According to LIV Golf CEO Scott O'Neil, everything is fine.
"LIV Golf is in the best shape it has ever been in its history!" in fact. The upstart league, funded until now by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, is "in a billion homes worldwide" and continues to plan beyond 2026. That Bryson DeChambeau's contract is up for renewal must presumably form part of discussions. But it is, we must all remember, absolutely fine.
Except that it isn't. On Tuesday, journalist Ryan French revealed that something seismic was coming, and by Wednesday that something had been revealed. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) will reportedly fund the league through the rest of this season – that is, five more months – but no further, as part of a new strategy to 'maximise returns and redeploy capital within the domestic economy'.
Those words should ring alarm bells among players and staff of LIV Golf and, privately, will have with O'Neil. His job description no doubt includes a demand to paint things in a positive light, but that has been tested over the past few days. Despite so far facing questions largely from his own staff members and broadcast partners he has, understandably, failed to hide the severity of what has happened, is happening, to the business.
"The reality is you're funded through the season and then you work like crazy as a business to create a business and a business plan to keep us going," O'Neil said during a TNT Sports broadcast. TNT Sports, televising the league in the UK for the first time this season, subsequently removed the interview from their platforms. O'Neil had unwittingly admitted the accuracy of the reports he was attempting to downplay.
LIV Golf is on course to have spent $6bn dollars by the end of this year. Its tournaments, which have so far rewarded Talor Gooch with more than $60m, Carlos Ortiz with $30m, Chase Koepka almost $10m, cost tens of millions to host. It has no major TV network deal, often relegated to the back-channels in the United States and only recently brought into the relative mainstream in the UK. It is haemorrhaging money with little to show for it beyond big crowds at two of its successful events, in Australia and South Africa. Successful insofar as the overall package has proven capable of selling tickets.
One way, perhaps the only way, for PIF to 'maximise returns' from LIV is to turn off the lights and save the money that is being spent, and whether or not sponsors can step in to rescue it – we had previously been told that the goal is to build 13 team franchises worth $1bn each, remember – the PIF evidently intends to walk away. Golf, in the end, for better or worse, proved capable of defying advances which have succeeded in football, boxing, WWE, and beyond.
LIV Golf almost won, make no mistake. When Jon Rahm jumped ship, soon after the PGA Tour had signed a 'framework agreement' with the PIF, it appeared the game was up. Rahm had been among a clutch of high-profile golfers to summarily reject LIV, his issues with the league matters of history and legacy. The very fundamentals of Jon Rahm the golfer did not align in any meaningful way with what LIV set out to do and he was happy to say so.
So when they won him over with something more than a quarter of a billion dollars, what couldn't they do? Who would be next? If European golf's modern historian, a player targeting wins in the Open de Espana so that he could match Seve Ballesteros, was vulnerable to their advances then might the PGA Tour have to cut their own losses and align in some way with an operation which first set out to destroy it?
Now we have our answers. LIV couldn't gain meaningful traction in the United States, despite having its golfing poster boy, DeChambeau, who flits between influencer, world-class major champion and government consultant. If DeChambeau, with his direct access to the Trump White House, can't break down this barrier then nobody can. Evidently, those who follow DeChambeau on YouTube do not follow him to FS2 and coverage of LIV Singapore. This ought not to have come as a surprise to organisers who now say their goal is to become the global golf tour, yet whose initial policy was to throw money at a raft of mid-tier PGA Tour players, largely from the USA.
LIV could not supplement Rahm's signing with anything comparable and instead switched to poaching DP World Tour players the moment they'd earned PGA Tour cards, an act of pettiness which revealed a lack of substance and commitment to whatever plans existed. When rebranding a team to represent Korea last year (and kicking out a player from Japan to do so), LIV could not attract the best Korean golfers from the PGA Tour, not even the one carrying an injury.
With Rory McIlroy resolute, Scottie Scheffler seemingly unbothered, most American golfers unwilling to sacrifice home comforts and most international ones determined to live out their dreams of beating those Americans on their own turf, the balance tipped finally, fatally, in favour of the PGA Tour. Its viewership is stronger, its schedule neater, its new CEO, Brian Rolapp, more proactive than his predecessor.
Not even Anthony Kim's remarkable comeback from total obscurity through drug rehabilitation to victory in the single biggest event on the LIV Golf calendar could shift momentum in its favour. Kim beating Rahm and DeChambeau in Adelaide represented the dream scenario for those in charge of the operation. Unfortunately for them, when the raison d'être is political rather than sporting, matters of sport carry less weight than they might merit.
Kim's achievement is among the most remarkable in golf, yet it happened in relative obscurity. He has not, despite LIV Golf being recognised with world ranking points for the first time, been able to get close to qualifying for majors, and as to which DeChambeau can attest, the content era does not dwell for too long on even the most astonishing of reels. This does nothing to diminish the scale of the achievement; LIV Golf is simply not a sufficient platform for it.
