Rory McIlroy won the Masters in April 2026 by one shot from Scottie Scheffler, in front from the opening round to the last putt.1 It was his second green jacket in twelve months and his sixth major, and it made him the fourth man to defend at Augusta, after Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods. Four months earlier he had been voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year, only the third golfer ever to take it.
He is at home this month. The Amgen Irish Open is played at Doonbeg, County Clare, from 10 to 13 September.5
He appears in twelve of the rankings here. Several concern Augusta and the Open. One concerns the Ryder Cup, one the finest swing ever built, and one is a catalogue of disasters.
McIlroy spent eleven years as the most famous golfer missing the one major everybody was counting, and no two lists have ever agreed on what that was worth.
Jack Nicklaus won eighteen majors. McIlroy has six
Fifteen players share the broadest golf ranking here, all of them candidates for best ever. McIlroy is one of the fifteen.
Nicklaus makes the question difficult. Eighteen professional majors is a total nobody has matched in sixty years of trying, from his first in 1962 to his last in 1986.
McIlroy arrives with six majors, thirty PGA Tour wins and 122 weeks at world number one.34 Next to Nicklaus that is a short paragraph, and it is still enough to belong.
Tiger Woods, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Walter Hagen and Arnold Palmer are all in the same fifteen. Between them the list covers a century of the sport, which is why nobody outside the top four is really competing for the top.
McIlroy vs Seve Ballesteros: Europe's oldest argument
Narrow the same question to one continent and McIlroy's case changes completely. Fifteen Europeans qualify, and the top of the field has been a two-man conversation since the 1980s.
Seve Ballesteros is the emotional answer. Five majors, two green jackets, and a Ryder Cup career that turned a European team from a formality into an event people flew across the Atlantic to watch.
McIlroy is the statistical one. Six majors, seven Order of Merit titles spread across fourteen seasons, and the first European ever to win all four of golf's majors.3
Nick Faldo has six majors too, three Opens and three Masters, won inside a nine-year stretch nobody in Europe has repeated. Behind those three sit Bernhard Langer, José María Olazábal, Pádraig Harrington and Tony Jacklin, which makes the list deeper than European golf's reputation suggests.
Shane Lowry, Royal Portrush and the Claret Jug
Twenty Open champions are ranked here, Old Tom Morris among them. Three were born on the island of Ireland, a strange share for a place of seven million people.
McIlroy won his Open at Royal Liverpool in 2014, by two shots, in the middle of a summer that also brought him the PGA Championship at Valhalla.3
Shane Lowry won his at Royal Portrush in 2019, in Northern Ireland, in front of a crowd that treated it as a home win for the whole island. Pádraig Harrington won two of them, back to back.
Harry Vardon won six. Tom Watson won five. Against that, one Claret Jug buys entry rather than any claim on the front.
Congressional, 2011: the US Open he won by eight
The US Open is built to punish the thing McIlroy does best. Narrow fairways and deep rough take the driver out of his hands and hand the week to whoever misses in the right places.
He won it anyway. Congressional, June 2011, by eight shots, at twenty-two years old.3
Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Jones and Willie Anderson each won four of them. One win puts you in the room. It does not put you near the front of it.
The career Grand Slam: six men in ninety years
Six players have won all four professional majors, and this ranking is the entire club, laid out end to end. Gene Sarazen completed the set in 1935. McIlroy completed it in 2025.2
Ninety years separate them, and McIlroy waited longer for the last piece than anyone else in the group. Eleven years passed between his 2014 PGA Championship and the playoff he won from Justin Rose at Augusta. Through most of those eleven years the Masters was the only subject any interviewer wanted.2
Gary Player, beside him in the frame, finished his set in 1965 and kept winning majors into a third decade. Ben Hogan finished his in 1953, the year he entered three majors and won all three.
The trouble with a six-man list is the other two names. Nicklaus and Woods would top almost any golf ranking ever written, so in practice the other four are playing for third.
Ryder Cup: McIlroy vs Colin Montgomerie
The Ryder Cup rewards a different game from the one that wins majors. Three days of match play, foursomes with a partner you may not like, and a crowd close enough to hear.
McIlroy has played every Ryder Cup from 2010 to 2025 and been part of six winning European teams.3 Eight appearances is a long apprenticeship in a format that has embarrassed better stroke players than him.
Colin Montgomerie never won a major and belongs here anyway. He never lost a Ryder Cup singles match in eight attempts, which is the sort of record the event invents and no other week in golf can produce.
Seve Ballesteros, José María Olazábal, Ian Poulter and Sergio García qualify on the same logic. So do Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper, from decades when the American team simply expected to win.
Brooks Koepka won four majors in three years
The 2010s is the decade nobody owned. Tiger Woods won one major inside it, right at the end, and no other player won more than four.
McIlroy has the case built on volume. Four majors in the decade, FedEx Cups in 2016 and 2019, and Order of Merit titles in 2012, 2014 and 2015.3
Koepka has the case built on timing. His four came between 2017 and 2019, all of them at majors, and almost nothing else in that period went his way.
Jordan Spieth won three before he turned twenty-four and then stopped winning them altogether. Dustin Johnson, Jason Day, Justin Thomas and Adam Scott all reached world number one inside the same ten years, which is the clearest evidence that nobody held on to it.
Ben Hogan wrote the book. Adam Scott is the modern edition
This ranking ignores trophies completely and asks only how the ball gets hit. Fourteen swings are on it, and several belong to players who won far less than the men they are being compared with.
McIlroy qualifies on physics. He is five foot ten and generates clubhead speed that players six inches taller cannot reach, which is why coaches show his sequence rather than his scorecard.
