When news came out that a “bombshell” announcement regarding the Saudi-backed breakaway league was imminent, amid rumors that the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) was pulling the financial plug on LIV Golf at the end of 2026, the golf media industry went berserk.
Some sources were saying this, some sources were saying that, and some sources were saying a bit of the other. All the while, of course, little had been confirmed.
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Scott O’Neil, the LIV CEO, appeared on a TNT Sports broadcast and said: “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.”
The interview was subsequently removed from TNT platforms. O’Neil, trying to douse the flames of speculation surrounding LIV’s future, had inadvertently poured more fuel on it.
Eamon Lynch: Proving even Saudis have a spending limit, LIV Golf runs out of time, cash and luck
It’s estimated that the LIV Golf project has burned through $5 billion – some put it at $8 billion – of PIF money. Taking the PIF, indeed.
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Given the mind-boggling sums lavished on players and prize money, the idea that it can advance in its current state without the backstop of the PIF war chest would seem ludicrous.
Earlier in the year, O’Neil suggested it could be a decade before LIV reached profitability. The way things are going, there will be vast herds of pigs taking to the sky in soaring flight long before that happens. Even the Saudis don’t have a bottomless pit of dosh.
Whether this is the beginning of the end for LIV remains to be seen. It’s certainly been a wild ride.
Division, defections, disruption, distractions, rancour, moralising, legal processes, fines, suspensions, petty squabbling? You name it, the men’s game has witnessed it all during LIV’s four-year existence.
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It’s coming up on three years, meanwhile, since the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the PIF announced a “landmark agreement to unify the game of golf” in a proposed merger that was the most unlikely alliance since beauty started dating the beast.
LIV Golf signage at the 2026 LIV Golf Mexico City event at Club de Golf Chapultepec in Mexico City.
Amid the hostilities of this civil war, it was a staggering development and one riddled with crushing hypocrisy.
Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner at the time, performed a tremendous volte face as he backed out of his anti-LIV stance with all the elegance of someone reversing their car into an industrial pallet of eggs.
A few months earlier, Monahan, somewhat crassly, used the victims of the 9/11 atrocity to effectively shame those American players who had jumped on board the Saudi gravy train.
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In June 2023, he was hailing a union with those same Saudis as a “momentous day.” The moral high ground can be a slippery old summit.
LIV’s audacious emergence was an almighty shock to the system, particularly for a hitherto complacent PGA Tour.
It was forced into fighting fire with fire while making a variety of costly concessions. Player power grew as the arms race intensified and the PGA Tour now has several events with purses of $20 million and upwards.
Those at the top table have never had it so good, but just how sustainable is this kind of model for a sport which is relatively niche compared to the likes of football, NFL or NBA? And what if the bubble bursts?
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A couple of years ago, Martin Slumbers, now retired from his post as chief executive of the R&A, expressed his unease over professional golf’s direction of financial travel and said he was concerned about “the impact substantial increases in men’s professional prize money are having on the perception of the sport.”
You probably have your own views on the reputational damage caused. As greed, fiscal vulgarity and a sense of entitlement grew on both sides of the divide, nobody would’ve blamed you, the golf fan, for tuning out over the past couple of years.
LIV came with a mission to upend men’s professional golf. But LIV’s end may be nigh.
Nick Rodger is a longtime golf correspondent for the Scotland Herald, part of USA Today Co.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: One week later, LIV Golf’s future still uncertain
Read the full article here
