Shipnuck: LIV Is Running on Fumes

Alan Shipnuck joins Rich to explain why the LIV Golf experiment may be closer to the end than anyone wants to admit. The reporting out of Mexico City this week paints a picture of an organization running on fumes even as the tournament continues.

Shipnuck frames the situation bluntly. LIV has been a chaos merchant since it arrived on the scene, and the chaos is now turning inward. Just last week at Augusta, the same CEO was telling people LIV was funded through 2032. Days later, the funding window shrank to 2026.

That is not a small revision.

The root cause, according to Shipnuck, is Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund executing a five-year strategic plan that pulls capital away from vanity sports projects. The Saudis sold their big soccer team. They pulled out of Tom Brady's flag football league. Pouring money into sports appears to no longer be the priority it once was.

Shipnuck gives LIV credit where it is due. As a golf league, LIV has never moved the needle. As a content machine, it is unrivaled in the history of the sport. Leak after leak, drama after drama, it has given the golf world six months of pure entertainment, and Shipnuck expects the next six months to deliver more of the same.

Rich presses him on whether this will genuinely be the final season. Shipnuck says the signs point that direction, but the X factor is Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the PIF governor who built LIV from nothing. Yasir still has juice, but everybody has a boss, and his boss is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. If MBS says the plug gets pulled, the plug gets pulled.

Shipnuck leaves the door slightly open. LIV could technically survive in a diminished form if it found outside sponsors. The purses would shrink. The decadence would end. The stars would leave. But the long-term commitments to venues, players, and tourism boards might be enough to keep something alive as the third or fourth best tour in golf.

That version of LIV is not the version Saudi Arabia paid billions to build.

Shipnuck closes with a clean line. LIV Golf as we know it, this exercise in excess, appears to be coming to an end. Whether it dies loud or quiet is the only question left.