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

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

The interview was later taken down from the internet, and a partial segment without that answer was re-posted.

As for LIV’s stars, Bryson DeChambeau did not talk with the media this week before withdrawing due to a wrist injury ahead of Sunday’s final round, nor did Dustin Johnson. Phil Mickelson wasn’t in Mexico as he is on an extended break for personal reasons. Rahm said he tried to ignore the news.

“Until the people in charge told me whether the rumors were true or not, for me, it didn’t make sense to think about it or waste time thinking about it,” Rahm said Thursday. “We were here; we knew we were going to play, so the idea was to prepare for a tournament. And that’s it. Since everything happened so suddenly and so quickly, I wasn’t very worried about it because normally, before the rumors start, we already know something. There’s always someone within the league who knows something; it happened so fast that I really didn’t worry about it.”

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As Rahm blitzed the field on Sunday, the LIV Golf broadcast flashed an ad for the league’s return to Mexico City in 2027, prompting Feherty to jab at the reports from early in the week once again.

“That’s really amazing,” Feherty said of the promp, “considering just a few days ago we had to announce we were returning this week.”

Rahm beat David Puig by six. He said he found something on Sunday at the Masters, and his game is now in a better spot. He stood on the 18th green with his Legion XIII teammates, celebrating a team victory. Afterward, Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton, Tom McKibbin and Caleb Surratt all faced questions about their team’s third consecutive win in Mexico. These forward-facing questions were much easier to answer.

“Four in a row sounds even better,” McKibbin said.

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