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LIV Golf will begin playing 72-hole events in 2026, and because it’s November and the leaderboards are full of names that may as well have been generated by ChatGPT, we’re all sort of pretending this is meaningful or interesting. Mostly, though, it’s just funny. As a surprising number of people seemed not to realize when the story came out and the jokes poured in, LIV got its name because L-I-V are the Roman numerals representing the number 54, and 54-hole tournaments were the spotlit calling card when this all began. Sure, there were other notable changes from traditional PGA Tour golf, but none of them inspired the literal name of the entire enterprise. To walk that back after three years is like a plot point you’d see in a “Veep” episode—a flailing institution that is so bereft of good ideas, and so chaotic, that they’re now at war against their own original mission statement.
Funny. But also: whatever. There is no reason to feel anything but complete indifference to this story, and I’d say the same about any other change they breathlessly trotted out, like making the holes a foot wide, or training donkeys to be caddies, or playing on the moon. What we’ve learned in the past three years—what we should have learned, anyway—is that none of the cosmetic format changes have ever made a lick of difference, and they’re not going to start mattering now.
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In January 2024, I narrated a Local Knowledge podcast about Andy Gardiner, the British finance attorney who came up with this stuff in the first place. Back in 2010, when he was writing his ideas down on a yellow legal pad, it was kind of interesting, in the same way that it’s interesting when you and your friends dream up new sports formats over a few beers. His inspiration was F1, and a lot of his ideas made it to LIV, even if he didn’t, including fewer tournaments (18, to be exact), fewer players, 54-hole events, teams as franchises, and shotgun starts (but only for the first two rounds). He also dreamed up things that didn’t survive the long evolution to LIV, like night golf, a system where a captain would decide before each round which two of his players’ scores would count for the team, and even listing the league on a stock exchange.
The difference between Gardiner and your drunk buddy who has a great idea to make baseball more exciting by adding a second pitcher’s mound is that Gardiner was super connected with powerful people in and around the game of golf, and those powerful people were intrigued. By 2017, this stuff was on Jay Monahan’s radar, and you know what happened next—the PGL seemed to be making inroads before it got derailed by COVID (how close they actually got to launching is a matter of huge debate even now), Gardiner arguably underestimated the PGA Tour, the Saudis got involved and, when everyone regrouped after the pandemic, the Saudis decided they didn’t need Gardiner at all since they already had his blueprint. And now we have LIV.
But the reasons PGL failed to launch are the same reasons LIV is lighting its own trademark on fire here at the end of 2025. In simplest terms, it was never about the ideas, and it was always about the players.
I remain convinced that the ideas weren’t bad. Well, I take that back—the music has always been stupid, “golf but louder” is an annoying tagline and the marketing has been the golf equivalent of the Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme … I’m not convinced anyone on that side of the team has consumed any media since watching a Kool-Aid commercial with teenagers skateboarding in 1997. (How will audiences be able to resist Graeme McDowell shooting a 76 in shorts??)
But the format ideas were, at worst, a mixed bag. We can debate how much traditional professional golf needed to change, but the amount of major and minor tweaks the PGA Tour has made since the schism is a huge rhetorical point in LIV’s favor. Divorcing ourselves from the exhausting weight of the war we’ve witnessed since 2021, is it a good idea to get the best players in the world together more often? Yes, and this is why we have signature events. Are smaller fields a good idea? Maybe, and again, to the extent that it matters, the PGA Tour has moved in that direction. Is team golf a good idea? Was 54 holes? Shotgun starts?
The answer to those last three is “no,” but it’s a qualified no—it didn’t work this time, for LIV. Were they fundamentally bad ideas overall? I don’t think so. The reason LIV couldn’t pull it off is that they never got the players it needed to defeat an established body that had more adaptability (under pressure) than they bargained for, and also a bunch of Americans who didn’t feel like spending their time playing golf tournaments that nobody cared about in Singapore or Jeddah at 3:30 a.m. in the eastern time zone. Let’s repeat that, because I’m not sure anything else ever mattered: They never got the players.
They knew it, too. They made some silly moves to try to correct course, like reanimating the corpse of Anthony Kim, and they made some hopeful moves, like signing Jon Rahm just before realizing nobody actually cared about him. The hard truth, though, was that you could never nickel-and-dime your way to relevance by piecemeal acquisition, especially without the top Americans. Unless you can get a monopoly right away, you’ll be at the mercy of inertia, and that’s a mistress that can’t be swayed even by eleventy billion dollars of oil money. This is the same reason why when you start a coup, your first move is to put a bullet in the head of the leader you’re overthrowing. What LIV did instead was the equivalent of standing outside the palace with a megaphone, shouting, “hey, there’s going to be a coup! You have one year until we begin launching limited assaults!”
Absent a mass conversion of the world’s best player, inertia was always going to favor the establishment over the renegade league with a new format, and the terrible irony is that along the way, LIV pointed the tour in the direction of key improvements to strengthen their position. It’s why you see the tour in its most stable position since the schism, it’s why they could afford to wait out the fake merger and it’s why LIV’s only three realistic options are hemorrhaging money, folding or acquiescing on the tour’s terms.
It’s also why, to return to the original point, the format doesn’t matter. Sure, move to 72 holes—who cares? Walking back the titular innovation is a sign of weakness, but that stopped being news ages ago. They can get rid of the shotgun starts, they can shut off the music, and they can make Graeme McDowell wear pants. Hell, they can even start raking in OWGR points. None of it will change a thing, because the format was never the point, and it’s never going to be the point. The point is the players, and on that front they look farther than ever from victory. We have entered the end stage, and LIV’s last remaining strength is that they can prolong it forever, if they want, with money, money, money, money, money, money, money.
