It was in early December 2023 that Jon Rahm ended the ‘will he, won’t he’ speculation and announced that he was indeed going to join LIV Golf. A fair few big names had left the PGA Tour to join LIV in the spring of 2022 – among them Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johson – but with the reigning Masters champion jumping ship, too, it seemed as if the arrivistes really had fresh wind in their sails. Now, not so much.
The most recent event on the LIV calendar concluded in New Jersey on Sunday at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. It was won by Joaquin Niemann but the kudos for winning the season-long LIV Golf League Individual Championship went to…Jon Rahm. What’s more, he was doing it for the third consecutive year. “It’s been great,” he said. “It’s been a great year.” What 2027 holds is a little more up in the air.
The LIV CEO, Scott O’Neil, has said he has signed an outline agreement with an investor to replace the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, which is withdrawing its support. (It is not clear if the LIV team championship, scheduled for later this month, will go ahead.) It is expected that LIV players will become majority equity holders in the revised venture, which Is nice, but that purses will fall, perhaps substantially, which is less so. Furthermore, the next campaign will likely feature 10 events rather than 14, half of those in the United States.
At Bedminster, DeChambeau told the New York Post: “I’d love to be able to play events on the PGA Tour, too. I think that’s best for golf. I’d love that. It’s not an either/or mentality. It’s can we do both? I think that’s where everybody wants to be. [I am not remotely sure that is where the majority of PGA Tour players want to be.] There isn’t a golf fan on the planet who doesn’t want to see me play a big tour event, and I get that.” (It may have been better if he had left it to someone else to voice that sentiment.) For his part, the PGA Tour CEO, Brian Rolapp, told Bloomberg: “There’s no merger, no conversations. We’ve been really concentrated on the PGA Tour.” Put another way, that so-called framework agreement between the two parties which was revealed amid much fanfare and controversy in June 2023 is as dead in the water as a skulled tee shot on the 17th at TPC Sawgrass.
Other than the extraordinary riches amassed by several individuals as a consequence of LIV coming into being, no one could sensibly suggest that men’s professional golf is better off for it having existed. It did not change the sport. It attempted to break it. It has not done that. The question now is whether it will survive, perhaps even thrive, in a less ambitious, maybe less noisy, format – or whether at some point next year it might seem to be falling apart altogether.