LIV Golf is on life support. Does it matter if the plug is pulled now the Saudis have gone? | Opinion

Were it not for Brian Rolapp’s disinclination to even mention LIV Golf, you’d be forgiven for thinking the PGA Tour’s CEO had spent the past week trolling his opposite number with a carpet bombing campaign of upbeat commercial announcements. 

On Monday, the Tour said that Sompo, an insurance company, will sponsor an event next season and an elite Championship Series tournament starting in 2028. On Tuesday, it was confirmed that Travelers will level up to the same tier. Wednesday brought news that Sentry will underwrite another of the silk-stocking stops. On Thursday, the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard was added to the public list of tournaments comprising the Tour’s premier schedule. (Friday was seemingly a day of rest for sales and marketing folks at the GloHo.) Each announced tournament has a $20 million purse, though total fees incurred by sponsors run closer to $30 million. 

By comparison, LIV Golf’s CEO, Scott O’Neil was silent since he had no good news to share and presumably little enthusiasm for addressing damaging speculation swirling around his business. One claim — amplified by his own players — is that the team finale scheduled for August 27 to 30 in Michigan will be canceled. Then came a cautionary rumor that it might happen after all, despite no build-out having commenced at the venue. A report followed that LIV is on the cusp of signing investors to keep it afloat into 2027, an infusion pegged at $250-$300 million, or about a quarter of what the Saudis have been torching annually for the past few years. Lastly, there was renewed anticipation of a bankruptcy filing as a step toward realigning the league’s financial obligations. 

No wonder the PGA Tour was so eager to position itself as surging in the right direction just as its antagonist is battling the narrative that it’s in a death spiral. Whether both circuits remain on their respective trajectories is another matter. 

Rolapp clearly has traction with sponsors to finance the Championship Series of a restructured PGA Tour, though it’s possible some incumbents were offered a friends-and-family discount rather than asked for the full $30 million.

But he has delicate questions to navigate. Are there enough companies willing to write checks for that elite tier of tournaments? Which events will be upper level and which will be consigned to the lower Challenger Series or disappear entirely? (Rocket Mortgage is out when this week’s tournament in Detroit concludes). How will members react to the winnowing down of eligibility criteria, when it’s clarified who has status on Tour, how it is earned and retained? Will sponsors continue to see value in the Challenger Series that asks a lesser spend but delivers a considerably less stellar field? Will all the changes generate the hoped-for substantial increase in the media rights fees? 

O’Neil wishes his issues were so benign. He needs to persuade serious operators to give him a lot of investment cash and fast. He needs to create a business model that can sustain itself rather than rely on the profligacy of a Saudi benefactor while avoiding being bled dry by opportunistic leeches. He needs to source tournaments for a pared-down schedule because several of his existing stops will be lost with the Asian Tour cutting LIV loose. He needs players to recommit to a structure that can’t fund enormous contracts but which might offer equity ownership instead, and whose access to world ranking points might be in jeopardy. He needs to cultivate a genuine fan base that isn’t defined by loud, terminally online gobshites who can’t simultaneously type and pick their noses. 

It’s an uphill climb that would knacker a sherpa, but LIV’s skeptics shouldn’t reflexively hope O’Neil fails. 

Executives at other global tours will certainly hope for that since LIV’s survival means competition for sponsors, venues, consumer attention, calendar slots and talent. But those aren’t concerns for anyone who opposed LIV on the basis that the sport shouldn’t sell an ownership stake to an authoritarian government trying to sports wash its abuses. With Saudi funding ending (though not just yet), LIV’s future is a matter of utter ambivalence for many of its harshest critics. Like any other enterprise, it should be left to live on its merits or perish on the lack thereof. 

Even if O’Neil does source new funding, some things about LIV are unlikely to change, or at least not rapidly. It’s a dreadful product, garishly presented, burdened with a brand reputation that’s indelibly associated with greed and mismanagement, beset with an indestructible victim mentality, toxically politicized in its associations, and built around players who are (in some cases, though not all) unmotivated, unlikeable, untrustworthy or unknown. 

All of those factors contributed to the league’s implosion, and all remain to be tackled if its CEO can somehow survive the immediate existential crisis. It’s a shame that his chance of success depends so heavily upon the very players whose loyalty has previously proven to be a losing proposition.

Eamon Lynch is a columnist for Golfweek and a contributor to Golf Channel.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: LIV Golf is on life support. Does it matter if the plug is pulled now the Saudis have gone? | Opinion