LIV vs PGA Tour
April 2025
Ever since the birth of LIV Golf, fans have criticized its relaxed nature and innovative approach to professional golf. The level of golf was expected to drop as players were guaranteed money and only playing three rounds of golf per tournament instead of four. Players from both professional circuits now compete in only four tournaments together each year: The Masters, the PGA Championship, the US Open, and the Open Championship. The best method to determine how LIV golfers match up against PGA golfers would be to analyze scoring performance across the four major tournaments.
The Goal
As stated in the project description, the goal of this project is to gain insight into how those who joined the LIV Tour are now playing when competing against PGA Tour players.
The Results
As we can see, the LIV Tour had a higher percentage of cuts made than the percentage of cuts made by beginning players. In all eight tournaments. When we move on to the top 10s, we can see they had decent success with five out of eight top 10 percentages being higher than the field makeup. Finally, we can see that LIV won two of the eight tournaments, despite comprising only about 12% of the field. Based on the percentages generated by this project, players from the LIV Tour are still capable of competing with the best of the best.
The Method
​To compare the two tours, I extracted scores from the four major tournaments held across the 2023 and 2024 seasons. Once all the players' placements were compiled and filtered into the correct tour, I chose four benchmarks to compare success. The first is the overall field makeup between the tours. Next, we have the percentage makeup of the cut for each tour. In golf, the "cut" is made after two days, where only a certain number of golfers move on to days 3 and 4 based on their score (Masters and U.S. Open: top 50 with ties; PGA Championship and The Open: top 70 with ties). This percentage, compared to the previous one, will indicate whether each tour is under- or overperforming based on the cut made. The third statistic tracked was the top 10 percentages. Similar to the cut made statistic, this can be compared to previous stats to compare success. Finally, we have the tour placed first overall for each tournament.
The Takeaway
While a deeper insight into the data would provide a more solid answer, it still appears that LIV Tour players can match, if not outperform, PGA players on a surface level. This does not mean LIV is a better tour, but more than likely, they still contain top players that have not skipped a beat from leaving the PGA Tour.