MENA Golf Tour’s OWG Ranking Points & LIV

In a shrewd move by LIV, they have formed and alliance with a nearly defunct golf tour that hasn’t played in 2 years since Covid. Ranking points are the biggest hurdle for LIV, not just for getting their players recognition but so most players can qualify for the 4 Majors. A few already carry exemptions to the majors but even many of those will expire over the next few years. I’m sure this is the one thing standing between some players that remained on the PGA Tour.

I’ve always felt like the points issue would get resolved, I believe you just can’t have the quality of players LIV has and not recognize them in world rankings even if their format is problematic. That said the MENA tour only awards 3 OWG points to tournament winners. If you don’t understand what that means, the average PGA tour winning gets in the 45+ point range after Field Rating is factored in. (Field Rating is based on the number of top-ranked players in the field) Even on the worst tournament fields on the PGA tour like Puerto Rico, John Deere, or Barbasol the winners gets 24 points guaranteed and are usually even a little more. In the PGA’s marquee tournament the Players Championship they get 80 points guaranteed even though the field isn’t that strong. It’s the same for every other tour as well, BMW Championship on the DP World Tour is inflated too. .

The DP World Tour(European) is slightly less, 18 guaranteed per event and 64 for their marquee event. The Japanese Tour gets 16 points per event guaranteed and 32 for their top event guaranteed. Even the Korn Ferry gets 14 points a week and 20 points for their championship. We routinely can find players playing their way into the top 100 of the Korn Ferry Tour (Grillo, Mito, and Zalatoris come to mind), and the Japanese tour usually has a few players in the top 100 at any time. A few players can peak in the top 35 even without playing much else. Satoshi Kodaira and Ryo Ishikawa come to mind for example. This usually gets one or two Japanese Tour players in all the majors. I’ve always felt like these players’ rankings were a little inflated on the European and Japanese Tour more than anywhere else.

For LIV this is getting a strategic toe in the door, and a long way from what they are looking for and frankly will deserve. Personally, One player could win every week and have a hard time cracking the top 200 and never get close to most majors with the points MENA can offer. LIV is looking for I’m sure, a guaranteed 14 to 18 points per contest at least I would think like the DPWT, JPN, and KFT, and I would think they deserve 20 points a tournament honestly with the quality of golfers they have. That would put it on a tier rivaling the PGA and you’d probably see more golfers move.