Robert TheodorsonThis is a two-part review of the 2025 LIV Golf Season. The second part of our review will be the awards and superlatives for the players and teams that dazzled us throughout the season.
Five Things LIV Got Right, and Five Things LIV Got Wrong
Right: The Tournaments Preceding Major Championships
We’re talking about tournaments that directly preceded three of the major championships in 2025: LIV Miami (The Masters), LIV Virginia (U.S. Open), and LIV Andalucia (The Open).
Nothing drives general interest in golf more than a major championship, and LIV did a fantastic job coordinating these three tournaments a week before their respective majors.
Conveniently geographically located to their corresponding major championship, the golfers participating in the majors did not waste time on travel and were able to immediately start gearing up for the major championship almost immediately after their LIV tournament concluded. We saw in one instance that DJ arrived in Oakmont mere hours after contending strong at LIV Virginia.
LIV Miami and the PGA Tour’s new Miami Championship will be a storyline for 2026. The Blue Monster is capable of hosting two professional tournaments, but LIV has yet to commit to returning to Doral for 2026. If they do return at the same time as last year, the course will host both tours within a month’s time, sandwiched between The 2026 Masters.
Wrong: The Individual Championship Makes No Sense
Joaquin Niemann won five tournaments this season. Jon Rahm won zero. Jon Rahm is your 2025 LIV Golf Champion.
The points structure is in obvious and desperate need of an overhaul.
LIV could take notes from the OWGR in that when a golfer wins a tournament, they are awarded many more points than the runner-up. For example: When Rory McIlroy won The Masters, he was awarded 100 points to Justin Rose’s 60.
In LIV, the winner of a tournament receives 40 points and the runner-up 30. This is in essence how Jon Rahm was able to whisk away a season championship by never winning a thing.
The winner of each tournament simply does not get enough points to separate themselves from the other two podium finishers. There is no comparable in sports where one can win an ultimate championship without winning a match before said championship.
The PGA Tour also faced this issue with their FedExCup standings where Tommy Fleetwood beat out Scottie Scheffler for the penultimate championship. Nobody minded the result as Fleetwood was years overdue for his first win, but naming anybody over Scheffler the season-long champion is disingenuous.
Right: Night Golf in LIV Riyadh
An experiment that could have gone horribly wrong turned out to be a resounding success.
Not only was the tournament a fun one to watch, but unlike much of the early season, it was easy to watch as well, more on that in our next section.
Adrian Meronk, the 2024 addition who reversed the fortunes of the hapless Cleeks, showed off his star power by beating eventual season-long champion Jon Rahm and LIV Indianapolis winner Sebastian Munoz by two strokes under flood lights in the desert.
The Top 10 of Riyadh also featured eventual winners Dean Burmester, Marc Leishman, Sergio Garcia, and Bryson DeChambeau. LIV had excellent representation of their star players right from the get-go, and the leaderboard appropriately foreshadowed what viewers would be treated to down the stretch.
For a tournament that could have, and probably should have failed, LIV defied the odds and turned Riyadh into a fabulous opening showcase.
Wrong: The Team Championship Feels Random and Unimportant
The Team Championship is interesting and important if you are one of the team captains being cut a nice big fat check for winning. For everyone else, including the fans, it isn’t.
Since all thirteen teams get a shot at the team championship, a team can technically come in last place with zero points and go on to win it all in August, much like how the individual championship is currently set up.
There isn’t another sport in the world where this occurs. The NFL, MLB, NHL, and MLS all have worthy (or worthy-enough) teams move on to the playoffs, and the cellar dwellers get to go home early. Those who aren’t up to the task are eliminated at some point before the grand finale.
In the PGA Tour the Top 70 players compete in a three-tournament playoff run where twenty of the field are cut in each of the first two-thirds of the tournament.
In LIV, everyone gets more or less an equal chance no matter what they did in the regular season. Even though this lapse in common sense was exposed last season when the last place Iron Heads bested multiple superior teams, LIV’s response was to have a Wednesday play-in match so a team like the Iron Heads (it was them this time) don’t spoil the fun again.
Right: For Half the Season, The Field Was Ultra-Competitive
I cannot knock Joaquin Niemann for winning almost half the tournaments on the 2025 season. On the PGA Tour, everyone expects Scottie Scheffler to win, and he usually does. The same was true for LIV in which Niemann won an unprecedented five tournaments in one season.
Other than Niemann, nobody else won more than once, but we did get to see the stars on display throughout the season.
Fans were treated to seeing Adrian Meronk, Sergio Garcia, Marc Leishman, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed, Talor Gooch, Dean Burmester, and Sebastian Munoz put their skills on show for the world to see and each bring home a new trophy.
While all professional sports are driven by their respective superstars, it was good to see LIV put up a number of worthy competitors on display so the season didn’t get too stale.
Even older stars like Bubba Watson and Phil Mickelson, who retain tremendous followings, had a number of close calls.
Watson, who was almost removed from the league last season, came close to winning at least twice and finished the season in the Top 10 three times. Mickelson, who sat out the season opener, treated fans to a number top finishes before losing steam at the end of the summer.
Wrong: The Drop Zone, or Relegation, Needs to be Expanded and Enforced
Policy without enforcement is useless.
There are quite a few members of the field that fans wouldn’t have minded seeing get the boot after spending the majority of the season at the bottom of the standings.
The Drop Zone, or anyone who finished in 49th place or worse, was populated by seven full-time LIV Golfers, most notably Henrik Stenson, and six substitutes like John Catlin and Ollie Schniederjans.
2025 felt like another season where at least twice as many guys should have been on the way out.
