"We're very fortunate that a lead investor has signed a term sheet approved by our board, which will carry and fund LIV going forward. It's very good news for us."
Scott O'Neil got to the point of the press conference eventually. LIV Golf, or LIV Golf 2.0 as it is being referred to, or LIV Golf 2.0: This Time Without the Sportswashing as it perhaps should be, will he says continue beyond 2026, because funding to do so has been secured.
Who is funding it and what exactly they are funding? Those key details remained absent, but thanks to diligent reporters who have been bang on the money since Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund decided it could not make this work, or did not wish to try, we have a good idea that the schedule involves 10 tournaments, five of them in the USA. Team golf is expected to be made more central to the product.
As for the funding, the first red flag could be found in O'Neil's own words – a term sheet approved by the board is some way short of funding itself. More red flags emerged as the day developed. The lead investor was not identified but is widely reported to be BC Partners, a private equity firm, and their investment would be in the form of a loan. This is no major sponsor injecting cash in a project it believes in.
And it is contingent on something more than a 10-event schedule and the promise of elevated team golf. Incongruously, given that implied emphasis on Legion XIII rather than Jon Rahm, on Crushers rather than Bryson DeChambeau, both LIV's new funding and its long-term future may depend entirely on what those two individuals decide to do.
The Financial Times explained that the money Rahm in particular is owed – reported elsewhere to be in excess of $100m – could be settled at a discount by the PIF to avoid bad publicity 'leaving the players positioned to sign fresh deals with the BC Partners-backed circuit'. Any such deals might involve yet more cash, but also equity in the new league, the sort of gamble that might appeal to some but won't appeal to all.
Let us be absolutely clear on this: if it was a mistake for Rahm to join in the first place, a debate which still rages given that he was heavily compensated for pausing a potentially historic career, it would be madness for the Spaniard to double down. Unless he is legally bound to LIV Golf 2.0, what other reason could there be for him to support it? Rahm should, and surely will, be playing his golf elsewhere in 2027.
DeChambeau is more complex. The idea of being the name and face of the organisation will appeal deeply to a player who probably worries less about the legacy he leaves in the professional version of the game. DeChambeau, whose success on YouTube has seen his popularity, fame and influence soar, who has a line in to the White House, will love the idea of being central to the future success of a defiant operation. He believes in LIV in a way that Rahm simply never has.
Later in Wednesday's press conference, O'Neil made the extremely tenuous argument that, on the ground in South Africa, Dean Burmester is as important as DeChambeau. That may be so, but try selling it in the boardroom. And so DeChambeau, who reportedly held court in a players' meeting earlier in the week, holds all the cards. This really could become his league.
Based on all of the above, you can be the judge as to where LIV supporters should sit on a scale that begins at scepticism and ends in bullishness, but it won't surprise anyone that so many skipped straight to the latter. Its most prominent online mouthpiece, commentator Arlo White, tweeted 'What a very interesting day guys…' White had made no comment earlier in the week, when it was reported that many of his colleagues had been told their services would no longer be needed.
This is business, and there are winners and losers in the end, but right now it seems premature in the extreme for anyone wedded to the success of LIV Golf to light the candles and slice the cake, because there remains a key question that nobody has addressed and that funding alone does not resolve: if LIV Golf was a failure – cancelled events, departing investors, impending bankruptcy says that it was – then how exactly will LIV Golf 2.0 be a success?
Supporters will point to the 50,000 spectators, most of them paying and some of them even at full price, who attended LIV's recent event in England, and it's undeniable that on the ground, there is an audience. How many were there for the golf, how many for the higher-profile entertainment, isn't so clear, but that perhaps doesn't matter. Ultimately there were enough people lining fairways and filling grandstands to make this event a success in isolation.
But how many watched on television? How many saw Lucas Herbert's dominant win and went out and bought a Ripper GC hat, downloaded the LIV app, paid their subscription and are raring to follow their new team in New York? On everything we've seen and heard through five years of LIV Golf, the answer is not enough. And unless that changes, unless it becomes a viable TV product watched by millions rather than at times tens of thousands, then the ultimate destination is as clear now as it was when Saudi Arabia pulled the plug.