Nor would the PGA Tour have been, by the way. However stable it appears to be, however bright the immediate future is – particularly with the likelihood of the likes of Rahm and DeChambeau, perhaps even Kim, returning to it – golf is ultimately a niche sport, at least as far as the TV product goes. To transcend requires the meaning only history can bring. McIlroy's second Masters win captured a huge global audience and images from it will of course endure.
It was just days after McIlroy's Augusta heroics, with world number one Scheffler in second, that news of LIV's impending demise began to spread. This is it seems the beginning of the end. Unless the DP World Tour abandons its strategic alignment with the PGA Tour, or the PGA Tour itself extends an olive branch, LIV Golf has no viable future. Neither scenario appears likely; neither established tour has enough to gain by conceding the high ground.
O'Neil insists that LIV's desperate scramble for sponsorship is a normal part of dealing in the world of private equity, but there is nothing normal, even in the year 2026, about being propped up by a nation state, vulnerable to forces as strong as war and the will of a crown prince. LIV's future depended on forming an alliance with the established golf organisations or remaining in favour domestically. How foolish it now seems to have believed that PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan's undoubted love of the sport would buy his pet project time.
Given the exorbitant fees required to secure even the short-term commitment of DeChambeau, to pay out the next $30m purse in Mexico, and in light of dwindling TV ratings in the world's number one golf market, finding sponsors to steady the ship is an almost absurd notion. O'Neil claims that the league brought in half a billion dollars in sponsorship last year, but all available accounting paints a picture not of flourishing finances but of total dependence on the investment fund which now appears set to abandon it.
No wonder local officials in New Orleans are seeking assurances that LIV Golf's event in Louisiana will take place later this year. According to O'Neil, it will proceed as planned and so will the remainder of the season, enabling those who jumped ship – such as early Mexico leader, Victor Perez – to get rich quick. That is, after all, what this entire operation was always about for so many who signed up. Without the money which now appears set to go, LIV would have held very little appeal to the best of them, particularly as it pays for missing majors and could yet pay for Jon Rahm missing the Ryder Cup.
As it happens, Rahm may breathe a sigh of relief should the road back to acceptance be paved for him. It doesn't take any tint of the spectacles to understand how much reputational damage the brilliant, two-time major champion suffered for his heel turn, made worse by his ongoing battle with the DP World Tour. As it stands, Rahm may not be eligible for Adare Manor next September. The prospects of him not playing were always slim and will disappear altogether if LIV Golf winds up two years before his contact is due to expire.
For now, that is not quite certain, but the signs are all there. And if LIV Golf does cease to exist, there will be damage to undo. How do the remaining operators service starved markets in Australia and South Africa which, as they've proven in their support of LIV, deserve better than the odd superstar every so often? Will those who earned such respect for staying put, such as Scheffler, take the final step into greatness by sacrificing something small for something big, and head to Australia in search of a Stonehaven Cup?
With complications around timings and taxation and no real sense that Scheffler, or indeed many of his peers, harbour such global ambitions, more likely is that we return to something like the world we had before, only with a strengthened PGA Tour. After the last few years, that is no bad place to be. Golf below professional level continues to thrive and the sport has demonstrated that it can continue absent of Tiger Woods – at least, for the time being.
Nevertheless, if we are to criticise those who abandoned the established tours then we must also ask something more of the biggest names we have. McIlroy is leading the way, venturing to India and Australia again, but even he isn't enough on his own. Golf needs the United States and its Ryder Cup stars to embrace travel and if they don't, the sport is all the worse for their insularity.
The big question, to which there will be no immediate answer, is whether this proves to be a Pyrrhic victory for the PGA Tour; whether, in restructuring from the ground up and inviting private equity through the front door, there is eventually a heavy price to pay. This is the byproduct of years-long stagnation compounded by golfers renting away their careers for exorbitant fees which have inflated the market. The fear is that it will ultimately burst. Then what?
It's possible that the PGA Tour is stronger than it has ever been in 2027, but is it really feasible that a golf league continues to dish out such extreme wealth even to extremely good golfers? If LIV Golf under the support of a sovereign wealth fund felt like a time bomb, what are we to make of a $20m purse at Harbour Town this week and a run of similar tournaments to come? For how long can that last?
And that uncertainty is what those who left contributed towards, whether it was their intention or not. They will argue in the coming weeks and months that everyone has benefited, but never did have an answer that stretched beyond the limits of their own careers. Golfers who by historic measures are no more than exceptional have earned more money than even the greatest ought to have been able to command. Good for them, but good for who else exactly?
Is it too much to expect today's custodians to think about those who follow? That is a difficult question to answer. But by burying their heads in the sands of Saudi Arabian wealth, what's certain is that the stars who left risked something more than their own reputations. Only in the years to come will we know at what cost.
