LIV lottery? And then their was only one

Access reduced even further with invite to only winner of December Promotions event

LIV will only offer one spot instead of three via 2024 Promotions event in Riyadh (Jason Butler/Getty Images)

The LIV Golf League is seeking more competitiveness and more marketing opportunities for its teams, hence its announcement Thursday that it is cutting by two thirds the number of spots available to be earned through a December qualifying event known as LIV Golf Promotions.

While there is understandably some merit in each of the 13 teams having the ability to pick its own players — every other sport does it that way — this does nothing to help the idea of LIV being more open to outsiders.

Under the new plan, instead of three players qualifying for LIV Golf from the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, promotions event, there will be only one. He will be joined by the winner of the International Series Order of Merit winner.

Aside from those two players, there is no access to the league outside of being hand-picked by a captain.

Clearly LIV Golf has decided to forget about getting Official World Golf Ranking points. While it had pulled its application earlier this year — after being turned down a year ago and making no changes — there was still some hope that the powers that be on both sides of the divide might put their egos aside and their heads together to come up with a solution.

The OWGR has made it clear to LIV that its “player pathways” to the league are insufficient, not to mention the limited (or zero) turnover from week to week.

Now the league has doubled down on this, throwing all its weight behind its team concept, which has yet to catch on and appears eons away from being viable to potential big-money investors.

In LIV’s defense, the teams are charged with trying to be commercially viable. Doing so means recruiting as many name players as possible. Getting “stuck” with a promotions player is unlikely to help that cause.

Of the three players who made it out of the LIV Promotions event last year, two of them — Kalle Samooja and Kieran Vincent — failed to earn enough points in the individual standings to avoid being relegated. It means they have no place in the league in 2025 unless they make it back via the qualifying method.

The other player to make it, Japan’s Jinchiro Kozuma, finished 45th, hardly a robust season in a 54-player league.

It’s also fair to argue that this is why the PGA Tour went away from the romantic notion of Q-School to having more players qualify through the developmental Korn Ferry Tour. The numbers suggest that there is far more success on the big tour when you’ve had a full season of developmental seasoning as opposed to a one-week qualifier.

In the case of LIV Golf, its Dec. 12-14 promotions event — which will see different levels of qualification for the first two days with 20 players advancing to a final-day 36-hole shootout for the one spot — will see the top 10 players get exempt status on the International Series, a group of 10 elevated events on the Asian Tour that have $2 million purses.

Last year, former U.S. Amateur champion Andy Ogletree won the International Series Order of Merit to earn a spot on LIV Golf for 2024 and he is a member of Phil Mickelson’s HyFlyers team.

American John Catlin, a past winner on the DP World Tour, is the current points leader on the International Series and in line to get that LIV spot.

Anthony Kim will likely be retained despite his weak showing in 2024 (Chris Trotman/LIV Golf)

If LIV keeps its 54-player format, it is likely that the promotions player and International Series player would become wildcards, like Anthony Kim and Hudson Swafford were this year. Swafford is not expected back and there are rumblings that Kim will be offered a spot on one of the teams.

Kim never finished better than 36th in 10 LIV starts this year and four times was outside the top 50. Bringing him onto a team won’t help sway the meritocracy supporters. Nor will lowering the number of qualification spots.

All of this, however, could change at any time. LIV has not fully committed to having only 54 players per event next year. Only four events in its 14-event schedule have been announced. Rumblings about a deal with the PGA Tour still abound, and while that won’t change anything for 2025, it might for 2026.

Stay tuned.