Raymond Carlin III-Imagn Images
The PGA Tour has opened the door for some players who defected to LIV Golf to return, and Brooks Koepka officially became the first big name to be welcomed back into the fold this week. However, Phil Mickelson is not eligible to receive the same treatment, and he responded to a theory that the organization knew what it was doing when it established the parameters for the Returning Member Program.
Phil Mickelson was the first domino to fall when LIV Golf set out to take on the PGA Tour, as the six-time major winner was reportedly lured away by a four-year contract worth $200 million when he made the leap in 2022.
The upstart league was able to poach a number of other notable names with similarly massive stacks of cash in the years that followed, but it doesn’t have much to show for it as it gears up for its fifth season of operation.
Bryson DeChambeau is really the only guy on the LIV Golf circuit who’s managed to avoid the curse of irrelevancy that has come with leaving the PGA Tour, and last year, there were some rumors that Brooks Koepka was thinking about sitting out the final year of the contract he signed in 2022 and returning to the circuit he spurned that summer.
It was unclear if the PGA Tour would require him to serve the one-year suspension that golfers who fled have been hit with. However, on Monday, we learned it has rolled out what has been dubbed the “Returning Member Program” designed to allow Koepka and other high-profile names to come back without being sidelined for an extended period of time.
That approach will also allow DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and Cameron Smith to rejoin this season thanks to the eligibility requirements that some golf fans think are explicitly designed to exclude one of their colleagues.
Did the PGA Tour purposefully exclude Phil Mickelson when it rolled out the Returning Member Program for LIV Golf Players?
According to the PGA Tour, the Returning Member program is currently available to players “who have participated in Unauthorized Tournaments, have not been a member for a minimum of two (2) years and have won THE PLAYERS, Masters, U.S. Open, PGA Championship and/or The Open Championship in the years 2022-2025.”
The organization didn’t offer any explanation for why 2022 was the cutoff, but I’d argue it makes sense when you consider that was the year LIV Golf played its inaugural season.
However, plenty of golf fans were quick to point out there was one additional LIV Golfer who would have been eligible to return if the cutoff had been just one year earlier: Phil Mickelson, who secured an unlikely win at the PGA Championship less than a month before his 51st birthday in 2021.
On Monday, golf journalist (and longtime Lefty critic) Alan Shipnuck made it clear he thought the cutoff was designed to spite him, and while it’s not entirely clear how Mickelson feels about that theory, he did at least acknowledge it with a string of emojis that implied he thought it was at least a little bit plausible.
😂😂😂👏👏👏
— Phil Mickelson (@PhilMickelson) January 13, 2026
Mickelson won 45 tournaments (the eighth-most of all time) on the PGA Tour before joining LIV. His most recent (and possible final) appearance in a sanctioned event was a tie for 36th at the Fortinet Championship in 2021.
There’s always a chance he could end up returning at some point, but it doesn’t seem like they’re going out of their way to welcome him back.