The Official World Golf Rankings are a system for rating the performance level of male professional golfers. They were introduced in 1986 and are endorsed by the four Major Championships and the six professional tours which make up the International Federation of PGA Tours, which are The PGA TOUR, PGA European Tour, Asian Tour, PGA Tour of Australasia, Japan Golf Tour, and Sunshine Tour. Points are also awarded for high finishes on the Canadian Tour, Nationwide Tour and Challenge Tour.

Calculation of the rankings

Points are awarded on the basis of final positions in official tour events on the qualifying tours. The number of points available at each tournament depends on the prestige of the tournament and the existing rankings of the participating golfers. The four major tournaments automatically receive the maximum possible rating, with 50 points allocated to the winner. The winner of The Players Championship receives 40 points, and the winners of the three individual events in the World Golf Championships series each gain 38 points. The winner of a typical PGA Tour event is likely to gain between 20 and 30 points, and many PGA European Tour events offer a points tally in the teens for the winner. On the other tours, winners usually receive a single figure points award, but a few of the stronger events rate a double figure award.

Each player's personal ranking is calculated from the ranking points he has obtained over the previous two years. Firstly, his scores from all the tournaments he has played in are scaled down over a two year period, with one eighth of the points awarded for each tournament deducted every three months in order to give priority to recent form. The player's adjusted scores are then totalled, and this total is divided by the number of ranking tournaments in which he has participated over the previous two years, subject to a minimum denominator of forty tournaments. The resulting averages for all players are put into descending order to produce the ranking table. This means that the player who has obtained most cumulative success, does not necessarily come top of the rankings: it is average performance levels that are important, and some golfers play substantially more tournaments than others. New rankings are released every Monday.

Importance of the rankings

A professional golfer's ranking is of considerable significance to his career. For example, a ranking in the World Top 50 grants automatic entry to the four majors, and ranking points are one of the qualification criteria for the European Ryder Cup team.

The rankings are well known to those who follow men's professional golf and feature prominently in media coverage of the sport. When Vijay Singh ended Tiger Woods' record run as world number 1 in 2004 it was one of the most reported golf stories of the year.

Number 1 ranked golfers

These are the golfers who have topped the rankings, in order of the number of weeks they have spent at Number 1 up to 11 April 2005. On that date Tiger Woods won the Masters and regained first place from Vijay Singh. The "Order" column indicates the sequence in which the players first reached number 1.

Of these players Bernard Langer and Seve Ballesteros would be most likely to gain additional weeks at number 1 if the rankings were backdated to before 1986. Greg Norman might possibly also do so.

Source for data: "Number One Watch" article on Official World Golf Rankings website 29th March 2005, and press release of 11th April 2005 about the Masters result.

Rankings archive

Year end world number 1 ranked golfers

• 2004 Vijay Singh
• 2003 Tiger Woods
• 2002 Tiger Woods
• 2001 Tiger Woods
• 2000 Tiger Woods

World top 10 at 31 December 2004

World top 10 at 31 December 2003

World top 10 at 31 December 2002

World top 10 at 31 December 2001

World top 10 at 31 December 2000

Note: points tallies for this date are not available from the official site. This table is taken from the prior week rankings on the 7 January 2001 list, which is the oldest list in the archive on the official site.

External link

More extensive lists of past rankings and the current weekly ranking list, which features more than a thousand golfers, can be found on the official site.

Official World Golf Rankings Website