LIV Golf events, despite featuring several of the sport’s top players, are currently excluded from the OWGR system. That means players competing exclusively in LIV events see their rankings fall rapidly, because their results are not counted.
LIV golfers can earn ranking points only by competing in major championships and international tour events.
For example, after tying for 34th at last week’s Open Championship, Westwood vaulted 3,759 spots in the Official World Golf Ranking to 930th. That moved him back ahead of his son, Sam, a mini-tour player who currently sits 2,759th.
“I think that just proves that without world ranking points it makes a bit of a mockery of the system,” Westwood said ahead of this week’s LIV Tour stop in England.
His comments came after LIV sent in a new application for OWGR recognition last month, which is currently under review. The tour first applied for world ranking points in 2022 but was rejected.
“I think mainly it relates back to wanting the best players in the major championships, not wanting this conversation where there’s a few people missing out because we don’t get world ranking points on LIV,” Westwood said.
“We either start to get world ranking points on LIV or the major championships have to revise their qualification system, which they seem – some of them seem to want to do but some seem reluctant to do, and they’d have to have a separate qualification system for LIV players, which I don’t think anybody particularly wants. You want it all to be based off the same system.”
Westwood’s sentiments echo those of Jon Rahm, the 2023 Masters champion and another high-profile LIV defector. Even before joining LIV in late 2023, Rahm had questioned the OWGR’s accuracy.
“I already thought it was flawed before I ever came, and I was vocal about it,” Rahm said.
Rahm has supported the idea of moving away from the current OWGR model in favour of a strokes gained-based approach used by independent analytics platforms like Data Golf to assess performance.
“So I think the last few years, even the world ranking itself and both Data Golf do a strokes gained ranking, and I think that much more reflects who truly is playing the best because the actual points being a two-year ranking, you can have a poor week or a poor three weeks, and that will hold you down for two whole years,” Rahm said.
“It’s crazy how you can actually finesse a little bit of the system by playing certain weeks and not playing certain weeks and things like that. It’s always going to be somewhat accurate but not the most, and I think strokes gained usually is going to be the better representation of how truly everybody is playing.”
While OWGR has made some adjustments to its formula in recent years, it has resisted calls to include LIV events, citing issues such as 54-hole formats, no cuts, and limited field sizes.
