Scottie Scheffler has won the FedExCup

Rory McIlroy had said as much even before the last two tournaments began. “Me, Player of the Year? No chance. It’s Scottie.” At East Lake, Scottie Scheffler proved him right by winning the Tour Championship and, with it, his second FedExCup in three years. A form of sporting justice, because the new format by no means guaranteed that the season’s best player would also be crowned its champion.

The thirty players who arrived in Atlanta were, in fact, all starting from scratch, as the advantage that had, until 2024, rewarded points earned during the year had been abolished. Scheffler, who was leading the FedExCup after the BMW Championship, had the same score as the player in 30th place. Four days could have wiped out seven months of golf. That didn’t happen. Starting on Sunday three strokes behind Viktor Hovland, Scheffler finished with a 66 and at 16 under par, three strokes ahead of the Norwegian. Over the weekend, he made twenty-one birdies and just five bogeys. McIlroy had five bogeys on Sunday alone, along with four birdies and an eagle. This, too, is what sets the world’s best player apart.

The FedExCup is a curious affair. The winner may not be the player who has accumulated the most points over the course of the year, nor even the one who has earned the most money. The PGA Tour has distinguished between the season’s best player and the season’s champion. This time, the two titles coincide. Scheffler also takes home the ten million dollars from East Lake and, with 120 million dollars in career earnings, overtakes Tiger Woods in the PGA Tour’s all-time money list – a record that Woods himself considers incomparable, as today’s massive prize funds are also a consequence of what he has done for golf.

Money that in recent years seemed to have become the sole measure of golf. LIV had persuaded Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and many others to leave the PGA Tour with contracts that were impossible to turn down. Four years later, after the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) had invested over five billion dollars, it decided to withdraw its funding; LIV has made most of its staff redundant and is seeking an investor to enable the tour to take place in 2027.

Meanwhile, the PGA Tour has announced that the window opened in January will not be reopened. Brooks Koepka made the deadline; Rahm and DeChambeau did not. They will continue to play in the majors for which they have qualified, and then we’ll see. They had left the circuit that had made them rich for one that promised to make them even richer. Now the PGA Tour awards ten million dollars to its champion, whilst LIV is looking for someone – whether from the oil or microchip industries, it matters little – who is willing to pay them next season. Otherwise, it will go under.