There was a time on Wednesday when the rumour mill was in full swing and it seemed that there was a doubt over whether LIV Golf Mexico City would even happen.
There is a large question mark hanging over the future of LIV Golf. The Financial Times reported that the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia are planning to cut their funding to the league.
What definitely did not help was how quiet the LIV hierarchy appeared to be amid rumours of their potential demise.
It seems that some of the players were just as confused about what came next as the rest of the world.
One LIV Golf player was initially unable to get onto the course for the pro-am
LIV did not help the situation by cancelling press conferences on Tuesday. It was claimed that technical issues were to blame. But obviously, the theories got going once doubts over the league’s future emerged.
And speaking on the Golf Channel Podcast, Rex Hoggard claimed that some players were not even able to get onto the golf course on Wednesday.
“It was a bizarre 48 hours. The best way to describe that was I was texting with a player who’s in Mexico City, a LIV Golf player, throughout the day yesterday, and this had been kind of building for 48 hours. We had all heard the rumours. It was kind of coming to a head,” he said.
“And so as players showed up yesterday on Wednesday in Mexico City for their pro-am, in the span of 30 seconds, I got a text from a player that says, ‘the golf course is closed, we can’t get on the property for the pro-am’. And in the same 30 second span, our producer Andrew Bradley got a text from a caddie who was on the range getting ready for the pro-am. That encapsulates what happened today. That is the perfect snapshot of ‘what is going on?’
“The player I was texting back and forth with compared it with COVID, when COVID shut everything down at The Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass. There was uncertainty, you didn’t know what the future was going to hold. There was a little bit of fear, a little bit of drama, simply because your future suddenly becomes very uncertain when this large unpacks.”
LIV Golf finds itself in an impossible position as the world awaits concrete news
You can completely understand why LIV Golf have not completely cleared up what happens next beyond this year.
Ultimately, if the PIF are planning to pull their funding, the league needs to find a way to survive. It is surely going to be nearly impossible to find a backer who will be content to invest such eye-watering sums in the league.
LIV can hardly argue that it has been a success on the course, with no major winners since 2024 and just one player finishing in the top 30 at The Masters this past week.
But there are likely to be so many twists and turns before LIV’s future is decided one way or another. It is going to be fascinating to see how the golfing landscape looks in the coming months.
