This week, LIV Golf made headlines when the league, now entering it’s fourth season, announced that it will expand its format from 54 holes to 72 holes in 2026. LIV Golf’s three-round format was initially one of its biggest selling points—both for players, who wanted more “time to spend with their families,” and fans, who were pitched a faster, snappier brand of golf—but it quickly became an albatross as the Saudi-funded circuit pursued OWGR points.
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Conventional wisdom suggests the move, which should help pave the way for World Ranking legitimacy and reopen traditional major qualification routes for LIV pros, will be popular with stars such as Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau and Tyrrell Hatton, but as the latter explained on Wednesday, that may not be exactly true.
“At the end of my first season, there was a questionnaire that was filled out,” Hatton told reporters at the Abu Dhabi Championship. “One of the questions was about moving to 72 holes, and of everyone who filled it out, I think there was only three guys, initially, who had said [yes] about moving there [to 72 holes].”
That’s a pretty remarkable revelation from Hatton. The Legion XIII pro’s first season on LIV came in 2024, meaning the survey was taken sometime in the past 15 months. Could the sentiment of the league’s stars really change that quickly or was this decision made above their heads? In all likelihood, a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
Either way, Hatton said that he’s personally “quite happy” with the change, which makes sense. Unlike many of the league’s big names, such as Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson, Hatton is in the prime of his career. He’s now a two-time Ryder Cup winner, finished T-14 at this spring’s Masters and was in the mix late Sunday at the U.S. Open before ultimately finishing T-4. The next logical step for him is to win his first major, and this change should make qualification for those marquee tournaments a much easier process.
As for the thoughts of the rest of the league, we can’t say, but something tell us that if that survey was retaken today, the results would look very different indeed.
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