LIV Golf has announced the first four dates for its 2025 schedule, and there’s a definite international flair to the season’s start. The 2025 LIV season will begin with dates in Saudi Arabia, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
LIV will debut in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, with its 2025 kickoff tournament on Feb. 6-8 at Riyadh Golf Club. One week later, on Feb. 14-16, LIV will return to Adelaide, Australia at The Grange Golf Club, site of LIV’s most popular and raucous event to date, the 2024 Australia stop. Two weeks later, on March 7-9, LIV will tee off at the Hong Kong Golf Club. A week after that, LIV will travel to Singapore’s Sentosa Golf Club for tournament from March 14-16. The remainder of LIV’s schedule, including domestic events, will be announced in the future.
The 2025 Masters will run from April 10-13; with many of its players qualified through prior victories, LIV Golf has structured its schedule to allow players to compete in all the majors.
The structure and timing of the announcement is a further indicator of LIV’s intention to be a far more international tour than the largely American-based PGA Tour. With golf exploding in popularity around the world, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, it’s a strategy designed to meet budding golf fans where they are, rather than expecting them to connect with, and tune in to, events taking place half a world away.
LIV’s schedule will be a demanding one on players, particularly U.S.-based ones, given all the changes in time zones and substantial travel involved. This would be the cost of those substantial paychecks that LIV players have received, regardless of promises or plans to play less golf and spend more time with family. LIV is clearly giving off the image of an organization planning for a long-term, internationally-based future.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, LIV Golf’s financial backers, and the PGA Tour announced a merger/strategic alignment 15 months ago, but since then there’s been little indication that any kind of true unification is imminent. For now, both sides are proceeding on separate tracks and separate schedules.
Several LIV players remain competitive and compelling figures even though they’re not as visible as they’d been on the PGA Tour. Bryson DeChambeau is the defending U.S. Open champion, Jon Rahm was in the hunt for an Olympic gold medal until the final holes, and Brooks Koepka has a T2 and a win in majors since jumping to LIV. Still, as popular as the LIV players are, and as successful as they’ve been when competing against their PGA Tour opponents, it’s now all but certain that that the only time they’ll cross paths as a group with the PGA Tour in 2025 will be at the four majors.