The world's best golfers are at Royal Birkdale in Southport, England this week for the Open Championship, where the final major title of the 2026 golf season is up for grabs.
After Rory McIlroy began the major season with another star winning at the Masters, parity has been the optimal word over the last two majors with a pair of surprise winners. Aaron Rai's win at the PGA Championship was a true shocker, while Wyndham Clark's second U.S. Open title at Shinnecock Hills was a stunner as he went wire-to-wire for his first major since that 2022 victory.
Major championships are where legacies are made, and a year filled with surprise winners only complicates matters. For those who win, their lives are changed forever, but those weeks where the game's elite fall short represent missed opportunities to climb ever-higher on the all-time list in a sport where careers are defined by major titles.
That makes the 2026 Open Championship a fascinating tournament, because it's the final opportunity of the season to grab one of those coveted trophies. A number of players who have put together great seasons in 2026 will feel added pressure to convert a strong year into a major title, while others are trying to turn around a year of disappointment.
These nine players fall somewhere on that spectrum and have the most at stake this week at Royal Birkdale.
Matt Fitzpatrick
An Englishman hasn't won the Open Championship since 1992 when Nick Faldo won his third. Before Faldo, Tony Jacklin's win in 1969 was the last English win at The Open. Suffice to say, with there being two Englishman tied for third on the odds sheet -- Fitzpatrick and Tommy Fleetwood -- there's palpable excitement about the possibility that drought gets snapped in Southport. While they share the same odds at 16-1 (per BetMGM) -- Fitzpatrick is unquestionably the player who has been the bigger threat this season. His three wins are tied with Chris Gotterup for the most on the PGA Tour this season, and his eight top 10s are the third-most of anyone. The only thing Fitzpatrick hasn't done this season is bring his absolute A-game to the majors, where he's been solid with three top 25s but hasn't managed to finish in the top 10. This has been the best overall season of Fitzpatrick's career, and paying it off with a major title at home in England would make for a storybook finish to 2026.
Tommy Fleetwood
The other Englishman leading the charge into Royal Birkdale is Fleetwood, who is enjoying another very good but not great year on the PGA Tour. He has six top 10s in 15 starts and while he hasn't had a top 10 in his last four starts, he also hasn't finished worse than T14. However, after finally breaking through to win the Tour Championship last year, this was supposed to be the year Fleetwood took a leap forward now that the monkey was off his back. Instead, he's been largely the same player -- one who is good enough to always hang around but not sharp enough to win. This week, Fleetwood is back home in Southport where he would be the most popular champion of anyone in the field at Royal Birkdale. For a decade, it seemed like a matter of when, not if, for Fleetwood at the majors, but at 35 years old there is no longer a sense that a major title is guaranteed. If he gets into contention, it'll be fascinating to see if he's lifted by the home crowd or if the weight of the moment and the anxiety of fans wanting so badly for him to get it done would cause him to falter.
Scottie Scheffler
The "what's wrong with Scottie" question has been divisive all season. On one hand, he hasn't won since his first start in January, which is shocking for someone who has dominated the PGA Tour for three years. On the other, he has four runner-up finishes and is a constant presence on the first page of the leaderboard. However, after last week's missed cut at the Scottish Open to snap his streak of weekends played, there's no doubt Scheffler's game isn't where he wants it heading into his Open Championship title defense. The silver lining was it gave him a couple extra days to scout Royal Birkdale, but everyone's still waiting to see Scheffler put together four rounds of the kind of golf we grew accustomed to seeing over the past three years. A win this week quiets all the noise, but if he doesn't win, it will only grow over the long eight months between now and the Masters.
Bryson DeChambeau
The first order of business for DeChambeau is to make the weekend. After missing the cut in the first three majors of the season, DeChambeau needs to avoid the indignity of getting shutout at all four majors in 2026. DeChambeau is getting set to hit golf free agency this offseason, and if he ends up with four missed major cuts, he'll be working from a serious deficit in negotiations with the PGA Tour, LIV Golf or any other entity. The challenge is, he's never been the best Open Championship player, with just two top 10s, no other top 30 finishes and three missed cuts in his career. If there's good news for DeChambeau, it's that one of those top 10s came last year when he snuck into T10 with a strong weekend. Perhaps there's something he can take from that to bring out some form we simply haven't seen from him at the majors this year.
Rory McIlroy
Now that he has two green jackets, I'd venture a guess that there isn't a tournament in the world McIlroy wants to win more than another Open Championship. For as much scar tissue as he's shed in recent years by capturing the career grand slam, there's still some heartache to work through in close calls at The Open. From watching Cameron Smith steal his moment at St. Andrews to Scottie Scheffler outshining him in Northern Ireland last year, there's plenty of weight still on his shoulders to grab the Claret Jug for a second time. On top of that, a place in the all-time top 10 is on the line if he can win a seventh major title -- and he'd move one U.S. Open away from a double career grand slam.
Tyrrell Hatton
The LIV Golf player with the best record in majors this season is Hatton, who finished T3 at the Masters and then T7 at the U.S. Open. Hatton now has nine career major top 10s and four in the last three years. That combined with his Ryder Cup record and 11 wins across the DP World Tour, PGA Tour and LIV Golf makes for an impressive résumé for the 34-year-old. However, Hatton's lofty expectations for himself are apparent in how hard he is on himself on the course, and like Fleetwood, he's entering the portion of his career where the pressure ratchets up to finally capture a major title. A win at Royal Birkdale would make him an all-time legend back home in England and change how we discuss Hatton, who right now is considered a nice player but not someone who gets highlighted coming into most majors as a serious threat.
Tom Kim
Tom Kim went through a three-year drought between wins before last week's Scottish Open, which reminded everyone of two things. One is that Kim has the kind of levels to his game to win against an elite field, and the other is that he's still just 24 years old. Kim joined an incredible list of international players to win four times before the age of 25, as only Rory McIlroy, Sergio Garcia, Hideki Matsuyama and Adam Scott accomplished that feat as well. His links golf pedigree is terrific, with a T2 at the 2023 Open on his résumé, and last year we saw a breakout Scottish Open winner carry that momentum into The Open and contend. Kim's 3rd place finish at the U.S. Open last month was evidence he was on the ascendency, and another week in contention at a major would prove that he's back to the form that won him three titles in his first two years. A win at Royal Birkdale would elevate him into another stratosphere and vault him ahead of some of the young stars on the PGA Tour that became household names while he was trying to find his game again.
Chris Gotterup
Earlier this year, I harped on the importance of Cameron Young capitalizing on reaching a new level by converting that into a major title. Young didn't manage to do that and now his form has dipped and he's slipped back out of the game's elite tier. Gotterup is now the man in the midst of a purple patch of play and we know what he can do on the links after winning in Scotland last year and being in the hunt at The Open a week later. A three-time winner on the PGA Tour this season, Gotterup can make a strong case for Player of the Year if he adds a major title and would affirm his place as one of the game's top young stars.
Wyndham Clark
You could argue no one has capitalized on hot streaks better than Clark, who has turned his two best runs of form as a pro into a pair of U.S. Open titles. Aside from those two U.S. Open wins, Clark has just one other top 20 finish in a major, but that just so happens to be a T4 finish at last year's Open Championship. He played well again last week at the Scottish and seems to be comfortable on the links, which when combined with his recent form makes him a serious threat. If he were to win on Sunday at Royal Birkdale, Clark would have more major championship wins than active stars Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas, Dustin Johnson and a whole host of golf legends.
