The story behind Marco Penge’s rise to golf’s elite ranks and why he ended a whirlwind 2025 in Australia and South Africa.
In a parallel universe, multiple DP World Tour winner Marco Penge might have travelled to Australia as a member of a visiting English Premier League team, in the same way glamorous soccer clubs Chelsea FC and Tottenham Hotspur will in Sydney in July and August.
The multi-talented Englishman had that choice. It wasn’t quite a ‘sliding doors’ moment; he trialled with several big football clubs as a teenager and took considerable time mulling over the decision. But he eventually pursued professional golf, which meant worshipping football and his beloved Arsenal FC from afar.
“I love golf, but football is my passion,” Penge, the breakout star of global men’s professional golf in 2025, told Australian Golf Digest over a coffee at Royal Queensland during the recent Australian PGA Championship.
Tall, athletic and shaped by his Italian heritage through his father, an aerial engineer, Penge grew up in Horsham, West Sussex, immersed in “the beautiful game”. As a teenager, he was a natural goal-scorer and even secured trials with Reading FC and Southampton FC – historic clubs that have enjoyed stints in the English top flight.
“But when I was 13, Dad was like, ‘You’ve got to choose: football or golf,’” Penge recalls. “I’m pleased I chose golf, but I would like to have had a crack [at soccer] and see where I would have gone. I was a No.10, so I sat in front of the centre midfield [position]. Football is my passion. I love golf, but it is my job. I am properly into the strategy and tactics of football. I’m a huge Arsenal fan. I really enjoy watching [Arsenal and England central midfielder] Declan Rice play.”
Still, the Englishman chose his own profession wisely. Penge, 27, announced his pedigree to the golf world during a breakout season in which he rocketed from world No.406 early in 2025 to closing out the year in 29th. That meteoric rise was courtesy of three DP World Tour victories and almost $6 million in prizemoney. He finished runner-up to Rory McIlroy on the Race to Dubai, the European order of merit, which in turn secured the first of 10 PGA Tour cards available to the highest-ranked DP World Tour players. Penge’s No.1 position on that list also locked up a start in the Players Championship, while he is into all four majors in 2026.
And yet, before Penge finally packed his clubs away in December for a Christmas break in England, he wanted to play two more tournaments. One of them, the Australian PGA, was being held in one of his favourite countries in the world, and the other, the Nedbank Golf Challenge in South Africa, was a nice and lucrative way to sign off on a whirlwind year.
That came only weeks after Penge was locked in a battle with McIlroy in early November for Race to Dubai supremacy. At the DP World Tour’s final two events in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, McIlroy clipped him for the season-long title, before Penge hopped on a plane from Dubai to Brisbane.
“Australia is a place that I love. It’s one of my favourite countries to visit and that’s why I’m here,” Penge said before finishing T-25 at the Australian PGA. “I love playing golf. I was in Dubai and halfway from home to Australia and had the opportunity to come and start the [new 2026 DP World Tour] season here and I didn’t really have a second thought. I played this course last year and visited Brisbane and really enjoyed it with my family, so I wanted to come back and kick off as fast as I can in the new season. Yes, I’m playing the PGA Tour [this] year, but I still want to make sure I’m in Dubai [qualifying for the DP World Tour finals] at the end of the season with a chance to win the Race to Dubai.”
A GREAT YEAR
It’s worth pinpointing when Penge began to take off on a life-changing season. The answer requires going back to late October 2024 and setting the scene. In Korea at the DP World Tour’s Genesis Championship, Penge risked losing his DP World Tour card. He was ranked 406th in the world at the time and holed a birdie putt to make the cut and sneak inside the top 115 on the DP World Tour moneylist as the season was finishing. Just 14 months later, he was ranked inside the world’s top 30 golfers.
“That putt gave me confidence,” Penge recalls. Asked whether he faced a tougher putt in 2025, he answered, “Definitely not.”
Penge said his trajectory illustrated how quickly fortunes can change for players grinding outside the spotlight. “I think even less than 12 months. One week you could be having a terrible year and then things come together and you end up winning,” he says. “What that does to your confidence and belief moving forward is massive.”
The Korea escape took on greater significance given the circumstances surrounding it. Earlier in 2024, a DP World Tour disciplinary panel had ruled Penge breached the tour’s integrity program after placing bets on golf tournaments in 2022 and 2023, none involving events in which he competed. The tour found the integrity of the competitions was not compromised, and Bunkered magazine reported the average wager was £24. Penge received a three-month suspension, with one month suspended. Reflecting later, he described the enforced break as a turning point, changing coaches and reworking his preparation. He accepted responsibility without deflection. “I broke the rules,” Penge told Bunkered. “Since I was a young boy, I’ve had bets on the majors and stuff… It was never my intention or understanding to, but I broke the rules.”