O'Neil's plan to enact that change remains largely secret, but the details we have leave as many questions as they do answers. He talks about LIV's pursuit of growing the game worldwide, boasted of the 10 countries it visits even on Wednesday – the same day various outlets reported it will drop to six. He has already conceded that it cannot compete with the PGA Tour in the USA, yet five of 10 events reportedly planned for 2027 will take place there, and his number one asset is DeChambeau.
The other five seem likely to be the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, Korea and Spain, because LIV Golf has teams ostensibly representing these nations. Golf is enormously popular in each of them already. LIV's UK outfit features none of the UK's best golfers. Its Spanish team does not even include Rahm, half of whose team is also from the UK and both of them better than any member of the Majesticks. Korea's team doesn't include the best Korean golfers, all of whom turned down LIV Golf. It's debatable whether those from Australia or South Africa do either.
Tied to nations, how does LIV ensure that a pipeline remains in place? That when Louis Oosthuizen has had enough, his replacement is Casey Jarvis or Jayden Schaper, both of them now PGA Tour-bound, or Aldrich Potgieter, who is there already, or Christiaan Maas, who soon will be? Does O'Neil really believe that Crushers can be elevated beyond DeChambeau himself when his teammates include Paul Casey, who turns 50 next year, 47-year-old Charles Howell, and Anirban Lahiri? As Jackson Koivun aims at the Presidents Cup, what of Michael La Sasso, who is sandwiched between Bjorn Hellgren and Danny Lee at 52nd in the current standings?
Lahiri had hoped a PIF-backed Asian Tour event in India would 'inspire a generation', but his attempts to do so now depend on tournaments organised by the DP World Tour instead. As for O'Neil's previous pledge to organise around national opens, LIV Golf currently has a stake in a couple of the smaller ones but that seems set to end now that the Asian Tour has jumped ship. The DP World Tour has held national opens in Australia, Kenya, South Africa, India, China, Turkey, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, and Scotland already this year. More follow in Ireland, France, and Spain, with plans to restore the English Open also in motion.
It is the DP World Tour, despite its critics, which continues to sit second only to the PGA Tour in prestige, influence, and significance. When Ryder Cup qualifying begins at the British Masters later this month, it will take over as the number one product in professional golf until January's Dubai Desert Classic. Fields in Ireland and India are exceptionally strong and it was recently announced that Ludvig Aberg will make his debut in France, too. It has been a long time since so many world-class golfers focused their attentions on a European autumn.
There is also the promise of more to come, through a so far vague announcement that the PGA Tour will support the Australian Open. Scottie Scheffler has begun talking in terms which suggest he'd like to play there soon, but for now Rory McIlroy will do. His commitment to a global schedule includes a return Down Under for the Australian Open after he's been to Ireland and India, and it was revealed recently that he'll stick around for the Cathedral Invitational too. While McIlroy will undoubtedly have been paid for visiting Kingston Heath, one of the world's greatest courses, the latter seemingly stems from a love of the game he plays.
LIV meanwhile survives, barely, on the promise of something it has so far failed to realise. Through five years which began with sportswashing and greed and saw it make no attempt whatsoever to win the hearts and minds of the tens of millions of golf fans worldwide, it is left with a clique of embattled supporters who cannot comprehend that what they like and what is popular do not always square.
This is a third-tier golf league that has a small number of first-rate golfers who are there because they were paid over the odds. It falls short of the DP World Tour not just in history, but in breadth, in quality of golf course, in depth of fields, in worldwide acceptance, and in its absence from a functioning ecosystem that, while not without flaws, allows players from every corner of the world to reach the top if they are good enough.
Viewed through all of this, Wednesday's celebrations from LIV Golf acolytes seem premature in the extreme. We might be closer to a schedule for 2027, but if LIV holds 10 events, with a weaker roster than it has today, with Rahm having departed; if five of those events are televised on FS2 in the US to an audience measured in thousands, if world ranking points are gone and if pathways are closed, then what we're talking about isn't recovery from the brink, but a slowing of the drift towards it.
