Jon Rahm captured LIV Golf’s $18 million Individual Championship without winning a single event—then went on a podcast and said the system that crowned him is broken.

The Spaniard’s admission arrived on the January 7 episode of GOLF’s Subpar Podcast, where he dissected a season that defied competitive logic. Zero wins. Four runner-up finishes. Twelve top-10s in 13 starts. And yet, Rahm edged out Joaquin Niemann—a man who won five of 13 events—by a margin of just three points.

“Winning the individual doesn’t have the same weight it did last year with having not won,” Rahm conceded. “Having him win five times. Can make an argument there that maybe he was more deserving.”

That argument isn’t difficult to construct. Niemann claimed nearly 40% of LIV’s 2025 tournaments—Adelaide, Singapore, Mexico City, Virginia, and the UK—yet finished second in the season-long race. The math exposes a structural flaw Rahm himself can no longer ignore.

“When somebody wins more than a third of the tournaments, he should probably run away with it unless I finish second every week, which I didn’t,” Rahm explained.

The tension isn’t merely statistical. It’s philosophical. LIV’s current points system mirrors American sports logic: reward consistency across a season, let the grind determine the champion. But Rahm is arguing for something closer to Formula 1—a model where race wins carry overwhelming value, where a driver dominating a third of the calendar shouldn’t lose to someone who never stood on the top step.

“The only sport that you can equate it would be Formula 1,” Rahm said, “where somebody wins a third of the races but finishes out of the points and still most of the time is going to be winning it all.”

Golf analyst Brendan Porath, speaking on the Fried Egg Golf podcast back in August, called the outcome “preposterous.” He noted that people “bending themselves in pretzels to suggest Rahm had a better season than the five wins of Niemann is what I find most amusing about what’s happening on LIV.”

The criticism carries weight because LIV’s points gap between first and second remains razor-thin: 40 points for a win, 30 for runner-up—a mere 33% premium for victory. That structure allowed Rahm’s relentless consistency to outlast Niemann’s explosive brilliance.

Jon Rahm’s lone blemish exposes the human behind the machine

Even Rahm’s floor had a story. His only non-top-10 finish in his entire LIV career came at Merida, where the course played brutally hard, and six or seven under went to a playoff.

“I was not playing good,” Rahm admitted. “It was so windy and difficult that you kind of just go for pars.”

He had a 10-foot uphill putt on the final hole to salvage a top-10. It cupped out, left half a roll short. Bryson DeChambeau then birdied holes one and two to knock Rahm out of the top 10 entirely. The result: T11, his worst finish on the circuit.

That lone stumble humanizes the machine. Even at his lowest, Rahm scraped to 7.5 points—enough to keep the accumulation rolling while Niemann’s hit-or-miss weeks opened the door.

Rahm softened the sting by pointing to other victories. Legion XIII won the Team Championship in a playoff against Crushers GC. Europe captured the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, 15–13, with Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton winning their opening foursomes match 4&3.

“Getting the Ryder Cup win in the US, I don’t feel like I haven’t won anything this year,” Rahm said.

But the Individual Championship question lingers. Rahm acknowledged that LIV is considering changes. “I think they’re changing it,” he said on the podcast.

Whether that adjustment arrives before the 2026 season remains uncertain. What’s clear is that LIV’s biggest star just called the system flawed—and he’s the one who benefited from it.