PGA Tour players and several of golf’s most prominent voices have shared their views on the sport’s next steps as well as where it all went wrong for LIV Golf following reports the breakaway league is facing imminent collapse.
Multiple reports have stated that the Saudi Public Investment Fund are strongly considering pulling their funding for LIV after releasing a five-year plan for the oil-rich kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund that did not include the golf venture.
FOX SPORTS, available on Kayo Sports, is streaming The 2026 PGA Tour LIVE & Exclusive | New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.
As a result, chaos has ensued in the golf world with Golf Channel reporting that some players are considering a boycott of this week’s Mexico City, alleging they have not been paid.
While, Golf Channel also reported that LIV CEO Scott O’Neil, the former NBA executive who replaced Australian golf legend Greg Norman at the helm, told players and staff that the remainder of the season will be funded.
Despite the exact next steps for LIV remaining unclear, there has been an abundance of discussion on what will happen to LIV’s players if the league ceases to exist.
LIV’s biggest names Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau as well as Australia’s Cameron Smith were offered an immediate return to the PGA Tour earlier this year because they won a major since the men’s professional game was split in 2022.
That was the opportunity that allowed Brooks Koepka to walk straight back to the PGA Tour – albeit with caveats including fines and limited entry into marquee events.
Koepka was not on the initial entry list for this week’s $20 million signature event, the RBC Heritage, but is set to earn a start as an alternate as Masters fatigue prompts players to drop out.
Understandably given the breaking news about his former employers, Koepka was the only player to decline media requests on Wednesday at Harbour Town Golf Links in South Carolina.
READ MORE
Collapse bombshell: LIV e-mail leaked as stunning pay claim, boycott threat emerge
‘No place in our game’: Ex-champ says sorry for staggering Masters tantrum after punishment debate
‘Wait a minute…’: How $70m Rory reveal ignited fairness storm as ‘insane’ Masters question emerges
Talking Pts — Genius McIlroy moment behind Masters’ ‘greatest’ shot; shock reply sparks fairness debate
The other path back to the PGA Tour that has been made available for LIV golfers is to serve a 12-month ban and earn back their tour card.
That is what Patrick Reed is doing right now on the DP World Tour.
The 2018 Masters champion will be eligible to play in PGA Tour events from August – 12 months after his last LIV start – and is one the most in-form players in the world this year.
Reed has won twice this season in Dubai and Qatar, and has risen to 20th in the world rankings after having been outside the top 100 a year ago.
The long-time villain has endeared himself to golf fans by swallowing his pride and doing things the hard way.
It is exactly what former European Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley believes must happen to other LIV players if their league ends.
“Everybody who went to LIV, went with a huge amount of risk attached,” he told Sky Sports.
“They got paid a huge amount of money to take a massive risk, to leave behind the safety net, if you want to call it that, of the PGA Tour.
“The Tour is a members organisation, remember. Not only were they going to LIV and getting paid a lot of money, they were harming the model that they left behind.
“At the time they all justified it as a tough business decision and they made that decision looking out for themselves.
“So, now, if this is the case, the roles would be reversed.
“The Tour can play really hard ball back against them. They can say sorry guys, your spots have been filled and play hard ball in return.”
McGinley added: “The loyalty has to be to the guys who did not go to LIV, not the ones who did take that risk and obviously got paid a lot of money for doing so.”
The current PGA Tour contingent certainly feel the same way.
A lot of players on the American establishment tour are disgruntled and fed up with the game’s civil war.
Plenty of them knocked back massive offers from LIV and would be outraged if others were essentially allowed to take the money and come back with little to no consequence.
They are also sick of no resolutions being reached.
A merger framework between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf was first announced back in 2023.
Multiple deadlines have passed with no solutions reached.
Early last year, speculation ramped up that it would finally be resolved as both sides held White House meetings with US President Donald Trump.
The players are wary that this may be another false dawn.
“Everyone deserves a place to play golf so it would be ridiculous to not allow them a place to play,” six-time PGA Tour winner Max Homa told Golfweek.
“I just heard that rumour an hour-and-a-half ago so it would be a hard one for me to digest at this moment, which is why I am not Brian Rolapp. I don’t know, I guess we got to find out if the rumour is even true. We’ve heard a lot of untrue ones in the last three years.”
Two-time major champion and Olympic gold medallist Xander Schauffele shared a similar sentiment to Homa, saying the players have been through all of this before.
“It’s kind of crazy to form an opinion based on all the rumours that are happening all the time between the two tours. I’m not going to waste a whole lot of thought on it, you know what I mean?” Schauffele said.
“I’m sure something concrete will come out of it if any of its true and if not everyone will just feel silly for thinking it was.”
“It will be hard to get everybody on the same page on how it should look depending on where you are in the world (ranking), the FedEx, if you’ve won recently or you haven’t and things of that nature,” he added.