Adam Scott is the modern reference. Ben Hogan is the historical one, and the book he wrote in 1957 is still the text most teaching professionals were raised on.
Mickey Wright made the list because Hogan called hers the best swing he had ever seen. Sam Snead, Ernie Els, Fred Couples and Louis Oosthuizen complete it. None of them qualified on major count.
McIlroy vs Bryson DeChambeau: distance without the gym
Eleven players are ranked on one thing: how far the ball goes. The list spans persimmon heads and carbon faces, so comparing them is unfair, which is most of the fun.
McIlroy ranked second on the PGA Tour for driving distance in 2026, at thirty-seven, in a field of players built for exactly that.4
DeChambeau took the opposite route. He rebuilt his body specifically to hit it further, then won the 2020 US Open by six shots and made every equipment conversation about him for two years.
John Daly led the tour in driving distance in eleven separate seasons. Jack Nicklaus and Sam Snead are on the list too, from eras when being the longest hitter meant something completely different.
Augusta, 2011: the 80 that still follows him
Eleven of these rankings are ones McIlroy would want to appear in. This is the twelfth, and he appears in it twice.
On the Sunday of the 2011 Masters he led by four shots after 54 holes and shot an eight-over 80, finishing tied fifteenth, ten strokes behind the winner.3 He was twenty-one, and the round was broadcast in full.
Thirteen years later he did something smaller and just as painful. At Pinehurst in the 2024 US Open he led by two with four holes to play, bogeyed three of them, and lost to Bryson DeChambeau by one.3
The company is grim and distinguished. Greg Norman led the 1996 Masters by six on Sunday morning and lost by five. Jean van de Velde needed a double bogey on the last at Carnoustie in 1999 and made a triple. Arnold Palmer led the 1966 US Open by seven with nine holes left. Jordan Spieth made a quadruple bogey on the twelfth at Augusta in 2016 while leading.
Two green jackets do not delete the round that made this list necessary. McIlroy has never pretended otherwise, and neither has anyone who watched it.
George Best, Joey Dunlop and a country of two million
Leave golf entirely and McIlroy has a different problem. Northern Ireland has fewer than two million people and an unreasonable number of world champions, and this ranking puts thirteen of them in one list.
George Best won the Ballon d'Or in 1968 and still appears on lists of the finest footballers who ever played. Mary Peters won Olympic pentathlon gold in Munich in 1972 with a world-record score.
Joey Dunlop won twenty-six Isle of Man TTs. Alex Higgins and Dennis Taylor between them own the two most-watched frames in snooker history, and Taylor's black ball in 1985 was seen by 18.5 million people after midnight.
McIlroy comes from Holywood, County Down, and is the only name here still competing at the top of a global sport.3 Graeme McDowell and Darren Clarke both won majors of their own and still have to queue behind a footballer and a motorcyclist.
Nick Faldo, 1989: the last golfer to win the BBC award
The BBC's Sports Personality award has been decided by a public vote since 1954, which makes it a ranking of years as much as of athletes. Sixteen winners are gathered here.
McIlroy won it in December 2025, and joined Dai Rees and Nick Faldo as the only golfers ever to do so.6 Faldo's win came in 1989, the year McIlroy was born.
The other names show what he was up against. Andy Murray won three times. Steve Redgrave won it after a fifth consecutive Olympic gold, Daley Thompson between two Olympic decathlon titles, and Bradley Wiggins in the year he took the Tour de France and Olympic gold.
Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill, David Beckham, Ben Stokes and Emma Raducanu are all here too. It is the one ranking on this page where being the best golfer in the world is not obviously the strongest qualification.
Twelve lists, and the 80 is still on one of them
Two green jackets in twelve months have not moved McIlroy on most of these lists. They moved him on exactly one, and that one had six members before he joined it. The round of 80 is still on the collapse list, and it will stay there whatever he wins next.
Sort one career twelve ways and the flattering answers and the ugly one draw on exactly the same facts, sorted two options at a time.
Go and settle whichever of the twelve you have an opinion about. Or write the thirteenth question yourself.
More rankings, more angles
- Tiger Woods vs Jack Nicklaus, Ranked Side by Side — eighteen majors against fifteen, on nine lists
- Andre Agassi Skipped Wimbledon Three Years, Then Won It — another career that reads differently by decade
- Billie Jean King Won 39 Majors. One Exhibition Made Her Famous — when the signature moment is not the trophy
- What Is Pairwise Comparison? — how a list gets built two options at a time
Sources
- 2026 Masters Tournament — result, margin, wire-to-wire win and the record 36-hole lead: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-04)
- 2025 Masters Tournament — the sudden-death playoff win over Justin Rose, and McIlroy as the sixth player and first European to complete the modern career Grand Slam: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-04)
- Rory McIlroy career record — the six majors and their venues and margins, the 2011 Masters final round, the 2024 US Open at Pinehurst, Ryder Cup appearances, 122 weeks at world number one, Order of Merit titles and birthplace: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-04)
- PGA Tour official player profile — 30 PGA Tour wins, world ranking and the 2026 driving-distance and cuts-made figures: pgatour.com (checked 2026-09-04)
- DP World Tour — Amgen Irish Open 2026, dates and venue: europeantour.com (checked 2026-09-04)
- PGA Tour — McIlroy named BBC Sports Personality of the Year on 18 December 2025, joining Dai Rees and Nick Faldo as the only golfers to win it: pgatour.com (checked 2026-09-04)
- Hero photograph by Cem0030, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons: commons.wikimedia.org (checked 2026-09-04)
