LIV Golf’s latest move surprised many in the golf world, but it went away Rory McIlroy with more questions than answers.
Tuesday, LIV Golf announced a startling change in its competitive format by moving all events to 72 holes, effective immediately. The move puts the breakaway league more in line with professional golf’s competitive structure and should clear one of the hurdles to gaining entry into the official world golf rankingswhich would provide LIV players with the world ranking points needed to gain access to major championships.
However, McIlroy, who spoke on Wednesday ahead of the 2025 Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at Yas Links, is unsure the drastic change from the rebel league will have the desired impact.
“I think it’s a special move because I think they could have gotten ranking points with three rounds,” McIlroy said. “I don’t think three rounds versus four rounds was what was holding them back.
“It certainly puts them more in line with traditional golf tournaments than what we’ve all been doing. It brings them back to not really being a disruptor and kind of falling more in line with what everybody else is doing. But if that’s what they felt they had to do to get ranking points, I think that’s what they had to do.”
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LIV Golf’s move to 72 holes has been rumored for some time, but it’s no less stunning. The move to 72 holes flies in the face of branding and initial selling points for the league, which aimed to simplify the viewing experience with a 54-hole, shotgun start tournament that would make golf more digestible in the age of short attention spans. However, LIV could never get over the fact that OWGR status gave the league access to major championship eligibility, and the league needs as many of its players in the majors as possible to try to attract new players and carve out a healthy chunk of pro golf market share.
While moving LIV to 72 holes could be the key to gaining access to the OWGR, McIlroy isn’t sure how much it will help the league now after years of its players falling in the world rankings.
“I think what’s difficult is that you have the LIV guys and you say they can get the world rankings, but because their strength of fields is going to be so weak, because a lot of the guys have already fallen in the rankings because they haven’t had a ranking point for so long, I don’t know if the ranking points are really going to benefit them,” McIlroy said. “It will be interesting to see how it develops.”
To McIlroy’s point, LIV currently has just three players – Tyrrell Hatton, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed – in the top 50 of the world rankings. Jon Rahm is currently ranked 71st. However, a change made to OWGR’s algorithm three years ago may lessen the blow to LIV. OWGR is used to calculate the strength of a tournament’s field based solely on its ranking. But in 2022, the OWGR changed its algorithm to include a metric called “Rating World Strokes Gained,” which factors not only your finish in the tournament, but also the scores you shoot in relation to the course you’re on. Sean Zak of GOLF wrote a detailed explainer of the metric when the news dropped in 2022.
