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Thursday, January 23, 2025

LIV Golf and PGA Tour Finales Will Clash for First Time

LIV Golf and the PGA Tour are set for another season apart, and this year, the final events of their respective seasons will be played head-to-head for the first time.

Scottie Scheffler tees off on hole 17 during the first round of The Players Championship PGA golf tournament Thursday, March 14, 2024 at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.
Imagn Images

For the first time, season finales for LIV Golf and the PGA Tour will be played head-to-head on the same weekend.

LIV Golf released its full 2025 event calendar Tuesday, scheduling its team championship in Michigan on Aug. 22–24, coinciding with the Tour Championship, which concludes the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup Playoffs in Atlanta on Aug. 21–24.

That will cap off a three-week stretch in which LIV and the PGA Tour battle on consecutive weekends. The FedEx Cup Playoffs begin in Memphis, Aug. 7–10, when LIV will be playing in Chicago on Aug. 8–10. The next weekend, the PGA Tour will be in Maryland on Aug. 14–17, while LIV’s individual championship is played in Indianapolis Aug. 15–17.

LIV Golf has not officially announced its 2025 U.S. TV partner, with The CW not returning after two seasons with the league. However, a source previously confirmed with Front Office Sports that Fox was nearing a deal with LIV. LIV’s season begins Feb. 6–8 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 

The PGA Tour has media-rights deals with CBS, NBC, and ESPN. NBC will broadcast all three FedEx Cup events in August, with ESPN+ offering its standard early-round streaming coverage.

In LIV’s previous three years of existence, it has never played an event on the same weekend as the Tour Championship. In 2023 and 2024, LIV hosted a U.S. event during the first round of the PGA Tour’s playoffs in August.

In total, six of LIV’s 14 tournaments in 2025 will be played in the U.S. Its first three Stateside will coincide with standard PGA Tour stops that don’t have that “Signature Event” status that includes better fields and $20 million purses. 

The FedEx Cup Playoffs have a $100 million bonus pool, with Scottie Scheffler taking home $25 million for winning the Tour Championship in 2024. Last season, LIV awarded $18 million to its 2024 individual champion, Jon Rahm. Ripper GC split $14 million for winning the championship.

The schedule announcement comes as LIV’s financial backers at the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia continue to negotiate with the PGA Tour on a deal that could help unify the fractured state of men’s professional golf.

The PIF is exploring purchasing an equity stake in PGA Tour Enterprises, which is the for-profit entity that was formed last year with an initial $1.5 billion investment from Strategic Sports Group—a consortium mostly made up of U.S.-based professional sports team owners. SSG’s investment could eventually grow to $3 billion.

Talks between the PIF and PGA Tour have been stalled by the U.S. Department of Justice on anti-trust concerns, but that could change after President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in. Trump previously said it would take him “the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done,” and it is assumed the DOJ will be more merger-friendly under the Trump Administration.

Trump-owned golf courses have hosted at least one LIV event each of the past three years. This season, Trump National Doral will host the Miami tournament April 4–6. Doral, which Trump purchased in 2012, previously hosted an annual PGA Tour event, which it last did in 2016.

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