The most dominant topic in the golf world leading up to the PGA Championship is the extreme uncertainty facing LIV Golf following the Saudi PIF’s announcement that it will withdraw all funding after the 2026 season.
The biggest concern for fans is whether this will ultimately bring LIV’s top players back to the PGA Tour, particularly Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm. DeChambeau will be the first player to get that chance as he becomes a free agent at the end of this year, but he has expressed concerns about returning for a variety of reasons, including whether the tour’s content creation policies will hinder his desire to continue. Build his YouTube channel.
While everyone on the outside is trying to figure out what the path back to the PGA Tour will be for DeChambeau and Rahm, PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolup has expressed calm confidence about the tour’s position with or without the two.
“The reality is, all of their players are under contract. Unless they’re under contract, that’s not an issue we need to worry about,” Lollup said on the Rich Eisen Show. “So, to be honest, we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. We spend most of our time thinking about what you and I just talked about, our future and how to improve the tour.”
Mr. Rolup understands that to make the tour better, it is important to have the best players competing as often as possible. This was a central theme of his plan to restructure the PGA Tour’s schedule, with the aim of creating more signature events that would allow top players to take to the field more regularly.
early this year Mr. Rolup described six focuses. He wanted to introduce a revamped schedule with more frequent visits to larger markets, a consistent field size of 120 players, a two-track system of promotion and relegation, and an enhanced postseason by 2028. Tiger Woods was heavily involved in that restructuring prior to his recent DUI incident, and Lolap appears to be trying to bridge the gap between what players and fans want from the PGA Tour.
Perhaps nowhere is the divide greater than on the issue of bringing back a player like DeChambeau, and Lollup recognizes the need to strike a balance.
“(Fans) want to see the best golfers together as often as possible, and I agree with that. That’s great. I’ve always made it very clear publicly that I’m interested in what makes the PGA Tour better,” Rolup said. “But at the same time, there’s the reality that we have a membership system, and anything we do to make the PGA Tour better has to be balanced against the interests of our current membership. I don’t really have the scars of the past, but it’s still there, so I have to be conscious of that.”
When he says he doesn’t “spend too much time” thinking about LIV’s stars, it feels like a bit of a bravado or rant, but it’s probably true. LIV’s sudden disruption creates more urgency for their business and the players who are trying to figure out what their future holds, but the PGA Tour is now in a position of even greater power and there is no reason to rush anything.
For DeChambeau in particular, internal conversations within the PGA Tour about what they want to offer him in terms of a potential return are almost certainly already taking place. LIV’s loss of funding after 2026 gives the PGA Tour a little more clout, making DeChambeau more likely to leave, but his contract situation has been well known for years and the tour has had plenty of time to prepare where it intends to draw the line with the two-time U.S. Open champion.
Mr. Rahm’s case would be a more interesting case, especially if LIV finds a new investor who wants to clean up its books and is willing to part ways with a few years left on its contract. But until then, as Rahm put it bluntly recently, “I have a few more years left on my contract and I’m sure they did a pretty good job when they drafted him. So right now, I don’t see a lot of solutions.”
No other player has moved the needle enough for the Tour to even consider bending over to include them. The likely path for these players is the path taken by Patrick Reed. That means accepting a one-year suspension from the last LIV event and returning to the status he still has as a past winner, or the status he can earn throughout the season on the DP World Tour.
In the meantime, the PGA Tour will monitor the situation and have any necessary discussions, but it has no intention of hitting the panic button and rushing to bring in LIV players, as it has done since Lorup’s arrival. If anything, it makes more sense for the PGA Tour to play a patient game right now, because the longer things go on with the future of LIV stars uncertain, the more leverage the tour will have in any potential negotiations.
