Is LIV doing enough to get OWGR?
Getting official world ranking accreditation would be a boon for the rival league
Jon Rahm would be top 10 in world is his LIV results counted (Michael Miller/ISI Photos via Getty Images)
For LIV Golf, abandoning its brand would seemingly be for a single reason — to get Official World Golf Ranking accreditation.
The 54-hole league — whose very name is the Roman numeral for 54 — surprisingly abandoned that part of its “additive” league when it announced last week that all of its events in 2026 will be contested over 72 holes.
While that is the traditional way that most professional golf events have been staged, there have been plenty of 54-hole tournaments throughout history. The LPGA Tour still conducts several each year.
Playing 54 holes undoubtedly led to ridicule — especially when players trotted out the mantra that the league offered them the opportunity to play less — but the idea behind it for LIV was sound: it wanted to be different and offer something else to the golf landscape.
LIV interwoven team element, 54 holes, no cuts and shotgun starts might not be for everyone, but wasn’t that the point of doing it? To give golf fans a different product than the same old PGA Tour?
And yet, the 72-hole issue hung over the league, especially as it attempted to get OWGR accreditation. While it was deemed to be something that could be worked around, there seems to be some thought that OWGR is telling LIV to do so. Why not do it for a handful of events? Wouldn’t that suffice?
If playing 72 holes is the answer to accreditation, this will be a win for LIV Golf.
“The writing’s on the wall that it’s going to be a matter of time before LIV (does) get points,” said Paul McGinley, a former DP World Tour board member, in an interview with bunkered.co.uk. “It’s a legitimate competitor for both the DP World Tour and the PGA Tour. Because of the huge amount of money that’s put in front of the players and relatively weak fields, the opportunity to make a lot of money is very, very clear. I think they’re a legitimate threat and they’re a legitimate competitor to the DP and the PGA tours.”
It does seem the massive up-front signing bonuses are now a thing of the past. But LIV Golf is still playing for $20 million every week among limited individual fields with no cut and another $10 million for the teams. A middling player who has only modest success can easily make $2 million or a year more plus have his expenses covered by the team.
The missing piece is OWGR, which has thwarted several players from being significantly higher than their current world ranking. Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Joaquin Niemann would all likely be top 10 players in the world if results from their LIV events counted.
While there has been a huge drop off in points for LIV members, they are still rated via strokes gained world rating, which helps OWGR establish its field strength. With that, various estimates put a LIV Golf event at receiving between 22 and 26 points to the winner. That’s roughly half of a typical PGA Tour event, but it’s not nothing. It’s more than many DP World Tour events receive and more than the Korn Ferry Tour.
And it’s certainly more than the Asian Tour’s PIF-backed International Series, where Tom McKibbin moved into the top 100 in the world with his recent victory at the Hong Kong Open, which also came with a Masters invite.
What’s unclear is if LIV Golf has done enough regarding the bigger issues that OWGR made public two years ago when its initially denied LIV’s original application to be included in the ranking system.
“I think the self-perpetuating thing is an issue with the world rankings — (the same) 54 players playing, all sharing points among themselves,” McGinley said in the Bunkered interview. “There’s obviously two or three elite players on there that seem to be coming in the top three every single week that they play, which they wouldn’t be doing if they were playing on the PGA Tour which is a lot deeper in terms of talent.
“There’ll have to be an algorithm and a formula. It’ll probably come out that there will be a lot less points available on LIV events than there will be on the PGA Tour. The depth of the PGA Tour fields, even the smaller fields of 70 players, the depth of those is much, much stronger than the depth of LIV.”
Sure, but there’s no guarantee that there will be some “formula” enacted. That is likely the point of LIV going to 72 holes. That might have been where some mathematical equation was necessary to account for one less round.
The bigger issues have always been player access, promotion/relegation and field variance.
Are recent changes that have seen LIV increase it’s number of spots via a promotions event and the International Series standings from two to four each year enough? Was having six bottom-performing players relegated out of the league enough? What about the continued lack of field variance from week to week? There’s been talk of having a weekly qualifier, But again, is that enough?
We shall see. LIV’s 2026 season doesn’t begin until February.