Less than five years after LIV Golf was officially announced, the breakaway circuit that attracted several former major championship winners to its gaudy purses, worldwide schedule and team-centric format, has reached a crossroads.
As expected, the PIF announced Thursday that it would stop financing the LIV Golf League after the 2026 season. It has invested more than $5 billion into the breakaway circuit since its inception in 2022 and that number will grow to more than $6 billion by season's end.
Though LIV continues to espouse future promise as it reshapes its leadership and searches for new investors, it again has precipitated another inflection point for professional golf that is probably just getting started.
What is the latest and what does it all actually mean?
Mark Schlabach: A LIV Golf official told ESPN on Thursday that next week's tournament at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C., will be played as scheduled. On Tuesday, LIV Golf and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry announced that a scheduled tournament in New Orleans won't be played. A tournament could be played in Louisiana this fall, but that seems unlikely given LIV Golf's current state.
There are three more international tournaments scheduled in Korea (May 28-31), Spain (June 4-7) and England (July 23-26), followed by three events in the U.S. at Trump National in Bedminster, New Jersey (Aug. 6-9), The Club at Chatham Hills in Westfield, Indiana (Aug. 20-23) and the season-ending championship at The Cardinal at Saint John's in Plymouth, Michigan (Aug. 28-30).
Paolo Uggetti: Though LIV now hopes to secure funding to stay alive after the 2026 season, the PGA Tour finds itself holding most of the cards. The threat of LIV taking any more players is gone and now the Tour can play the waiting game as the inevitable question becomes: Will LIV players try to make their way back to the PGA Tour and how?
A source told ESPN Wednesday that conversations about potential pathways for certain players to return have begun at Tour headquarters, but with circumstances being different now than they were when they opened up the returning member program for Brooks Koepka, it seems likely that it won't be easy for any players hoping for a return to the tour they chose to leave.
And though there will be uncertainty about a way back until the Tour decides to announce some kind of pathway -- or more likely take each player on a case-by-case basis -- PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp & Co. now have no reason to rush into any decisions. As the question of whether LIV can get through this season without any more event cancellations or postponements as well as whether any players will withdraw from events looms, the Tour can sit back and let players, as they have already done, come to them.
With no PIF investment, what will LIV have to do to stay afloat?
Schlabach: After losing its financial backing from the PIF, LIV Golf named two investment bankers to its new independent board, Gene Davis and Jon Zinman, who will attempt to bring the league's new vision of a "diversified, multipartner investment model" to fruition.
Given the amount of money that LIV Golf has burned through in four-plus years -- it is reportedly spending $100 million a month and $40 million per tournament -- it won't be easy. LIV Golf CEO Scott O'Neil previously said it would take five to 10 years for the circuit to become profitable.
Not even the world's richest oil state could keep losing that much money.
Even if LIV Golf somehow secures new funding, the league will not continue in its current form. The days of $30 million purses and nine-figure contracts for star golfers are over without PIF's endless coffers.
A source told ESPN that LIV Golf is open to staging fewer tournaments, playing them only in countries outside the U.S., and even merging with the DP World Tour in some fashion.
While that might be enough for older golfers such as Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter and others, and younger players such as David Puig, Elvis Smylie, Caleb Surratt and Michael La Sasso, it's not what LIV Golf's stars signed up for.
Uggetti: Frankly, LIV's best lifeline might not be an influx of investor money but rather some kind of partnership that gives them the credibility they never quite had.
Even if they are able to get, let's say, 25% of the investment that they had from the PIF, everything about their operations will have to change and be pared down to fit their new budget. It's the price the league will have to pay for how good things were -- unlimited sums of money can't be matched by strategy or business savvy.
And if LIV becomes a watered down, less money-centric endeavor, the appeal quickly loses its luster. Why would a young player looking to build out a career in the sport choose to play for equal or lesser purses if LIV's current setup includes only watered-down Official World Golf Ranking purses and not as many events to hone your game?
The idea of partnering with the DP World Tour or even with some national opens, as it has been suggested, would be a boon for LIV. It would be a best-case scenario as it would be able to draft off the legitimacy of such organizations and events. But what's to say these entities are willing to partner with a tour that just lost its financial backer in such a loud and damning fashion? LIV would have to present a clear incentive and benefit to such parties and the only way it would be able to do that is by requiring its best players to take part in those events if there are any left after this season.
Of course, some players who don't opt to go back to the DP World Tour or PGA Tour (or who don't have status to do that) will sign up for whatever iteration of LIV comes from this. But as an entity with hopes of becoming an international tour that grows, LIV, as we know it, can't continue. It's hard to see how the entire operation is able to find any footing after this fallout.
What will the response be from the PGA Tour?
Schlabach: Koepka, a five-time major champion, returned to the PGA Tour on Jan. 12 via a new returning member program.
