When the Official World Golf Ranking finally opened the door a crack to LIV Golf last week, they didn’t exactly throw a party in Saudi Arabia to celebrate the news. There was a clear reaction of “yeah … but” coming from LIV circles as they kicked off the breakaway league’s fifth season in Riyadh.
“We acknowledge this long-overdue moment of recognition …” read the opening line of LIV’s response statement to the decision that the OWGR would give world ranking points to the top-10 individual finishers each week.
“However, this outcome is unprecedented. … No other competitive tour or league in OWGR history has been subjected to such a restriction.”
That’s true enough, but it’s also true that no other tour in the history of golf is quite like LIV. OWGR chairman Trevor Immelman brokered a Solomonic solution for getting his board and the system to recognize a league that has merit even if it’s not a full-fledged meritocracy in the way that golf tours around the world have always operated.
Perhaps after the latest rankings came out following LIV’s inaugural counting event, the league might change its tune and come to better appreciate the value of the gift it received from the OWGR and what it can mean to the league’s hungriest young players.
Elvis Smylie, the unquestionably talented 23-year-old Australian left-hander, shone in his LIV debut under the lights in Riyadh with a one-shot victory over league heavyweight Jon Rahm. That win earned Smylie roughly 23 world-ranking points – not nearly the 58 that Chris Gotterup received for winning the PGA Tour’s WM Phoenix Open but more than the 20.1 points former LIV star Patrick Reed got for winning the DP World Tour’s Qatar Masters.
With that relatively modest haul, Smylie climbed from 134th in the world to No. 77. That is not insignificant.
Suddenly Elvis heads home to Australia this week for the popular LIV Golf Adelaide event knowing that another big finish in front of a raucous home crowd could put him on the brink of the top 50 and a potential chance to qualify for the Masters in April.
“I have goals that I want to achieve from a ranking point of view, and I’m continuing to progress in the direction that I want to and play my way into majors, which is something that I’m very passionate about doing,” Smylie said Tuesday in Australia.
Rahm did alright, too, collecting 13.3 points for another runner-up finish, which moved him up from a grossly undervalued No. 97 to 67th and on the path closer to where he belongs. Considering Rahm never finished outside the top 10 in 13 LIV starts last season (including four runner-up finishes), simulations show that he would likely be in the top 10 of the OWGR right now if LIV had been receiving the same points in the last two seasons.
Peter Uihlein, who moved from 199th to 154th in the world ranking by finishing third in Riyadh, seemed to understand more than anyone else on LIV just how valuable getting any OWGR points is for the league.
“I might be one of the few that like it,” Uihlein said. “We have more world-ranking points today than we did yesterday. I saw the winner gets 23 points (in Riyadh). In Qatar, he gets 20. In my mind we’re the second-best tour in the world right now. Obviously, there are things that probably need to get worked out with the top 10 or whatever, but the reality is we have more points today than we did yesterday. I’m all for it.”
That’s the kind of attitude that should incentivize the young players LIV has been increasingly going after the last two seasons. Finishing top-10 in a LIV event means something now, and if you string enough of those together it can add up to opportunities to play in majors.
“It’s fantastic that we’re getting points. It’s fantastic that we’re being recognized in a way. With that said, I don’t like how we’re not being treated the same as every other tour.” – Jon Rahm
That’s a real carrot for players such as Smylie, Joaquin Niemann, Tom McKibbin, David Puig, Michael La Sasso, Caleb Surratt and Josele Ballester. This is a chance to really distinguish themselves and prove their merit in a league that now means a little more than just money.
“Yeah, it’s definitely a step in the right direction,” Smylie said. “I think there’s still more work to be done, but I think … everyone here at LIV have done a really good job of being able to give us players the opportunity to be able to benefit from ranking points, which will therefore get us into the majors, which is incredibly important, for me especially. But it’s great that we’re able to do that on a platform like LIV now.”
Said Cam Smith, the 2022 Open and Players champion of Smylie: “I genuinely think he can be the best golfer in the world. He’s got all the tools of the trade. He just needs to keep doing what he’s doing and knuckle down. … He has to decide where he goes from here, and I think it can only go one way, and it’s better.”
OWGR will help define that, even if catching No. 1 Scottie Scheffler might be out of reach for those not playing the PGA Tour unless they win multiple majors. Rahm, who has ascended to world No. 1 before, understands the value of being a part of the system even if he wishes it was more.
“It’s fantastic that we’re getting points. It’s fantastic that we’re being recognized in a way,” Rahm said in Riyadh. “With that said, I don’t like how we’re not being treated the same as every other tour. It seems like the rules that have been in place don’t really apply to us, with only 10 of us only getting points. It doesn’t seem fair. The small fields out there throughout the course of the year, their players get full points.
“There’s work to be done. While it’s good for some people, it could cause some players to actually lose world ranking points instead of gaining them because finishing 11th is basically a missed cut, and we’re already adding to the divisor.”
That’s certainly an issue, as Talor Gooch got nothing for finishing a stroke behind those tied for ninth last week and fell 11 spots further into irrelevance at 1,579th in the world. But the old adage “play better” applies, and a big season on LIV could bring Gooch back to respectability.
Of course, there are good reasons the OWGR isn’t treating LIV the same way it treats every other tour, and it took great pains to spell that all out very plainly when it announced LIV’s restricted inclusion. It classifies LIV Golf events as “small field tournaments” with a ranking points distribution cutoff applied.
“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 substantial. LIV’s average field size of 57 is lower than the minimum of 75 (average) set out in OWGR regulations. It operates exclusively no-cut events. Its restrictive pathways to join (only five spots filled from the Asian Tour’s International Series and a closed promotions event) do not offset the turnover of underperforming players. And arguably most importantly, its recruitment and self-selection of contracted players flies in the face of golf’s qualifying standards on all other tours.
LIV should be very thankful it got what it got. And it can improve that by expanding true relegation and qualifying pathways into its league.
“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,” said Immelman, the 2008 Masters champion and CBS golf analyst who took the reins of the OWGR last year from Peter Dawson.
“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.”
LIV should be very thankful it got what it got. And it can improve that by expanding true relegation and qualifying pathways into its league. It has known this since its first application for ranking points was rejected and Dawson thoughtfully spelled out 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 underperforming players more quickly and equitably.”
LIV expanded its “relegation zone” from six players to 11 in 2026, 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 its promotions event or the International Series standings. Whether it creates 11 qualifying pathways to fill those spots next year remains to be seen, but it will need to do better to convince the OWGR to expand its points on offer.
Like Dawson before him, Immelman made it clear that LIV will need to do more in order to be treated on equal footing with other tours.
“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 in December at the PNC Championship. “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.”
It will never be the equal of the PGA Tour, but if LIV takes advantage of its OWGR opportunity, it could actually become a viable and sustainable global rival.