Amid earlier reports suggesting that the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia will no longer fund LIV Golf, the Wall Street Journal reported that league executives are expected to make that official with players on Thursday.
The newspaper cited sources and said that PIF recently laid out a plan for the next five years and made no mention of the golf entity that invested more than $5 billion since its 2022 inception and disrupted men’s professional golf with signings of several prominent players, including Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm.
When news of such a reality first broke two weeks ago while LIV was playing an event in Mexico City, LIV players pushed back on the idea while executives did not comment. The Financial Times also reported the PIF plans two weeks ago.
Several hours passed before CEO Scott O’Neil sent a memo to staff and players that was leaked to the media in which he confidently said the league would persevere.
“We are heading into the heart of our 2026 schedule with the full energy and organization this is bigger, louder and more influential than ever before,” O’Neil wrote in part. “The life of a startup movement is often defined by these moments of pressure. We signed up for this because we believe in disrupting the status quo. We have faced headwinds since the jump, and we’ve answered every time with resilience and grace. Now we answer by doing what we do best: putting on the most compelling show in sports.”
LIV’s next scheduled event is next week in Virginia, but earlier this week a tournament slated for late June outside of New Orleans was scrapped, with funding issues believed to be the reason.
O’Neil did tell UK broadcaster TNT while in Mexico City that the league had funding through this year.
“The reality is you’re funded through the season and then you work like crazy to create a business and a business plan to keep us going,” O’Neil said. “But that’s not different than any other private equity business in the history of mankind.”
If LIV is to survive beyond this season, it will need significant outside investment and sponsorship.
Although the league has boasted of new sponsors such as Rolex, Qualcomm, HSBC and several others, the support is nowhere near what is necessary to run events that include $30 million purses each week and burn beyond that in order to operate.
More Golf from Sports Illustrated
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- Keegan Bradley Explains How Jim Furyk Was Selected Again to Be U.S. Ryder Cup Captain
- With Donald Trump, Doral and the Cadillac Championship, the PGA Tour Has Come Full Circle
This article was originally published on www.si.com as LIV Golf Will Inform Players of Loss of Funding, Per Report.
