Rahm returns as Scheffler, McIlroy head to a rejigged Scottish Open
Jon Rahm makes his PGA Tour return at a redesigned Renaissance Club, where a co-sanctioned Scottish Open brings Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy into the field.
The 2026 Scottish Open begins on Thursday at the Renaissance Club in North Berwick, Scotland, with co-sanctioning from the PGA Tour and DP World Tour producing one of the deepest fields of the pre-Open portion of the calendar. Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm all tee it up, and they do so on a layout that tournament organisers have meaningfully redrawn since the club last hosted the event.
The marquee story is Rahm. The Spaniard has spent the bulk of the past two seasons between LIV Golf events and starts that count on the Official World Golf Ranking; his appearance at a PGA Tour co-sanctioned tournament signals that the post-2023 schism is now routinely porous in marquee weeks. The field round him is unusual for an Open qualifier: Scheffler, the world No. 1 for most of the past two years, and McIlroy, the Masters champion in 2025, both start on Thursday.
A course rebuilt for a co-sanctioned week
The Renaissance Club arrives at this Scottish Open with material change. Course modifications have reworked the routing, the green complexes and the approach angles at several of the closing holes, and the field will not have a familiar yardage book from the previous stagings. The setup matters because North Berwick sits on linksland that exposes a different shot each round depending on wind direction.
Rory McIlroy, asked in his pre-tournament presser about the renovation, called it "a course that will play very different from what we saw in 2023," per BBC Sport's preview. The practical effect is a tournament that organisers can present as a fresh test of the same field that will reconvene at Royal Birkdale for The Open the following week.
The LIV-PGA detente in plain view
The rosters at this week's co-sanctioned events are the clearest evidence that the structural split in men's professional golf is no longer the dominant story it was in 2023 and 2024. Rahm's appearance on a PGA Tour startsheet is the single most visible marker. The longer trend — LIV events continuing to count on the Official World Golf Ranking, PGA Tour events continuing to invite back former members on a case-by-case basis — has produced a calendar that functions as one tour with an awkward organisational veneer.
The counter-narrative is straightforward: framing and shot-callers inside the PGA Tour still treat the framework as a provisional arrangement, and the league-into-which-LIV-merges conversation has not produced a definitive agreement. But at the level of week-to-week competition, the gates are open enough that the Scottish Open field reads like a pre-2019 reunified tour. The structural frame is that professional men's golf is operating under a soft détente rather than a settlement, and marquee weeks will keep looking unified until formal terms force them not to.
Stakes: An Open tune-up with real consequence
The Scottish Open carries a full allocation of Open Championship places to the top finishers not already exempt, and the 2026 edition sits a week before Royal Birkdale. That gives the field — particularly the European-bias portion of the DP World Tour roster — a sharper incentive than usual to attack pins rather than play conservatively for the weekend.
Scheffler, on form by his own standards if not by his 2024 peak, has converted high finishes at links-style events into majors more reliably than any current player. McIlroy, who has now won four different majors, is a different problem: his press conference at the Renaissance Club was the local media's first chance to ask him about the next Open venue rather than the last. Rahm is the variable. His PGA Tour starts over the past twelve months have been sparse; his competitive reps on this side of the fence are limited. The reasonable read is that he is sharp but rhythm-light.
What remains uncertain
The field lists published by the PGA Tour and DP World Tour include several marquee names that confirmed their entry ahead of tee times; final commitments are not always the same list that walks the first tee. Weather at North Berwick in early July is forecastable only in broad strokes. And the reshaped course itself introduces a real epistemic gap — no PGA Tour regular has played the new routing in competition. The early leaders on Thursday will be reading greens, not executing from memory.
The 2026 Scottish Open is, on paper, a tune-up. The week it is shaping into is closer to a referendum: on the practical state of a reunified elite calendar, on the relevance of pre-Open links form, and on whether Rahm's return reads as an early chapter of a new arrangement or as a one-off.
Monexus framed this fixture as a co-sanctioned men's event rather than as a LIV-versus-PGA Tour story; the field composition does the framing work for us.