Reports suggest LIV Golf’s doomsday is approaching.
Rumours began swirling on Tuesday when amateur golf guru Ryan French revealed in a space on X (formerly Twitter) that LIV Golf was ‘shutting down’ and that we’d all hear about it ‘pretty soon’.
“I have some very good sources, and I’ve heard that other people have sources that LIV is ‘shutting down’,” French said, who runs the popular Monday Q Info website.
“I’m not sure they’re going to tee it up this week. Maybe this week, and that’s it. I think you’re going to see some pretty lengthy stories coming out from longtime… New York Times-type stuff out pretty soon.
“I had it this afternoon from… I’m 99.9% confident. I know there were emails sent, I’ve talked to some agents. I’ve talked to a player. I think it’s happening.”
The Financial Times has now reported that the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF), which bankrolls LIV, is on the verge of cutting support. To this point, the PIF has seemingly pumped $5 billion into the venture, now in its fifth season.
In the week of the Saudi-funded league’s event in Mexico City at Club de Golf Chapultepec, the sixth event of the season in the days following the 2026 Masters, a press conference planned with Jon Rahm was cancelled.
Speaking in a press conference on Wednesday in Spanish, Sergio Garcia said, “Frankly, we haven’t heard anything other than what Yasir (Al-Rumayyan) already told us at the beginning of the year.
“That is, he’s behind us, that they have a project of many years – there are always many rumours. I can’t comment on anything more than what we know.”
LIV chief executive Scott O’Neil was at Augusta National last week, a club that is certainly capable of bringing golf’s most powerful leading figures into the same place at the same time.
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Also on Wednesday, James Corrigan of the Daily Telegraph wrote that LIV Golf executives had been called to a meeting in New York, but for reasons yet to be revealed. It was also said there were no LIV executives present at the tournament on Tuesday, two days before the action planned to get underway.
NCG has reached out to LIV Golf for comment and has also been in contact with figures on the ground at LIV Mexico City at Chapultepec.
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Golf writer Alan Shipnuck has also taken to X since reports started emerging: “To use the old Hollywood saw, No one knows anything. But a tapped-in player agent just texted me, ‘Have heard MBS wants to use the war as Force Majeure to pull the plug.'”
MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, is the de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the chairman of the PIF and is approaching $1 trillion in worth. Yasir Al-Rumayyan is the governor of the PIF and can often be found at LIV events, and occasionally found at St. James’ Park in his role as chairman of Newcastle United.
Published on Wednesday afternoon, the PIF board of directors approved its strategy for 2026 to 2030: “The 2026-2030 Strategy represents a natural progression from a phase of growth and expansion to a new phase of achieving sustainable value, maximising impact, increasing investment efficiency, and implementing the highest standards of governance, transparency, and institutional excellence. It also aims to strengthen the role of the private sector as an active partner in sustainable development.”
Al-Rumayyan was front and centre of the framework agreement with the PGA Tour that was publicly announced in June 2023. The framework agreement was meant to end hostility and promote cooperation between both sides of golf’s ‘civil war’, in which players had been suspended by the PGA Tour for moving to LIV, and fined by the DP World Tour (formerly the European Tour) for playing in LIV events.
But since then, the PGA Tour has secured a multi-billion-dollar equity deal with US sports investment group SSG, and LIV continued to poach talent from America and Europe. The framework agreement naturally came to nothing.
The LIV League was formed in 2022 and rocked the long-term professional golf establishment. Players from the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour took lucrative contract offers to leave these established tours and join the breakaway league, players like Rahm, Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Cam Smith and Tyrrell Hatton.
Two star players who had been on LIV’s roster, Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed, left before the start of the 2026 season, with Koepka returning to the PGA Tour via the new and convenient Returning Members Category, which hit Koepka with strict financial penalties and restrictions on playing opportunities in the Signature Events.
Players who had won the Players Championship or one of the four majors since 2022 were eligible for this category, but out of Koepka, DeChambeau, Rahm and Smith – the only four to whom this criteria was relevant – Koepka was the only one to take it up. Given the current rumours, this now has some retrospective intrigue.
At the start of April, three-time Masters champion Mickelson revealed he wouldn’t play at Augusta this year, nor would he play for an ‘extended period of time to navigate a personal health matter’. Lefty has only played in one LIV event this year, previously citing the same reasons for his absences.
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