Golfers ranked below 48th will be relegated at the end of the 2025 season.
For the last four seasons, LIV Golf has served, in part, as the greatest late-career victory lap in sports history. Fortysomething golf legends whose best days came in the late 2000s and early 2010s earned tens of millions for three days’ worth of work a dozen or so times a year, regardless of how well they performed.
But it’s a new era in LIV Golf, and that means the avalanche of cash without conditions is ending. With two individual tournaments remaining, including this weekend’s Chicago event, some notable names are right on LIV’s cut line … and this year, LIV Golf apparently really, really plans to cut them loose.
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The LIV Golf tour includes 56 players, and at the end of the season, anyone ranked below 48th is “relegated.” (That’s LIV’s term, although unlike in, say, English Premier League soccer, there’s no lower LIV tour for “relegated” players.) Relegated players will lose their full-time slot for the 2026 season, though they will have the opportunity to play their way back onto the tour.
It all sounds properly meritocratic, unlike the no-cut format of LIV’s weekly events. But last year, Bubba Watson and Branden Grace both ended the season below the cut line … and yet somehow managed to stay on rosters for this season. Both are safe this season because of some top-5 finishes, but the fact that they’re still in the mix at all given the supposed finality of the “cut zone” is enough to raise questions.
This year, though, there apparently may not be the same wiggle room. Notable players below the cut line include Ian Poulter, Mito Pereira and wild card Anthony Kim, while Lee Westwood and Henrik Stenson are ranked 46th and 47th, respectively. The Telegraph reported that players have been informed that there will be no Bubba-esque leniency this year; cut means cut.
It’s likely no coincidence that this hard line comes as LIV Golf is reapplying for Official World Golf Ranking points. The intractability of LIV’s player movement — if there’s no cut and no chance of losing your playing slot, there’s no risk — was a key reason for the OWGR’s rejection of LIV’s prior application for ranking points. The OWGR provides a pathway for players to play their way into the majors; LIV players have no such pathway on the LIV tour. (LIV Golf did not answer Yahoo Sports inquiries about the new cut-line stance or its relationship to the OWGR application, but provided a breakdown of players at risk.)
Poulter and several other notable names are believed to be in the final year of their initial LIV contracts, which apparently paid them tens of millions of dollars — LIV does not disclose contract specifics — and have made several million more in tournament purses since joining the league in 2022.
If they are cut from LIV, Poulter, Stenson, Westwood and others could potentially return to play on the DP World Tour, providing they pay the fines — some in the million-dollar range — that the tour has levied on them. That might be the only way that the European notables, once locks for the Ryder Cup captaincy slot, could work their way back into establishment golf’s good graces.
Category: General Sports
