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 rebel 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.
And yet Rahm’s performance was furthest from anyone’s mind as he made his way around Club de Golf Chapultepec this week.
Because bigger questions hung in the air. Questions about LIV Golf’s uncertain future that went unanswered during a chaotic week for the currently Saudi-backed league.
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On Wednesday, multiple outlets reported that the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund is planning to stop funding the rebel league. 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. 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 announced 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, another signal that the fund is moving away from its global sports efforts.
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 described 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.
“We haven’t heard anything other than what Yasir [Al-Rumayyan, the PIF governor] told us at the beginning of the year. 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.”
Amid LIV Golf uncertainty, CEO says season to continue ‘full throttle’
By:
Sean Zak
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 that was blamed on a local power outage.
O’Neil later joined the coverage on Thursday and said he’s “excited” about the future of LIV, without addressing whether or not the PIF would be withdrawing its backing.
“This notion of do you have to raise money? Probably. This is business,” O’Neil said. “But if we keep the trajectory going the way we are and the revenue growth going, this is going to be a really good business for a really long time.”
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 $590.1 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.
Despite all that LIV has forged ahead with a steady stream of capital from the PIF, one that reportedly will be turned off after the 2026 season. If the PIF pulls out, the rebel league will need to find new investors to stay operational beyond this season. They could try to sell stakes in franchises or partner with another tour. Either way, a different money spigot will need to be turned on to keep the league afloat.
In the wake of a wave of reports that LIV is on unstable ground, O’Neil’s message was that things at LIV are full steam ahead in 2026 and beyond. But in a later interview, he walked back comments about LIV’s future, noting that only 2026 is guaranteed.
“It’s just not the way the world works,” O’Neil said in an interview with TNT in the U.K. when asked if the league was fully funded through 2030, as some have stated. “We have commitments to have this … 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 reuploaded.
As for LIV’s stars, there was no cohesive messaging about what the future entails for LIV. 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 takes an extended break for personal reasons. That left Rahm as the only player asked about the question that hovered over LIV’s sixth event in 2026.
While the noise this week overshadowed the golf at Club de Golf Chapultepec, Rahm maintained that he didn’t pay the rumors of LIV’s demise any mind as he was preparing for the tournament.
“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 on 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 LIV Golf returning to Mexico in 2027, “considering just a few days ago we had to announce we were returning this week.”
It was another odd moment in a hectic week for the rebel league that ended with no answers.
Rahm wound up beating David Puig by six shots. 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.
McKibbin said that “four in a row sounds even better,” alluding to the planned return in 2027.
But that, like everything this week at LIV Golf Mexico City, lacked clarity and certainty.
LIV Golf will head to Virginia next in a few weeks. Then, its best players will head to the PGA Championship at Aronimink. Seven events will remain in the season after that, and then LIV Golf’s uncertain future should, eventually, come into view.
