The clock is ticking for LIV chief executive Scott O’Neil to secure the fresh investment required for the league to remain operational beyond this season. The league has ‘gone to market’ in a push for new investors and requires between $250 million and $350 million to keep afloat after the Saudi retreat.
Several LIV players have rallied around the league’s battle for survival, which is being assisted by New York-based investment bank Ducera Partners. Bryson DeChambeau is actively involved in the pitching process, while many others have been offering financial leads to the league and its teams.
“There’s a lot of players with some great contacts that have approached Scott and connected people through the business world,” says Lucas Herbert, the Ripper GC player who sits fourth in the league’s 2026 standings. “This stuff just takes time and hopefully they can do all the work they need to get done. Hopefully it gets done and obviously we can continue on this great product next year.”
It’s understood a reduced 10-event schedule is being pitched to investors – with a sharper focus on team golf and the international venues in which the league has enjoyed the most success. LIV also hopes that its restructured calendar could be populated with national opens. During one of his first interviews after it emerged LIV was losing its funding, O’Neil revealed the league was exploring the staging of these historic tournaments, which for years have been the cornerstone of the DP World Tour.
“Will there be a change in how we operate? Of course,” O’Neil said. “I would have told you that last year and six months ago. We are looking to blend a version of LIV and the national opens, the great national opens around the world. We think they’re the most underappreciated, undermarketed, underdeveloped assets in golf, and the reason is it gets us on the ground to grow the game of golf.”
LIV has been targeting national opens in territories they have enjoyed the most interest. The league’s standout success stories have been visits to Adelaide and South Africa – and LIV hoped to build on their foundations in the southern hemisphere by completing a deal to co-sanction the Australian Open.
However, as first revealed by TG, an approach from LIV was knocked back, with the DP World Tour securing an extension on its co-sanctioning rights of the event for at least another three years.
The historic events have now become a key battleground in golf’s ongoing power struggle, with LIV attempting to map out a sustainable future without $30 million purses. The problem for LIV is that many of these national opens are already on the DP World Tour’s schedule.
“For a long time, we’ve focused on building up our tour as credible, sustainable, strong, and built around national opens,” DP World Tour CEO Guy Kinnings told TG recently. “That’s not something you just come in and get like that. It’s decades of building a relationship with the federations.”
Herbert, who has qualified for this month’s US Open after his win in Virginia, is one of the players who has most cherished his time on the league and is desperate to find a pathway forward. With his win in Virginia, the 30-year-old Australian became one of the few players to have won on the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the LIV circuit.
“We’re all working really hard to try and figure out a way to, you know, to keep making it happen so that we can keep doing this,” Herbert tells TG. “It’ll look different from what it has this year. As far as strictly LIV events, the plan they’re going with right now is less of them, but we’re going to try and play more national opens around the world. Whether they’re under a LIV branding or not, we want to play different events around the world.
“It’s going to be a change next year. It’s tricky to know whether it’s going to be a good or a bad thing in terms of a shortened schedule. But the locations that we’re going to go to are obviously earmarked as some of the really crucial markets. Those are the exciting events that we’re looking forward to.
“Australia – I think it’s going to be the number one on the schedule that we want to make sure that one gets in the right slot. All the players – not just the Ripper boys – are really keen to get back down there.
“I don’t know exactly how all the cards are going to fall but I can see LIV being something that’s going to be really important in the future.”