What's next for LIV Golf, PGA Tour after latest move by upstart league?

On March 5, LIV Golf withdrew its application for accreditation from the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR). The bureaucratic technicality sounds tame, yet it actually portends war.

Attracting top talent with money is the LIV model. Money will always be the most prominent reason players move to LIV. PIF, the Saudi-backed investment fund behind LIV, has insane amounts of it to offer. 

The PGA can't and won't ever be able to compete with money. What it can offer that LIV can't is guaranteed access to the sport's most prestigious tournaments, the majors. LIV has the money, and PGA has the fame. If either side could offer both, it could destroy the other.

What does all of this have to do with rankings? While OWGR is a stand-alone entity, it originates from and is run by the heads of the majors. They created the OWGR rankings to provide a consistent, transparent way to determine who qualifies for their tournaments. Earning OWGR points is the ability to access majors. 

Greg Norman has recruited some of the biggest names in golf by cutting massive checks. If he could wield his blank checkbook and guarantee access to the four majors, the "have your cake and eat it too" package, the PGA tour would struggle to remain relevant.

It took almost 20 months to arrive at this point because OWGR rankings adjust slowly, using a two-year rolling time horizon. This gave LIV a year before most players' rankings fell to a level that compromised their ability to automatically qualify for majors. 

When the PGA and LIV announced their surprise marriage plans last spring, it delayed this zero-sum battle. Their prenup even included a clause stipulating LIV events would earn OWGR ranking points. Alas, the union has yet to be consummated, and the PGA has moved on to other suitors.  

How do they plan to settle all this? If LIV gets a no when it wants a yes, the courtroom is usually a good bet. But LIV needs to kneecap the rankings in the court of public opinion, not settle in a real court. 

The upstart league has known this from the start, and even while applying to join OWGR, it started a shadow campaign seeking to undermine it as unfair, based on a faulty algorithm and possibly anti-competitive.  

They are right on some of those points. In the summer of 2022, 10 PGA players in the OWGR top 100 defected to LIV. When they left, their average combined ranking was #21. Today, that average is #238. 

Excluding LIV players from OWGR rankings damages the ranking's legitimacy. This damage is starting to gain notice. And not just by Greg Norman's relatives.  

Some of the PGA's top players are growing more vocal about how bad it looks to have peers who they know to be much more talented than their ranking suggests. World No.6 Patrick Cantlay spoke out about this in a recent quote to Golf Digest.

"...and I don't know if broken is the right word, but I think that there's been so much uncertainty and change in the last couple years that it's inevitable that things need to be updated or things need to be changed."