The concept of having teams was one almost forced upon LIV Golf through the lack of depth in quality of their fields, especially in the early days. How do you make everyone playing relevant to the outcome when some players were, frankly, quite obviously primarily there just to make up the numbers? The first LIV Golf event was LIV Golf London, played at the Centurion Club in June 2022. The field comprised only 48 players, spread across 12 four-man teams, and yet still had to include four players whose world ranking ranged from 1,324th to 1,731st in the world to get all the 48 entry slots filled.
With all due respect to these players, I doubt many expected them to be challenging for the top of the leaderboard. (Spoiler alert: none of the four even made the top half of the leaderboard, and they finished between 14 and 31 shots behind the winner.) But, by including a team competition and making their scores relevant to that, this element could potentially give interest to the scores of those otherwise make-weight players.
Since that first event, LIV Golf has been able to attract better-quality players – for example, by the time of the second tournament Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed had signed up to LIV – and the number of competitors has also been expanded. So, too, as result has the number of teams, up from 12 to 13.
If you enjoyed this quiz, why not try your hand at some of our other ones such as:
Every Player In the 2024 Solheim Cup
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