Sagström Enters Match Play Top-10 With LPGA Win
Madeline Sagström rose 4 places to enter the Womens Match Play World rankings top-10 with her dramatic 1 hole victory over Lauren Coughlin of the USA in the 2025 LPGA Match Play Championship. Sagström was 4up on Coughlin through 6 holes, but then lost five of the next six holes to be one down, before squaring the match at the 13th. The key moment was her par at the 16th to take the lead again, which the Swede held on to for her second LPGA win.
Runner-up Coughlin went to the 18th hole in every match with her perfect record only blemished in the final and her group stage loss to Mi Hyang Lee in the second round. Her consolation is that she is up to #3 in the Match Play World Rankings for golf.
With a criteria of a minimum 10 games in the last 5 years, Ariya Jutanugarn of Thailand dropped from top place to #2 as fellow Thai Atthaya Thitikul entered the overall rankings at #1 thanks to a run to the quarter-finals that saw her win 4 out of 5 games.
In the history of the LPGA Match Play rankings for this event, Sagström also moves up to 4th behind leader Lilia Vu who has an impressive 80% win rate.
The champion Madeline Sagström became the first player to win the LPGA Match Play event by winning all 7 games. This is actually unusual when you have group stages as analysis of the WGC Match Play compromises shows where only 33% of champions were undefeated.
In the WGC the number of the top-10 seeds playing on the weekend was 30%, whereas in the 2025 LPGA it was 20% on Saturday and 25% on Sunday.
This is one of the reasons that Match Play World created the Match Play Matrix format so that every player plays every round and the winner is the only player left undefeated with a 100% record.
