Despite getting OWGR points, LIV still pouts

Top-10 finishers will get world ranking points, which is different because LIV's different

Jon Rahm and LIV golfers will be playing for OWGR points in Riyadh this week (LIV Golf)

LIV Golf is finally getting Official World Golf Ranking points … and it’s still not happy about it.

The OWGR announced Tuesday that it is accepting LIV Golf into the men’s global ranking system effective immediately with this week’s season-opening event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But the points on offer will come with considerable restrictions that will see only the top-10 finishers in LIV Golf events receiving ranking points, “which recognizes there are a number of areas where LIV Golf does not meet the eligibility standards set out by OWGR.”

Despite the significant acknowledgment from the OWGR and its detailed explanation for why LIV’s unique situation comes with equally unique limitations, LIV wasn’t pleased that it didn’t get everything it wanted.

“We acknowledge this long‑overdue moment of recognition, which affirms the fundamental principle that performance on the course should matter, regardless of where the competition takes place,” LIV’s statement said.

“However, this outcome is unprecedented. Under these rules, a player finishing 11th in a LIV Golf event is treated the same as a player finishing 57th. Limiting points to only the top 10 finishers disproportionately harms players who consistently perform at a high level but finish just outside that threshold, as well as emerging talent working to establish themselves on the world stage — precisely the players a fair and meritocratic ranking system is designed to recognize.

“No other competitive tour or league in OWGR history has been subjected to such a restriction. We expect this is merely a first step toward a structure that fully and fairly serves the players, the fans, and the future of the sport.”

In its statement announcing LIV’s inclusion, the OWGR spelled out the basis for the restrictions since LIV still does not operate a league with the same merit-based standards as all other global tours.

“Ranking points will be allocated to the top-10 finishers (and ties) in LIV Golf’s individual stroke play events, which recognizes there are a number of areas where LIV Golf does not meet the eligibility standards set out by OWGR,” it said.

“LIV Golf events will be ranked based on OWGR’s standard classification of ‘Small Field Tournaments’ with a ‘Ranking points distribution cutoff’ applied to award points to players who finish in the top 10 (and ties). Players who finish lower than 10th will not receive OWGR points and those points will not be redistributed to the players finishing 10th or higher.

“The Board’s overriding aim was to identify an equitable way of ranking the best men’s players in the world, including the top performing players in LIV Golf, while taking account of the eligibility standards that LIV Golf does not currently meet and the fact that it operates differently from other ranked tours in a number of respects.”

Those differences are numerous and substantial:

• LIV’s average field size of 57 for 2026 is lower than the minimum of 75 set out in OWGR regulations;

• It operates exclusively no-cut events;

• Its restrictive pathways to join LIV Golf include only two spots filled from the Asian Tour’s International Series and three from a “closed” promotions event which does not offset the turnover of players exiting the league;

• Self-selection of contracted players, with numerous players being recruited rather than earning their place on the tour;

• The addition/removal of players to/from teams based on their nationality rather than for meritocratic reasons.

Trevor Immelman — the independent non-voting OWGR chairman whose Board includes representatives from Augusta National (Will Jones), PGA European Tour Group (Guy Kinnings), PGA of America (Kerry Haigh), PGA Tour (Jay Monahan), The R&A (Mark Darbon), USGA (Mike Whan) and participating eligible tours (Nick Dastey) — said the OWGR worked hard to incorporate the fairest comparison between disparate tours.

“This has been an incredibly complex and challenging process and one which we have devoted a huge amount of time and energy to resolving in the seven months since LIV Golf submitted their application,” said Immelman, the 2008 Masters winner who took over the reins of the OWGR last year from Peter Dawson. “We fully recognized the need to rank the top men’s players in the world but at the same time had to find a way of doing so that was equitable to the thousands of other players competing on other tours that operate with established meritocratic pathways.

“We believe we have found a solution that achieves these twin aims and enables the best-performing players at LIV Golf events to receive OWGR points.”

During the time since LIV re-applied after withdrawing its application in 2023 after an initial rejection from the OWGR, Immelman has been in frequent communication with LIV CEO Scott O’Neil attempting to bridge the gap between the head of the Saudi-based league and the seven voting members of the board.

