Gregorio De Leo wins card for DP World Tour
Gregorio De Leo, after an excellent round all the way up the leaderboard, finished eighth with 408 (67 66 69 71 68 67, -20) strokes in the Final Stage of the Qualifying School, played over 108 holes, and earned one of the twenty Category 18 ‘cards’ for the DP World Tour 2026 awarded to the top-ranked players. The others, from 21st to 60th place, got category 21 for the major circuit, with fewer opportunities to play, and the full ‘card’ for the 2026 HotelPlanner Tour.
At Infinitum Golf in Tarragona, Spain, where the 156 competitors teeing off took turns for 72 holes on the two courses at Lakes Course (par 71) and Hills Course (par 72) and the 60 who made the cut finished on the first course, South Africa’s Zander Lombard dominated with 391 (64 69 67 64 63, -37). He closed with a 63 (-8, nine birdies, one bogey), the best partial of the round, leaving Canada’s Aaron Cockerill, India’s Shubhankar Sharma and Australia’s Connor McKinney, second with 404 (-24), at 13 strokes, and Portugal’s Daniel Rodrigues and England’s Nathan Kimsey, fifth with 406 (-22), at 15. In seventh with 407 (-21) was French Alps Tour member Quentin Debove, while De Leo was joined by American Davis Bryant, Zimbabwean Benjamin Follett-Smith and Englishman Matthew Baldwin.
The tournament was held in seventh place.
Three other Azzurri participated in the tournament: Lorenzo Scalise, 29th with 413 (-15), Jacopo Vecchi Fossa, 49th with 418 (-10), and Matteo Cristoni, 60th with 422 (-6). For all of them the ‘card’ for the 2026 HotelPlanner Tour, but the first two already had it, Scalise because he was confirmed in this year’s Road To Mallorca (order of merit) and Vecchi Fossa for earning it with the second place in the Alps Tour ranking. As for Cristoni, he achieved it by starting from Stage 1, won at Golfclub Schloss Ebreichsdorf in Austria, and going through Stage 2 (16th at Desert Springs Golf Club in Almeria , Spain).
Gregorio De Leo took the ‘card’ for the second consecutive year at Qualifying School, after finishing 13th last year in the event won by Edoardo Molinari. In season he finished 130th in the order of merit (out of the 115 who were confirmed to stay on the tour) acquiring category 10, which would not allow him many appearances, while now with category 18 he will have more chances. In the final round he shot a partial 67 (-4) with four birdies with no bogey.
The Spaniard Gonzalo Fernandez Castaño, seven wins including two in the Italian Open (2007, 2012), France’s Julien Quesne (2), also scoring in the Italian Open (2013), failed to return to the circuit, where they also played leading roles, Gregory Bourdy (4) and Alexander Levy (5), Denmark’s Lucas Bjerregaard (2), Scotland’s Marc Warren (4), England’s Chris Wood (3) and Oliver Wilson (2), Germany’s Yannik Paul (1), Paraguay’s Fabrizio Zanotti (2), and South Africa’s Justin Harding (2) and George Coetzee (5).
A check for 5,000 euros out of a prize pool of 120,000 euros went to Lombard.