The PGA Tour extended the same offer to LIV golfers who had been away from the PGA Tour for at least two years -- and who won the Players Championship or one of the four majors (the Masters, PGA Championship, U.S. Open and Open Championship) since 2022 -- to return to the PGA Tour under certain conditions and with severe financial penalties.
Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Australia's Cameron Smith were eligible to return under those conditions. None of them decided to come back, and the deadline was Feb. 2.
Koepka's penalties were financially harsh: He agreed to forfeit any player equity shares for the next five years and won't be eligible for the $100 million FedEx Cup bonus program this season. At the PGA Tour's request, he also agreed to make a $5 million donation to charity.
In a memo to PGA Tour members at the time, Rolapp said Koepka was potentially forfeiting $50 million to $85 million in potential earnings based on his performance and the Tour's growth.
Former Masters champion Patrick Reed announced on Jan. 28 that he plans to return to the PGA Tour this fall. He last competed in an unauthorized event (LIV Golf tournament) on Aug. 24. Since Reed resigned his PGA Tour membership before playing in a LIV Golf event, he must serve a one-year suspension and will be eligible to play in PGA Tour tournaments on Aug. 25.
I'm guessing there are some golfers who won't want to come back to the PGA Tour. I could see Poulter, Westwood and others returning to the DP World Tour. Louis Oosthuizen might give up competitive golf completely.
The PGA Tour won't want every golfer back from LIV Golf -- Joaquín Niemann and Tyrrell Hatton might be two others -- and every LIV Golf player won't want to come back.
But the penalties for those who want to return figure to be steep -- perhaps even more than what Koepka endured. "There were rules, and they were broken," Rolapp told the Wall Street Journal this week. "With rules comes accountability."
DeChambeau and Phil Mickelson were among 11 suspended golfers who filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour in August 2022. Yes, DeChambeau is one of the most popular golfers in the world, but not everyone on tour has forgotten that he did some damage on the way out.
DeChambeau's contract with LIV expires at the end of the season.
"I don't necessarily have scar tissue, but there are plenty of people around our tour who do," Rolapp told the Wall Street Journal. "It has to be accounted for in some shape or form."
Uggetti: All indications are that the Tour will not be running back the returning member program it offered Koepka as well as Rahm, DeChambeau and Smith, but it will have to answer the question of how (and if) they want to fold players who want to return back into their structure.
Of course, one complicating factor is that the Tour's own structure is also rapidly changing. At the Players' Championship, Rolapp announced that one of the goals of the competition committee is to potentially establish a two-track tour with the top players in the main track and players attempting to move up in the lower track. It will be a relegation system of sorts.
Should a Rahm or a DeChambeau seek a way back to the PGA Tour, I would imagine the Tour will find a way to get them into the top events to boost the overall competition. But as far as other players who might look to return, it won't be immediate. A source indicated that the Tour would weigh all outstanding factors: prior status and performance, whether the player resigned their membership or not as well as their previous involvement in the antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour that Mark mentioned above.
There's also the question of value added. DeChambeau and Rahm are obvious in what they bring to the table -- both have combined for four majors and have large followings domestically and internationally. But plenty of the rest of LIV's potential returnees don't have the same reputation. As Rolapp told the Wall Street Journal this week, he's only interested in players who can help the PGA Tour be the best tour.
"Not every player can do that," Rolapp said.
What are players saying?
Schlabach: Brian Harman, the 2023 Open Championship winner, was asked about the LIV situation after his opening-round 4-under 68 in the Cadillac Championship on Thursday in Doral, Florida.
"There's been guys that are going to come back," Harman said. "I can't speak individually to each of them. Seems like they're treating them all as a case-by-case basis. I would think that the fans want everyone to be playing together and time heals all wounds. There's still some sentiment out here, especially with all the lawsuit stuff, that stuff's going to be tough to get past. We play with all those guys in the majors, so, yeah, I think there should be a path back."
Harman wasn't sure what the punishment should be for leaving the tour.
"I think there should be something," he said. "I'm not smart enough to be able to tell you what that is. That's other people's jobs. I think there has to be something. I think that would help [with] some of the bad blood and some of the resentment, although I haven't heard near as much of it in the last couple years as we did to start with the lawsuit."
Jordan Spieth wasn't sure if the pathways back will be the same for everyone, either.
"I know olive branches were given out a couple months ago," Spieth said. "Brooks took them up on it. So I'm not sure what would now change. That doesn't necessarily mean that LIV's not going to still move on, too. I think there's just too many unknowns for me to have a good gauge on what would happen there.
"But I think, if there's a system for Brooks and a system for Patrick Reed, does that stay the same for guys in the same category as those two coming back or does it change now? Does it change for guys who sued and dropped their membership? There's just a lot of different things that happened over the last four years for that. I'm kind of glad I'm not in that room, and I trust the guys that are in that room to make the right decision."
