Robert TheodorsonThe 2026 LIV Golf Season swings back into action this Wednesday through Saturday (February 4 – 7), at the Riyadh Golf Club, host of the recent PIF Saudi International. Riyadh played host to the first-ever major golf tournament held completely at night and under the stars.
Last season Jon Rahm came away with the season-long individual championship after finishing three points better than runner-up Joaquin Niemann who won a league record five tournaments last season!
Top names like Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and Dustin Johnson each have plans to win multiple tournaments this season, vying for the individual championship, a chance to move their respective teams into prime seeding position for the team championship, and competing for the four major championships throughout the season.
We examine how the best stack up against the rest and who has what it takes to win tournaments, inside and outside LIV for the 2026 season.
This is Love Live Golf’s list of Top 10 LIV Golfers going into the 2026 LIV Golf Season!
10. Dustin Johnson
2025 Final Standings: 14th Place
2025 Top 10’s: 5
2025 Top 5’s: 1
2025 Wins: N/A
Biggest Moment of 2025: T23 finish at The Open at Royal Portrush.
2026 Outlook: 2025 was the first time since 2014 that DJ failed to record a win across all tours and major championships. It was a season of ups and down for the 4 Aces captain which included two dismal 54th-place showings at LIV Hong Kong and UK, and three missed cuts at The Masters, PGA Championship, and U.S. Open. Two LIV captains that had dismal 2024 seasons bounced back in Bubba Watson and Phil Mickelson, we’re betting that DJ does the same, and that is taking into account that a 14th-place finish is dismal by DJ’s standards.
9. Carlos Ortiz
2025 Final Standings: 8th Place
2025 Top 10’s: 6
2025 Top 5’s: 4
2025 Wins: International Series Macau
Biggest Moment of 2025: T4 finish at Oakmont.
2026 Outlook: Ortiz’s 2025 season was all about consistency. While Ortiz didn’t record a win on LIV, he did capture a trophy at The International Series Macau and finished T4 at the U.S. Open at Oakmont, a tournament and course that proved to be the most difficult challenge to any golfer during the entire season. At 34 years old, Ortiz is out of his prime but likely has a few more good years ahead of him and is certainly a threat to win one or two tournaments during the 2026 LIV season.
8. Tom McKibbin
2025 Final Standings: 20th Place
2025 Top 10’s: 4
2025 Top 5’s: 2
2025 Wins: Link Hong Kong Open
Biggest Moment of 2025: Winning Hong Kong by seven strokes.
2026 Outlook: LIV has a few members under twenty-five that the world should be very excited about and one of the best of them is Northern Ireland’s Tom McKibbin. A huge win at the Link Hong Kong Open served as McKibbin’s coming-out party and was followed up by a number of successful tournaments on the DP World Tour and Asian Series.
7. Talor Gooch
2025 Final Standings: 6th Place
2025 Top 10’s: 5
2025 Top 5’s: 3
2025 Wins: LIV Andalucia
Biggest Moment of 2025: A champion for the first time since winning the league trophy in 2023.
2026 Outlook: The 2023 LIV Golf Individual Champion had a rough start to the 2025 season until a couple of Top 15 finishes at Miami and Mexico paved the way for his first podium finish of the season (Korea) and his eventual lone win at Andalucia. With Brooks Koepka’s sudden departure, Gooch once again finds himself as the undisputed best player on his team, as was the case when with Bubba Watson’s RangeGoats in 2023.
6. Sebastian Munoz
2025 Final Standings: 4th Place
2025 Top 10’s: 7
2025 Top 5’s: 3
2026 Wins: LIV Indianapolis
Biggest Moment of 2025: Shooting 59 at LIV Indianapolis.
2026 Outlook: Indianapolis marked Munoz’s first ever LIV Golf victory and first major win since 2019 on The PGA Tour. After several seasons of coming up just short, Munoz finally broke through in spectacular fashion including a round of 59, something only accomplished by Bryson DeChambeau and Joaquin Niemann before him. A year ago, I wrote a special piece on Munoz entitled “Sebastian Munoz is Ready to Win” detailing Munoz’s elite talent and his ability to battle it out with the league’s best. We would like to see more of Munoz outside LIV, but for the time being, Sebastian has proved that he is an ironclad Top 10 player in this league, and will remain as such.
5. David Puig
2025 Final Standings: 10th Place
2025 Top 10’s: 4
2025 Top 5’s: 3
2025 Wins: BMW Australian PGA Championship
Biggest Moment of 2025: Winning his first DP World Tour tournament by two strokes.
