What Is LIV Golf? (& How It Differs From the PGA Tour)
LIV Golf is a Saudi-funded professional golf league, launched in 2022, that plays 54-hole events with no cut and a shotgun start instead of the PGA Tour's traditional 72-hole, cut-after-36-holes format, and it organizes players into teams that compete alongside their individual scores. It exists because Public Investment Fund (PIF) money pulled a chunk of the world's best players away from the PGA Tour with guaranteed contracts, and the two sides have been circling a "framework agreement" toward some kind of unified structure since mid-2023 without ever actually finishing the deal. Whatever you think of where the money came from, the on-course product is a genuinely different format from a normal tour stop — that part isn't spin.
Key Takeaways
- LIV Golf launched in June 2022, funded by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), and signed away top players — Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau among them — with guaranteed money the PGA Tour doesn't offer.
- Events are 54 holes across three rounds, played with no cut, using a shotgun start so every group tees off at once instead of in waves.
- Players compete individually and as part of a 4-man team (13 teams total); team scores are added together, and the season builds toward a separate Team Championship.
- The Official World Golf Ranking denied LIV ranking points in October 2023 over its closed-field, no-relegation format, and only began awarding limited points to top-10 LIV finishers starting in 2025.
- A PGA Tour–DP World Tour–PIF "framework agreement" was signed in May 2023, but years later it still hasn't produced a completed merger, and reporting in 2026 suggests PIF may not keep funding LIV past that season.
How Is LIV Golf's Team Format Different From a Regular Tournament?
Every PGA Tour event is, at bottom, 156 individuals playing their own ball against the field. LIV bolts a team layer on top of that. There are 13 teams of four players each — Crushers, Fireballs, 4Aces, and so on, most with a marquee name attached — and every player's individual score also counts toward their team's total for that event. Whoever posts the lowest individual score across the field wins that week outright, same as any stroke-play event, but the team math runs in parallel: all four scores from a team count in a given round, so a bad day from your fourth player actually costs the team something. It's a scoring format cousin to best ball, scramble, and shamble formats that recreational golfers already know from member-guest weekends, just run at a much higher level with real money on the team result too. The season funnels toward a Team Championship event where the format shifts again, mixing stroke play with a knockout bracket to crown a team champion separate from the individual points race.
What's a Shotgun Start, and Why Play 54 Holes With No Cut?
A shotgun start means every group begins simultaneously on a different hole — 18 groups spread across an 18-hole course, all teeing off within minutes of each other — rather than the staggered morning-to-afternoon tee times you'd see on a normal PGA Tour Thursday. It's a made-for-TV decision more than anything: the whole field is on the course at once, so broadcasters can cut to a leaderboard-moving shot on any hole at any moment instead of waiting for the last wave to reach contention late in the day. Pair that with the 54-hole, no-cut structure — three rounds, everybody who tees it up Friday plays all the way through Sunday — and you get a compressed, predictable three-day window with no weekend where half the field goes home. It's a real trade-off: no cut means no player gets eliminated for a bad Thursday, which is friendlier to the field but removes one of the things that makes stroke-play golf tense. Reporting heading into the 2026 season indicated LIV planned to shift its regular-season events from 54 holes to a 72-hole format going forward, closer to the traditional structure — worth confirming against that season's actual schedule rather than assuming the old format is permanent.
Who Actually Funds LIV Golf?
Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund — PIF, the country's sovereign wealth fund, run by governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan — bankrolled LIV Golf from its 2021 announcement through its June 2022 launch, and the guaranteed contracts that pulled players away from the PGA Tour came directly from that fund. This is also the single most-covered controversy around the league: critics call it sportswashing, an attempt to launder Saudi Arabia's human rights record through the credibility of professional golf, while LIV and its players have generally argued the money is no different in kind from other sovereign or sponsor-driven investment across professional sports. Neither argument really changes the format on the course, but it's the context that explains why nearly every major golf outlet frames LIV coverage the way it does, and it's worth knowing before reading anything else about the league.
Where Does the PGA Tour Truce Actually Stand?
In May 2023, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, then–DP World Tour CEO Keith Pelley, and PIF's Al-Rumayyan signed a five-page "framework agreement," announced publicly on June 6, 2023, that proposed folding the commercial operations of the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour (Europe's tour), and PIF's golf investments into one new for-profit entity, with the PGA Tour holding majority control regardless of how much PIF put in. That framework was a genuine surprise at the time — golf's civil war looked like it might just end at the negotiating table. It didn't, not cleanly. Years of follow-up talks, at least one meeting at the White House, and a parade of self-imposed deadlines have all come and gone without a finished deal; LIV Golf itself was never folded into that framework and still operates as a separate league. Then, in reporting from spring 2026, outlets including CNBC and CBS Sports covered word that PIF was preparing to stop funding LIV Golf after the 2026 season, calling the long-term investment "no longer consistent" with its current strategy — LIV's board reportedly formed a committee to look at outside investors, and the league postponed at least one 2026 event. LIV's leadership publicly pushed back on the idea the league was folding, but that's the kind of headline that changes fast, so treat anything specific about LIV's future beyond the 2026 season as unsettled rather than decided.
Can LIV Players Still Compete in the Majors?
Yes, but access is separate from the PGA Tour–LIV fight entirely — the four majors set their own qualification criteria and aren't run by either tour. Where LIV players actually got squeezed was the Official World Golf Ranking: in October 2023, the OWGR board unanimously rejected LIV's application for ranking points, citing the league's closed 54-hole no-cut format and its lack of player turnover — a 13-team league with almost no relegation doesn't generate the kind of results data the ranking math needs. That mattered because a chunk of major championship and top-tier event entry runs through world ranking position, so LIV players who fell out of the OWGR's top spots lost some of that pathway even as they kept cashing LIV paychecks. The OWGR softened its stance starting in 2025, awarding limited points to top-10 LIV finishers, but LIV players as a group still generally rank lower than their results would suggest under a fully open system. For more on how the four majors set their own separate entry rules in the first place, see our breakdown of what makes each major different.
Sources
Frequently Asked Questions
- LIV Golf launched in June 2022, with its first event at Centurion Club near London, after Saudi Arabia's PIF announced the league's formation in 2021.
- No. LIV Golf is a separate, independently operated league. A 2023 "framework agreement" proposed merging commercial interests between the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, and PIF, but that deal has not been completed, and LIV itself was never absorbed into it.
- LIV built its format around guaranteed fields and a compressed three-day broadcast window, so every player who starts an event finishes it — nobody misses the weekend the way they would on the PGA Tour or in most traditional stroke-play events.
- There are 13 teams of four players each. Every player's individual score also counts toward their team's total for the event, and the season builds toward a separate season-ending Team Championship.
- The Official World Golf Ranking denied LIV's application for points in October 2023, citing its closed-field, no-relegation format. Starting in 2025, the OWGR began awarding limited points to top-10 finishers at LIV events, a partial change from the original denial.
- Unclear. A framework agreement was signed in 2023, but years of negotiations haven't produced a finished merger, and 2026 reporting suggested PIF may pull its funding from LIV after that season — so the league's structure beyond 2026 isn't settled.