LIV Golf individual tournaments will now receive Official World Golf Ranking recognition, starting with the first event of their 2026 season in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The Official World Golf Ranking board made the announcement the day prior to the kickoff event of the slate of 13 individual tournaments. The winner of this week's LIV Golf Riyadh event will earn approximately 23 points, compared to 59 for the PGA Tour's WM Phoenix Open and 21 for the DP World Tour's Qatar Masters.
The OWGR will offer points to the top 10 finishers and ties in each of the individual LIV Golf events this season. No player outside of that cutoff will get points, with the OWGR reaffirming that there are a "number of areas where LIV Golf does not meet the eligibility standards set out by OWGR."
Keeping in mind those issues, LIV Golf events will be ranked based on OWGR’s standard classification of Small Field Tournaments -- that is, those with less than 75 players -- and, as such, face that cutoff at the top 10 players and ties.
The OWGR Governing Board said their goal 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."
While LIV Golf has increased its field size to 57 for this season and added a fourth competitive round (which wasn't a big sticking point anyhow), LIV Golf still solely has no-cut events and restricts the pathways to LIV Golf. The five players added in 2026 through the Asian Tour's International Series order of merit and the Promotions Q-School-style event does not offset the player turnover in the league, and it also doesn't address players being hand-picked to join the league (or leave it) based on recruiting rather than performance.
“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 Trevor Immelman, 2008 Masters winner and OWGR chairman, in a statement. "We fully recognised 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. I would like to acknowledge the substantial and constructive efforts made by Scott O’Neil and the team at LIV Golf. We look forward to working with them on implementing this approach with immediate effect for the 2026 LIV Golf season.”
The OWGR said the evaluation process will continue heading into 2027, as LIV Golf is apparently planning further format changes that could result in how their individual events are evaluated.