“So, I’m sure the player directors and board members have been planning for it for quite some time just in case. I’m as curious as you are, I can tell you that much.”
Wyndham Clark, the 2023 US Open champion, was one player that rejected LIV’s advances.
The American made clear that he would be uncomfortable with the defectors easily returning to the PGA Tour.
“If you still technically have status you can play and if not you should have to earn your way back,” Clark said.
“It will be interesting to see what they do. I hope there is at least something they do because a lot of guys had a chance to go and didn’t.
“If they can go make a bunch of money and come back, that’s a bummer. At this point, I don’t really care; I just want golf back and unified.”
While Michael Kim, the world No.44 who is a prominent voice on social media by offering fans valuable insights into professional life, shared his view that precedent must be followed.
“The Tour has had different sets of rules for different players. The standard has been one year, right?” he said. “I don’t know why it would be different for anybody else.”
Fox Golf expert analyst Paul Gow believes the PGA Tour hierarchy will not be overly accommodating of many of the LIV players, but their hands may feel tied by the drawing power some of the LIV stars possess.
“There is a path there and they will just have to rejig the path for how they like it,” Gow told foxsports.com.au.
“Currently, I think we can only go by what was set in place for Brooks Koepka, who was fined $5 million to get back in, with a 12 month suspension served. And Patrick Reed has done it a different way again on the DP Tour and it has still worked out for him perfectly.
“But it is purely up to the board, and that has Adam Scott and Tiger Woods in there, and I am sure they probably won’t open their arms up to these players, but Bryson does move the needle. So does Jon Rahm. So does Cam Smith. There are a number of players – Joaquin Niemann – that turn the needle in the game and they should try to find a way for them to get back.”
If those big names do find their way back, Gow insists it will not take long before their names are once again at the top of PGA Tour leaderboards.
“They will be able to sharpen up pretty smart,” Gow told foxsports.com.au
“You look at Koepka and the way he has strolled back into golf. He is playing some really good golf and if some putts had dropped, he probably would have won a tournament by now.
“One thing that golfers are very good at is adapting. They adapt to different course, to different tournaments, different cities, different countries, different weather. You name it.
“Golfers are really good to adapting to what the situation is and I think that will be the case for these guys.”
Meanwhile, Golf Channel’s Eamon Lynch and Damon Hack dived into where it has all gone wrong for LIV.
The prospect of the PIF pulling away their funding raised the question of whether any other benefactor would step in to carry the league forward.
Lynch believes there is very little likelihood of that happening.
“They are billions of dollars in the hole. There is no prospect of any kind of traction here. There’s no audience traction … there’s no sponsors, it has no future,” Lynch said.
“So the idea that somebody else might go in on the assumption that these team franchises would be worth something is speculative.”
LIV has enjoyed successes with a bumper crowds in Adelaide for the past four years as well as in Johannesburg for its first South African event last month.
But Lynch believes those big events have said less about LIV and more about the way the southern hemisphere nations have been treated by the golfing bodies for a long time.
“If you’re trying to make a sports league solvent on the basis of selling tickets you’re already losing,” he said.
“It’s a media rights business, and they don’t have any. They’ve literally given away their media rights for as long as they’ve existed.
“All Adelaide and South Africa prove is where the rest of the golf tours have failed. They’re golf desperate, golf hungry audiences that aren’t being served.”
Lynch’s point about the media rights appears to be the key.
LIV has regularly endured ratings struggles and failed to land blockbuster broadcast deals in its initial years.
But while the PGA Tour is often ridiculed around the world for being too American centric, Hack believes LIV’s failure to truly crack the American market has been a main reason for its inability to recoup losses.
“The American audience never really bought in,” he said.
“The format. Shotgun start. Hard to follow. The team concept never really seemed to take hold – it wasn’t a Ryder Cup or a Presidents Cup.
“And then the narrative has changed over the last couple months with Brooks coming back to the PGA Tour, Patrick Reed sitting in a packed room on the DP World Tour and saying everyone knows that the best tour is the PGA Tour.”
All of those unique aspects of LIV’s product have been points of ridicule across the journey.
Anti-LIV golf people have had a field day on social media in the aftermath of these reports.
Former professional turned broadcaster Brandel Chamblee led the chorus with a scathing social media rant.
“Given that the product was so ill-conceived and ended up being worse than anyone could have imagined – with shotgun starts, initially 54 holes, a team concept that was nothing but laughable and tournaments that meant and continue to mean nothing, and such a paltry number of viewers, losing billions along the way – would it surprise anyone if the Saudis came to their corrupted senses and finally euthanized the whole lame-brained tour,” Chamblee wrote.
Many other reactions about LIV being a sinking ship are a lot more light-hearted.
There is plenty more to play out in this situation, but for now, scroll down for the best social media reactions.
Discussion about this post