2026 Outlook: Puig is LIV Golf’s most skilled and exciting player under twenty-five, and the results are starting to pile up. After winning the BMW Australian PGA Championship, Puig narrowly lost out on the Dubai Invitational, coming in T3, and then again coming in T7 weeks later at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic. Finishing in the Top 10 of the final standings last season Puig has already proved he’s one of LIV’s best golfers, now he’s proving that he’s among the very best in the entire world. A major championship may be a few years away for the youngster, but nobody should be surprised to see Puig’s name at the top of the leaderboards at all tournaments for years to come.
4. Joaquin Niemann
2025 Final Standings: 2nd Place
2025 Top 10’s: 6
2025 Top 5’s: 6
2025 Wins: LIV Adelaide, Singapore, Mexico, Virginia, UK
Biggest Moment of 2025: Winning every other tournament in an eight-event stretch.
2026 Outlook: Niemann’s dominance of the 2025 season is something we’ll likely never see again by an individual performer. When Joaco was “in it”, he won 5/6 times. The rest of the season included some forgettable finishes outside the Top 15, but nobody remembers those, just the fact that he won every other tournament for half the 2025 season. While his win total from last year is unlikely to be replicated, Niemann is still obviously very capable of making another run for season-long individual champion. Joaco’s results outside of LIV have been concerning to say the least. The Torque captain does not seem comfortable with his game outside of LIV Golf as evidenced by four straight missed cuts starting with the PIF Saudi International and ending with the Hero Dubai Desert Classic. It’s unlikely that we get a feel for what kind of season Niemann will give us until after at least the second tournament in Adelaide, February 12 – 15.
3. Tyrrell Hatton
2025 Final Standings: 26th Place
2025 Top 10’s: 3
2025 Top 5’s: 2
2025 Wins: Hero Dubai Desert Classic (January 2025)
Biggest Moment of 2025:
If golf is a polite conversation, LIV Golfer Tyrrell Hatton is the bloke at the dinner table who tells the truth and still gets invited back. The headline act in his year came away from the LIV bubble, when he won the Hero Dubai Desert Classic in January — a Rolex Series win that reminded everyone his talent doesn’t need a passport, just a pin position. And then, as if to underline the point, he finished 2025 by helping Europe get over the Ryder Cup line at Bethpage, delivering the kind of half-point that feels like a full punchline.
2026 Outlook:
Hatton’s 2025 LIV season was an odd little cocktail: the irons were superb, the scoring held up, but the overall standing didn’t reflect how often he was actually playing good golf. He posted three top-10s — including a pair of T5s — yet never truly turned consistency into a podium run. The numbers suggest a fairly straightforward 2026 recipe: keep the approach play cooking, tidy up the driving, and the results should look a lot more like the talent. The league’s own read on him screams “bounce-back”: if the driver stops leaking and the putter remains even vaguely Hatton-ish, it’s hard to see him hovering around the mid-20s again. Pencil him in as an early-season nuisance for anyone who enjoys a quiet Sunday — and a very real candidate to climb into the top tier of the individual standings while continuing to power Legion XIII’s team ambitions.
2. Bryson DeChambeau
2025 Final Standings: 3rd Place
2025 Top 10’s: 7
2025 Top 5’s: 4
2025 Wins: LIV Korea
Biggest Moment of 2025: Three Top 10 finishes across all major championships.
2026 Outlook: Though we saw him during a losing effort at The Ryder Cup, DeChambeau has taken a different path than his colleagues this winter and used his time to rest and prepare for the 2026 LIV Golf season as opposed to play in other international tournaments. Usually so much down time would be concerning, but not for a man of DeChambeau’s caliber. Finishing T5, T2, and T10 in The Masters, PGA Championship, and Open, respectively, DeChambeau was in the conversation for his third major championship more often than not. Although he probably would have liked to win more than once last season, Bryson is still in the prime of his career and will likely challenge for multiple wins this season on LIV and the major championships.
1. Jon Rahm
2025 Final Standings: 1st Place
2025 Top 10’s: 12
2025 Top 5’s: 7
2025 Wins: N/A
Biggest Moment of 2025: Winning a second consecutive Ryder Cup, co-leading Team Europe in total points won.
2026 Outlook: The 2024 and 2025 Individual Champion had a magical, but winless 2025 season, and so it feels like Rahm’s big break is right around the corner in 2026. Coming in Top 10 in 12/13 LIV Golf Tournaments, and four fantastic showings at the four major championships, Rahm’s season was all about.
