'It's Been Devastating To Our Tour' - Asian Tour CEO Talks LIV Golf Exit, Rebuilding Circuit And New DPWT Partnership

Cho Minn Thant has been involved with the Asian Tour since 2007. The Myanmar-born executive became COO in 2016 before being appointed CEO in 2019.

And in that entire 20-year span, Thant has seen plenty of change within his home circuit - much of which has occurred since 2022.

But even by those standards, 2026 has been tumultuous to say the least. With a seemingly settled partnership working alongside LIV Golf, any future plans were immediately dissolved when the Saudi PIF withdrew its backing of the team-based circuit.

It wasn't just LIV affected by the decision. The Asian Tour - which had launched the International Series, funded by LIV Golf, as the backbone of its schedule - suddenly had a decision to make.

With an obvious lack of certainty from LIV's side, the Asian Tour opted to walk away from that partnership and ultimately form a new one with the DP World Tour and PGA Tour.

Several months on, the Asian Tour is still feeling the affects of a sudden change of plans with multiple events having been cancelled this season and a different route ahead.

Just before the second half of the season begins in Taipei, Thant sat down with Golf Monthly to discuss what has gone before and where the Asian Tour goes now...

The decision to cut ties with LIV and begin working with the DP World Tour and PGA Tour - how did that all come about?

Things were fine at the start of the year, we had quite a few tournaments planned on the schedule with the International Series. Up until March time, we were looking at how to expand the International Series and we were in the process of signing another five-year extension with LIV Golf.

Had the news not broken in April about the PIF withdrawing from LIV Golf, we would have happily continued for another five years with LIV Golf. But obviously what happened happened in April and we had to look at various options.

They could not commit to the International Series being funded through the end of this year - even though they had a commitment from the PIF to fund LIV Golf League events.

So that put us in a pretty precarious position where we just had to look at other options.

Discussions with the Europeans started straight away and they brought the PGA Tour into the discussions as well. We had several meetings between April and June, and we were able to sort out broad terms at The Open Championship.

We've always said that the last five years with LIV Golf has been phenomenal for the Asian Tour. Prize purses went up, the depth of talent playing on the Asian Tour went up. We were able to build our schedule pretty much around the 10 International Series events for so long.

It was a very abrupt situation, no one expected it. The LIV management didn't expect it, we didn't expect it, and it's been devastating to our tour, to be quite honest.

It's not even a small hiccup, it's a fairly sizeable hit that we've taken this year. There was about $20 million worth of event budget for the remainder of the year that we won't be able to take advantage of.

We had a good relationship with LIV and there's no hard feelings, we look at the relationship fondly. We just couldn't stay with them through this period where they had to restructure LIV Golf because we had to get on with our season and plan 2027 also.

As a result of that, are the prize funds on the Asian Tour for the rest of this year still $2m or have you been forced to make changes?

We've had to make quite a few changes. The Hong Kong Open remains $2m, as it would have been on the International Series. The Philippine Open was supposed to be an IS event, but that's going down to a $1m prize purse.

IS India and IS China won't happen at all on the Asian Tour this year, but the Saudi International remains our finale and that will still have a $5m purse.

Turning to the future and the DP World Tour agreement, what are the benefits you hope to see from the new partnership?

Apart from the co-sanctioned events, which are likely to be five events next year, we've got the pathway to the DP World Tour.

Commercial collaboration is very important as well. The PGA Tour and the DP World Tour have very strong partners and brands which they work with across their tours. I think a lot of those sponsors have interest in Asia as well, so it'd be great to see commercial collaboration.

And also the other tours which work with the DP World Tour, so the Australasian Tour, the Sunshine Tour etc, we can now freely work with them. We can now freely work with the PGTI as well which is also aligned with the DP World Tour.

We can have conversations a lot more freely than we could have in the last five years or so.

What is the health of the Asian Tour like now compared to when you took over in 2019?

I think it's very strong at the top level now, with all these co-sanctioned events and a lot of tournaments on the Asian Tour actually increasing their prize purses to compete with the IS events that we previously had.

I think we're in a very good spot if you're a high-ranked player on the Asian Tour. So if you finish in the top-65 on the Order of Merit or if you're a tournament winner, or even above that.

We've got some work to do when it comes to Q-School grads and players coming up through the Asian Development Tour now that we don't have the six or seven International Series events that we used to have.

We're going to have to pull our socks up and get to work so we can find solid playing opportunities for them, but we're certainly going to be stronger from an outside perspective. If you look at the Asian Tour, we're going to have some very strong events now.

What does the next five years look like on the Asian Tour?

We want to get 30 tournaments on the schedule. We normally operate with 20-21 tournament on an annual basis, so with the addition of some co-sanctioned events we'd like to get up to 30.

We feel like that's a very strong and full year schedule. Within those 30, we'd like at least half of them to be full-field events so they're not co-sanctioned as well.

Our current situation at the Asian Tour is 'hey, we've taken a pretty big hit this year because of LIV's withdrawal. But we're in the process of rebuilding and we'll probably need the season of 2027 to recover and get back to full strength in 2028.