Lynch: When LIV’s cash ran out, the Asian Tour followed. They won’t be the last to flee
· Yahoo Sports
LIV Golf has cycled through a couple of marketing tropes in its brief history. The league launched four years ago with “Golf, But Louder,” a nod to its self-image as a brash, innovative disrupter (not that it was going to be mistaken as referring to raucous galleries). The 2025 season brought a new campaign, “Long LIV Golf,” suggesting a more acrid attitude and a determination to stick around despite consumer apathy and economic headwinds. If LIV’s CEO, Scott O’Neil, needs a fresh motto for whatever reality awaits, he could strike a blow for truth in advertising by going with a simple “Caveat Emptor,” because this is an enterprise where nothing ever equals what’s been promised, no matter who's doing the promising.
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It was during a July 16 meeting at Royal Birkdale that O’Neil was informed by his counterpart at the Asian Tour that the circuit was exiting its partnership with LIV and instead aligning itself with the DP World Tour and PGA Tour. The news caught O’Neil by surprise, though it shouldn’t have since just opening his email these days means doom scrolling through disappointments.
In April, the Saudi Public Investment Fund pulled its financing despite assurances that LIV was secure through 2032. Vendors in New Orleans were promised a June tournament that was eventually nixed, and a similar fate is expected for the team finale scheduled next month in Michigan. Tech company Mobii is suing the league for unpaid invoices and lost revenue. Another lawsuit has been filed by a group alleging its original concept for LIV was stolen (apparently there’s a competition to claim ownership of a fiasco). O’Neil’s plan to rebuild the league around national championships was undercut when the Australian Open recently bedded in with Europeans and the Yanks despite his intensive courting. All while the same players publicly vowing to help him bail water ready their life rafts by paying fines to other tours and discreetly inquiring about access.
Amid that tsunami of lousy news, the Asian Tour bolting wouldn’t seem awfully important. After all, LIV’s prize fund this week in the U.K. is about equal to the entire Asian Tour schedule. But in a world of dwindling options, it further drains an already dangerously low battery on LIV’s life support.
The Asian Tour provided a narrow but crucial route onto LIV, which allowed the Official World Golf Ranking to award the league limited points in February, four years after Greg Norman promised players it would do so. But the OWGR expressed ongoing concern about LIV’s “restrictive pathways,” which have now been almost entirely cut off as the Asian Tour feeds its talent to Europe instead.
The OWGR announcement had this clause: "OWGR acknowledges that LIV Golf is planning further changes for the 2027 season. As LIV Golf continues to evolve, OWGR will continue to evaluate LIV Golf against OWGR’s eligibility standards, which could result in an increase in points, a decrease in points or removal from the system altogether.”
The OWGR’s board will now almost certainly reassess LIV’s qualification for ranking points. The board convened at The Open in England and isn’t scheduled to meet again until December, but an extraordinary session could be called earlier if LIV announces firm plans for next season. By then, debating LIV’s fitness for ranking recognition could be as futile as testing the language skills of a corpse.
O’Neil told players that he aims to reduce the 2027 LIV schedule from 14 tournaments to 10. What events will comprise that 10 is another matter. Two sources say the Asian Tour’s new direction means tournaments in Hong Kong and Singapore will likely depart LIV’s existing schedule, with other significant stops on that circuit placed beyond O’Neil’s reach, including Macau, the Philippines, New Zealand and, ironically, Saudi Arabia. LIV’s desperate hunt for schedule scraps has led it to inquiring about a potential partnership with the Wales Open, which hasn’t been held since 2022.
LIV’s luckless leader is targeting September 1 as his deadline to secure new financing. Even if he succeeds in finding another fool willing to torch cash on this catastrophe, O’Neil must still cobble together a tournament schedule, finagle a promotional pathway option that won’t jeopardize LIV’s ranking status, and retain players willing to compete for pennies on the dollar — which basically means those who can’t escape contracts, those with no other competitive avenues open to them, or those who are so daft that they might have accepted an equity stake in the Titanic even as she slipped below the surface.
O’Neil is trying to reverse engineer a business from a failed vanity project. The Asian Tour stuck around until the cash spigot dried up then moved on before the lawyers move in. Others will follow, leaving LIV to its deserving reality of being little more than a convenient crutch for the Kool-Aid drunks searching for relevance in the sewers of social media.
Eamon Lynch is a columnist for Golfweek and a contributor to the Golf Channel.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Lynch: When LIV’s cash ran out, the Asian Tour followed. They won’t be the last to flee