup points to automatically qualify for Donald’s roster is limited. However, he has shown great form in the last 12 months on LIV Golf. How much is that worth to Donald? We will have to ask him when the time comes in 2025. Not only did Garcia win the LIV event in Spain, he also finished second three different times, ensuring a third-place finish in LIV’s year-long ranking behind Jon Rahm and Joaquin Niemann. 

The ultimate truth in how Garcia stacks up against other Ryder Cup hopefuls is best seen via golf analytics site DataGolf. His extremely solid performance on LIV Golf in 2024 ranks Garcia as the 22nd-best player in the world right now, alongside the likes of Tony Finau, Wyndham Clark and Tom Kim. It also ranks him as the 8th-best European in the world, just behind Shane Lowry. Were he to keep playing at (or better than) that level, the decision would be up to Donald, who isn’t shying away from the idea. During a year-out press conference in September, Donald said it was up to Garcia to take the necessary steps to become eligible, admitting they had had phone conversations about Garcia’s desire to rejoin Team Europe.