There was a small, easily missed line in Jon Rahm’s press conference at the Renaissance Club on Tuesday that said more about the state of professional golf than any leaderboard could. Asked how it felt to be back inside the ropes of a PGA Tour event, the two-time major champion shrugged. “It’s just another event,” he said. Three years ago, a sentence like that from a player who had left for LIV Golf would have been unthinkable. This week, at the Genesis Scottish Open, it barely registered as news.
Rahm tees off Thursday afternoon alongside Alex Fitzpatrick and Rasmus Højgaard, playing his first PGA Tour-sanctioned tournament since the 2023 Tour Championship. It is only possible because the Scottish Open sits in the narrow overlap between the PGA Tour and DP World Tour calendars, co-sanctioned by both, and because Rahm has spent the last two months quietly resolving a standoff that once threatened to keep him out of the 2027 Ryder Cup altogether.
A first for LIV golf, not just for Rahm
What makes this week unusual is not that Rahm is here. It is who is here with him. Tyrrell Hatton, Laurie Canter, David Puig, Tom McKibbin, Adrian Meronk and Victor Perez, all contracted LIV players, were granted conditional releases by the DP World Tour to fill out the 156-man field at the Renaissance Club. It is the first time a group of active LIV members has played a PGA Tour co-sanctioned event since the league split the sport apart in 2022, a fact that would have sounded like fantasy even a year ago.
The Scottish Open field has been announced and for the first time ever current LIV players Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton, Laurie Canter, David Puig, Tom McKibbin, Adrian Meronk and Victor Perez will be playing a PGA Tour co-sanctioned event.
— Flushing It (@flushingitgolf) July 4, 2026
Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler are…
Scheffler and Rory McIlroy headline a field that, as Rahm put it himself, feels closer to two majors stacked back to back than a regular tour stop. That is not simply a compliment to the golf course. It is a reflection of how much the game’s civil war has thawed in a single year, one conditional release and one settled invoice at a time.
How the standoff ended
Rahm’s route back to a PGA Tour tee box began in May, when he finally reached an agreement with the DP World Tour after months of refusing to budge. The tour wanted him to commit to a minimum number of European events to remain a member in good standing, a requirement for any player hoping to be eligible for the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor. Rahm held out for a four-event minimum for months before eventually agreeing to five, along with settling fines from three LIV events that had clashed with the DP World Tour schedule, a bill in the region of $375,000.
Jon Rahm announces he has reached an agreement with the DP World Tour. Both sides made concessions, per Rahm.
— GOLF.com (@GOLF_com) May 5, 2026
A deal has been made. Expect to see Rahm out on the DP World Tour this season.
“There’s no longer a standoff,” Rahm said at the time. “There was some concessions on both sides. I offered some, they extended an olive branch.” The timing was not incidental. Around the same period, LIV’s owner, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, confirmed it would stop funding the league beyond the end of this season, a development that has left every LIV player quietly reassessing how much leverage they actually have left. Rahm, asked this week whether he might personally invest in keeping the league afloat, did not rule it out. “They haven’t asked me to put my money in yet,” he said. “Never say never.”
A stacked field a week before the Open
Whatever the politics, the golf on offer at the Renaissance Club this week is as good as the Scottish Open gets. Scheffler arrives having managed only one win in a year that, by his own remarkable standards, counts as a mild drought. McIlroy is back for the first time since a tied 32nd at the US Open, though this event has generally brought out his best golf, with a win in 2023 and two more top fives since. Matt Fitzpatrick chases a fourth title of the season, and defending champion Chris Gotterup, fresh off a bogey-free 62 to win the John Deere Classic on Sunday, is bidding to become the tournament’s first back-to-back winner.
The course itself has changed since Gotterup denied McIlroy there last year. The Renaissance Club has reverted to the routing it used when the tournament first arrived in 2019, swapping the front and back nines so that the old sixth hole, a stadium-style par three nicknamed the Thistle, now sits inside the closing stretch instead of the opening one. Viktor Hovland, who plays the new-look course this week, backed the change: “It makes for a better finish. I hope we get to see this most years going forward.” Three spots in next week’s Open Championship at Royal Birkdale are also on offer to any player outside the exempt list who can force their way up the leaderboard, adding a second tournament’s worth of stakes to a week that already had plenty.
What it means going forward
None of this settles the larger argument about LIV and the established tours, and nobody at the Renaissance Club this week is pretending it does. But a field that includes seven contracted LIV players alongside the top two in the world rankings, all a week before the Open, is a version of professional golf that looked impossible for most of the last three years. Rahm insists it is just another event. The rest of the sport will be watching rather closely to see if he is right.