Jon Rahm won but questions about LIV Golf’s future dominated chaotic week

Jon Rahm stood just off the 18th green in “disbelief.”

Just a week after he left Augusta National disappointed following another poor major performance, Rahm ran away from the field at LIV Golf Mexico City to claim his second title of the season. On paper, it should’ve been another week in which one of the global league’s marquee stars triumphed. A five-event stretch that has seen Rahm win twice, Bryson DeChambeau claim two titles and Anthony Kim author a remarkable comeback win is as good as LIV could have dreamed of to start 2026.

Advertisement

And yet Rahm’s performance was somewhat of a sidebar as he made his way around Club de Golf Chapultepec this week. That’s because bigger questions hung in the air. Questions about LIV Golf’s uncertain future that went unanswered during a chaotic week for the five-year-old league.

*****

On Wednesday, multiple outlets reported that the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund was on the verge of pulling its funding for LIV. While the PIF has a value of around $925 billion, the Iran War and Middle East conflict have, according to reports, impacted the fund’s budget and strategy. Saudi Arabia was already planning on reprioritizing spending away from certain projects — like The Line, part of the Neom giga-project — and toward more sustainable efforts. Reports of the PIF abandoning LIV Golf dropped the same day the PIF unveiled a new five-year strategy that will focus on the domestic economy to diversify its reliance on oil. The PIF said it planned to transition from “a period of rapid growth and acceleration to a new phase of sustained value creation, with a strengthened focus on maximizing impact, raising the efficiency of investments, and applying the highest standards of governance, transparency and institutional excellence.” The PIF also said that it expects domestic investments to account for 80 percent of the fund over this period, with international investments cut from 30 to 20 percent.

While no announcement was made about its investment in LIV Golf, on Thursday, the PIF sold a 70 percent stake in Saudi Pro League soccer team Al Hilal. At the same time, The Telegraph’s James Corrigan reported that LIV officials had been summoned to New York City for an emergency meeting.

Advertisement

As all this was going on, LIV Golf was preparing for a tournament in Mexico City. On Tuesday, press conferences were canceled due to what was later explained as a power outage. On Wednesday, Sergio Garcia and the Fireballs took the mic, and the 2017 Masters champion said that LIV players had not been informed of any change in plans.

“We haven’t heard anything other than what Yasir [Al-Rumayyan, the PIF governor] told us at the beginning of the year,” he said. “That he’s behind us, that they have a long-term project. You know there are always a lot of rumors, and I can’t tell you anything more than what we already know.”

That same day, LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil sent an email to his staff saying that the league would continue “full throttle” in 2026 without mentioning any plans for the future.

“I want to be crystal clear: Our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle,” O’Neil wrote. “While the media landscape is often filled with speculation, our reality is defined by the work we do on the grass. We are heading into the heart of our 2026 schedule with the full energy of an organization that is bigger, louder, and more influential than ever before.

Advertisement

“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.”

On Thursday, LIV Golf’s coverage of the first round opened with commentators Arlo White and David Feherty brushing aside the reports that LIV’s funding was being pulled.

“There are still some writers and broadcasters that take pride in their work, but this generation has spawned a bunch of fast typists, you know, that consider themselves to be experts, and evidently, they’re not,” Feherty said. White chimed in: “Yeah, it must be exhausting, trying to will the LIV Golf league out of existence. Take a day off, everybody.” The broadcast was then hit with a two-hour blackout, again due to a local power outage.

According to business filings in the United Kingdom, first reviewed by The Athletic in October, LIV Golf Ltd, the U.K.-based entity that manages the golf league’s activities outside of the United States, lost more than $590 million in 2024 and has lost $1.4 billion since 2022. O’Neil told The Financial Times in February that he didn’t see LIV turning a profit in the next five, or maybe even 10 years.

Advertisement

“It’s just not the way the world works,” O’Neil said in an interview with TNT in the U.K. on Thursday, when asked if the league was fully funded through 2030. “… 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. But that’s not different from any other private equity-funded business in the history of mankind.”