What followed was a sequence that defined his season. Two months after returning, Penge claimed his maiden DP World Tour victory at the Hainan Classic. In August, he birdied the final hole to edge Denmark’s Rasmus Hojgaard at the Danish Golf Championship. In October, he defeated Dan Brown in a playoff to lift the Open de España.
“China was a huge achievement because winning on the DP World Tour was a dream as a kid,” Penge recalls. “Winning in Denmark was different because I was the underdog going up against probably the best player in Denmark and his home crowd. [The Spanish Open] was probably the biggest tournament I’ve won from a history side of things with the names on the trophy like Seve [Ballesteros] and Jon Rahm.”
Naturally, the perks of winning accumulated quickly once Penge surged into golf’s upper tier, and by season’s end he’d barely had time to absorb them all. But there was one moment he had marked in his calendar to look forward to – in April this year.
“As a father, I’m most looking forward to playing the Par 3 [Contest at the Masters]; seeing my little boy having a hit in the white overalls at Augusta. How good’s that?”
Penge’s Masters debut was secured through the Open de España triumph, which was one of six national opens where Augusta National chose to award the winner an automatic invitation to the Masters. He cannot wait to drive up Magnolia Lane and compete at Augusta.
“For me, [the Masters] is the best tournament to watch… the best players in the world are together, [the traditions like] the green jacket, Augusta National, the conditioning, the scenery,” Penge says.
“[Watching from afar], the Masters is very special in many different ways. I think the golf course will suit me pretty well. It’s obviously wide off the tee and the greens are firm, so you need to be a high-speed player to be able to stop the ball quickly on the greens. Hopefully, I can turn up there with my A-game. I’ve already started picking the brains of the likes of [reigning champion] Rory and Cam Smith, Shane Lowry and Tommy Fleetwood.”
And what did Smith, a runner-up at Augusta National in 2020 and a member of the final group at the 2022 Masters, offer in terms of advice about the hallowed turf?
“I spoke to Cam on a ride back to [the hotel during the Australian PGA]; he dropped me home,” Penge says. “I was talking to him about how beneficial he thought it was to go to Augusta a few months early to get practice rounds in and stuff. He said that, for your first time, it would be really beneficial. He’s a great guy; someone I love spending time with.”
Those who followed Penge closely throughout last year understood why Augusta National seems a natural fit and somewhere he should be competitive. Playing alongside McIlroy at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship offered a snapshot of his raw firepower and crisp iron play. Penge led the DP World Tour in strokes gained off the tee last season, averaging 290 metres while finding close to 60 percent of fairways.
By the time Penge reached Australia and then South Africa, the urgency had eased. His PGA Tour card was secure; his Masters debut locked in and his season complete. The clubs were eventually packed away when he returned to England. Then, after Christmas, Penge planned to relocate to the tour pro-laden Palm Beach area of Florida with his wife and son to start his PGA Tour career.
Despite now playing on the PGA Tour, Penge wants his connection to Europe to remain firm. He plans to return for a meaningful DP World Tour schedule in September after the PGA Tour season concludes in August.
“I’m looking forward to obviously playing at Bay Hill and Riviera and Torrey Pines, but the ones I’m looking forward to the most are the Players Championship and the Phoenix Open,” Penge says of the PGA Tour. “I want to contend in the majors and try to get a win on the PGA Tour. That would be pretty cool in my first season. I want to get in contention as much as I can.
“I think the DP World Tour, for me, is a tour I really want to support; hence why [I travelled to] Australia. I want to try to play at least 10 times on the DP World Tour, so hopefully I can go well on the PGA Tour, not have to play the [autumn] events and come back to Europe. That’s my goal.”
Before heading home from Australia and South Africa, Penge allowed himself a moment to acknowledge what he had accomplished.
“The experience I had in Abu Dhabi and Dubai with the Ryder Cup boys there, and to feel like I’d earned their respect,” Penge says when asked which congratulations resonated most. “All of the guys were saying how good a job I’d done.
“However my career goes now moving forward, I’ve proved a lot to myself and achieved so much. At the same time, I want to win more and [now I have] a sense of freedom. Hopefully I can top off a few more in the next few years.”
Photographs by Getty images/ quality sports images, stuart franklin, richard heathcote, andrew reddington, luke walker