The OWGR mathematics are complicated, but the winner of this week’s event in Riyadh will get roughly 23 world ranking points compared to just more than 59 for the PGA Tour’s WM Phoenix Open winner and nearly 21 for the winner of the Qatar Masters on the DP World Tour. That’s based on LIV’s adjusted field rating of 108.29129 compared to the PGA’s Tour’s 344.55263 and the DPWT’s 121.74787. Since the OWGR is not reallocating all of those 108 points to the top 10, only about 68 percent of the points (73.48, or more with ties for 10th place) are being awarded to the top-10 finishers. The distribution to the top 10 is roughly in line with Data Golf’s points distributions from 2025.

Despite LIV’s gripes at being treated differently because it is different, the points on offer will be very meaningful to its consistently top finishers like Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Joaquin Niemann and Tyrrell Hatton.

OWGR experts — who simulated what the world rankings would currently look like if LIV golfers had been getting this top-10 allocation of points in the 2024-25 ranking window — show that Rahm would be ranked No. 11 instead of 97th, DeChambeau 14th instead of 33rd and Niemann 16th instead of 155th and that 11 LIV golfers would be ranked inside the top 100 instead of six.

This is significant because the OWGR is a key criteria for all of the major championships when it comes to qualifying for the world’s biggest events. The Masters takes the top 50 in the OWGR at the end of the calendar year and the week prior to the tournament. The PGA Championship does not have a published OWGR exemption category but typically takes all players among the top 100. The U.S. Open uses the top 60 at two points in the weeks leading up to the tournament, while the British Open takes the top 50 two months before the championship.

At the time that LIV Golf was denied OWGR points in 2023, then-chairman Peter Dawson explained that the decision was “entirely technical. LIV players are self-evidently good enough to be ranked. They’re just not playing in a format where they can be ranked equitably with the other 24 tours and thousands of players to compete on them.”

In his letter to LIV Golf at the time, Dawson said that 54-hole, no-cut events as well as smaller field sizes were not deal breakers, but that “in order to obtain inclusion in the OWGR system, it is necessary for you to develop a structure that invites new players on objective, recent performance and relegates under-performing players more quickly and equitably.”

The OWGR accounts for no-cut events but giving fewer points and on Tuesday also adjusted its points distribution to credit scheduled or weather-shortened 54-hole and 36-hole events with 75 percent and 50 percent of allocated points, respectively.

LIV Golf will play 72-hole tournaments this year and increased its fields from what started as 48 players in 2022 to now 57 players. The move to 72 holes was championed by Rahm but not embraced by DeChambeau.

“It’s definitely changed away from what we had initially been told it was going to be. So there is some movement that we’ve all been, I would say, interested in and going ‘why that movement?’ Because we were told it was going to be this,” DeChambeau told Today’s Golfer ahead of the start in Riyadh.

“So that’s definitely made us have some different thoughts about it. I’ve got a contract for this year, and we’ll go through it there and see what happens after that. … Is it what we ultimately signed up for? No. So I think we’re supposed to be different, so I’m a little indifferent to it right now. Hopefully it weighs positively on me over the course of time but you never know. I’m not sure. We didn’t sign up to play for 72.”

LIV also expanded its “relegation zone” from six players to 11, meaning those who finish from spots 47 to 57 in the individual standings will be dropped from the league in 2027 and be required to earn their way back via a Promotions event (3 spots) or via the International Series on the Asian Tour (2 spots).

A point of concern for the OWGR is the fact that LIV Golf dropped four players who finished better than its relegation zone but were replaced by hand-picked players in order to better brand their teams. For instance, Jinichiro Kozuma finished 32nd in the 2025 standings despite missing the first five events due to injury, but the Japanese player was dropped because LIV rebranded his team as all-Korean. In only eight starts, Kozuma finished ahead of retained players such as Graeme McDowell, Martin Kaymer, Peter Uihlein, Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter. His best finish was a tie for second at the Dallas event and he posted two other top 10s.

That doesn’t jibe with other merit-based tours. The PGA Tour doesn’t dump the 88th ranked golfer in FedEx Cup points and replace him with someone else just because it feels like it.

“When you look at the OWGR and how it’s made up with 25-plus eligible tours around the world, thousands of golfers that are ranked around the world, it’s about meritocracy,” Immelman said at the PNC Championship in December. “That’s one of the beauties of our sport and the beauty of the professional game is earning your way onto a tour, fighting to keep your job on that tour. So it’s really been more along those lines of working with them on understanding their league from that standpoint: meritocracy, promotion and relegation and the self-selection aspect of how their league is made up.”

Acknowledging that LIV Golf is planning further changes for the 2027 season, the OWGR will continue to evaluate the league as it evolves against the ranking system’s eligibility standards, which could result in an increase in points, a decrease in points or removal from the system altogether.