I don’t think anyone can honestly say that guys like Kevin Na, Ian Poulter, or Lee Westwood were seriously giving it their all throughout the season. Their performances reminded me of Scott Vincent who for two years in a row only showed up when he was in danger of being relegated, which he eventually was.
There are guys like Jason Kokrak and Matt Wolff who are genuinely trying their best, but would likely be out of a job by now elsewhere.
Then there are interesting cases like Brendan Steele and Danny Lee who have both won a LIV tournament, but have spent the other 99% of their time on LIV just trying not to finish in the bottom 10.
Last season, LIV spared Bubba Watson, who repaid the league by putting in a fantastic 2025 season. Branden Grace was brought back by his team (which was a highly dubious decision at the time) and finished very strong.
The point is that the decision for LIV to go against their own policies paid off this time, but they should not expect to catch lightning in a bottle twice.
There are a lot of guys abusing the points system that are just here for the guaranteed paydays and nothing else. Viewers do not want to see those types of golfers as they only give credence to the argument that LIV is a retirement league and the players are in it for the money.
Only time can tell if LIV will decide to abide by their own rules this time around.
Right: The Youth Movement
LIV failed to sign another star player away from the PGA Tour for the 2025 season, instead opting to rely on potential and youth, and the move paid off.
Banking on young stars like Caleb Surratt, Josele Ballester, and Tom McKibbin, the league showed it is willing to wait and develop young talent into championship-calibre players who built themselves up somewhere other than the PGA Tour.
To a degree, the plan did backfire a bit as the Iron Heads’ Yubin Jang and Cleeks’ Freddy Kjettrup found themselves relegated out of the league after one season.
The fact that the league has those three aforementioned young players who can and will compete in majors (Surratt needs to find a way to qualify first) for years to come is encouraging and gives the league more credibility with young golfers looking to go pro.
LIV’s advantage is that it can create a direct pipeline from the NCAA to the league. This is attractive to college golfers who don’t want to grind it out for years on the Korn Ferry Tour, just hoping for a spot on the PGA Tour.
The correct path going forward would be for additional teams to invest in top young talent while simultaneously offering established stars a chance to join the league.
Wrong: Golf Fatigue After The Open is a Real Thing
Most fans don’t care about golf after The Open has concluded, and that’s just the honest truth.
It’s not fair or right, but The Open occurs far too early in the summer, and afterwards nobody really pays too much attention to tournaments after the season’s final major.
We were pleased to see the crowds show up in Chicago and Indianapolis to have a good time and enjoy a fun weekend, but I can’t imagine there was a lot of people who tuned in to watch golf that didn’t really count towards much minus the individual championship (see above).
Both tours need to work with the USGA and the R&A to see if these tournaments can be pushed back. The majors feel too close and congested.
A major championship doesn’t feel special when there’s literally less than a month between The PGA Championship and the U.S. Open. There’s no anticipation, no buildup; this must change.
If the powers that be will not change, then LIV needs to start moving their tournaments up in the year. Winter and early spring seem to belong solely to the PGA Tour as LIV’s first American tournament didn’t even start until April while the PGA Tour was doing it’s weekly thing in Hawaii and California, and yes people are very hungry for televised golf in January and February.
Right: The 2026 Schedule Early Release, So Far
After four seasons, it is painfully obvious that some tournaments are more successful and watchable than others. I previously mentioned what big hits LIV Miami, Virginia, and Andalucia are, but bringing back Riyadh and Adelaide to start the season is huge as well.
If Riyadh remains untouched, I know I’m in for a treat. Likewise, while the tournament in Australia isn’t very watchable for the American audience due to the severe time difference, I know for a fact that everyone down under is having a good time.
The only surprises are Singapore and South Africa, but for different reasons.
I think most folks could live without Hong Kong in 2026, we noticed how painfully empty the course was during the match, but Singapore suffers from a similar problem.
South Africa is a great idea; I’m just amazed that LIV got through all the bureaucratic red tape to get this tournament green-lit. This was likely a tournament three to four years in the making.
Changes that could make the 2026 season even better include:
- Starting the American circuit earlier, likely after Adelaide, and taking place in Southern California or Arizona.
- Moving a post-Open tournament to earlier in the season. LIV is already committed to UK and Indianapolis, so Chicago would make more sense in spring or early summer.
- Finally, make the move to expand into Japan.
Wrong: Television Coverage Must Improve
Anecdotally, when I talk to golfers on the course and the subject of the weekend’s tournaments come up, almost everyone I’ve encountered has no idea how to actually watch LIV Golf. I’m not surprised, as I found it a baffling ordeal myself for more than half the 2025 season.
Taking away the free LIV Golf + app which streamed every tournament in favour of a pay-per-view model makes sense when viewership is rivalling the PGA Tour or you can compete with whatever other sport is on television.
It’s a horrible mistake to remove free viewership when your league is in its 4th season and you’re still desperately trying to build your fanbase.
Trying to watch a LIV tournament in 2025 consisted of figuring out if the tournament was being aired on the FOX Sports App, FS1, FS2, or FOX, and sometimes it was a mixture of all four.
The app would shut down after an hour of ‘free’ preview and FS2 is available to just over 62% of cable-TV subscribers. A lot of the tournaments were just not viewable to American audiences.
FOX got what they wanted, which was essentially filler content before the start of the NFL season and a distraction from pre-October baseball.
LIV was lucky if folks knew they had to change the channel or switch to the app at a certain time to see the finale of a tournament. Nothing was properly explained; the tournaments aired on three different channels and an app, and folks were probably wondering why YouTube would only let you watch pre-round coverage.
To this day, it remains the most bizarre way I’ve ever encountered trying to watch sports.
