MEXICO CITY (AP) — Jon Rahm said he had no trouble moving forward inside the ropes amid uncertainty surrounding the future of LIV Golf, even as speculation swirled around the league’s main source of funding: Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Rahm said, “For me, it didn’t make sense to think about it or waste time thinking about.” He made the comments Thursday after opening with seven birdies in his round of 6-under 65 at LIV Golf Mexico, leaving him three shots behind Victor Perez of France at Chapultepec Golf Club. The golfer’s focus stayed on the scorecard while the financial machinery behind the league drew the real attention.
Who Holds the Money
Speculation was running rampant on Wednesday that the Saudi fund was on the verge of drying up. That uncertainty hung over a league built on elite financing and expensive spectacle, where the people making the shots are not the same people deciding whether the whole operation keeps breathing.
Rahm said, “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.” He added, “It happened so fast that I really didn’t worry about it.” The line is revealing in its own way: inside the league, information moves through the hierarchy before the public gets a whisper.
There was also a power outage at the course on Tuesday, and the streaming of the first round went out for about two hours. Even the infrastructure around the event seemed to wobble, a fitting backdrop for a league whose future was suddenly being discussed in the language of interruption and doubt.
What the Executives Say
The LIV chief executive, Scott O’Neil, sent a memo to staff saying the 2026 season would proceed without interruption and at “full throttle.” Questions remained whether that would last beyond the end of the year. The memo reads like the usual command from above: keep the machine moving, keep the workers and players reassured, keep the doubts off the front page.
O’Neil sat down with LIV’s broadcast team and remained bullish about the future. He said, “Given the momentum of this business, we’re really excited about where we are and the position where we are.” He said he met with 50 people at the Masters and rolled out a plan that “might surprise people.”
LIV Golf has said some of its metrics such as ticket sales and team sponsorships have increased, and O’Neil is projecting 10 of the 13 teams and four of the 14 events will be profitable. But the costs are enormous: prize funds run to $30 million for each tournament, along with operations. The whole thing is a high-priced exercise in corporate capture, with the numbers always needing to justify the spectacle.
The Business of Spectacle
The newsletter Money in Sport reported in February that LIV Golf already had spent $5.3 billion and was projected to surpass $6 billion by the end of the year. That is the scale of the money being burned to keep the league alive, while the future of the funding remains a question mark.
O’Neil said, “This notion of bringing teams to market, I had two calls this morning.” He added, “This notion of, ‘Do you have to raise money?’ Probably this is business. 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.”
That is the language of the apparatus: business first, confidence on cue, and a promise that the revenue line will somehow outrun the costs. Rahm, meanwhile, kept his attention on golf, not the instability around the league’s Saudi-backed future. He said he had no trouble moving forward inside the ropes, even as the structure around him looked increasingly like a very expensive question waiting for an answer.