Alan Shipnuck has been embedded in LIV Golf's orbit since before the league existed, and on Dan on Golf this week he laid out exactly how he thinks the next chapter is going to go. The short version: Yasir Al-Rumayyan has personally written himself out of the game's establishment, the PGA Tour has won the war, and a smaller, stripped-down LIV may still endure, but only as something Shipnuck only half-jokingly called 'zombie LIV.'
Shipnuck's most pointed comments were aimed at the LIV chairman, who has overseen the public retreat of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund from the league he helped create. 'This was his baby,' Shipnuck said. 'And the first sign of real adversity, he just ducks and runs. He just ran for the hills. Like, stick around. Help figure this out. Bring in some new investment. Give your creation a path forward. He just dipped out. Total lack of courage and commitment. And for a guy who's staked so much of his self-image on being a golf bro, like he will never be welcomed back at Augusta National. He will never get to play at any of these great clubs because he's persona non grata now. He has destroyed his golfing life along with everything else.'
Shipnuck argued the social cost will outweigh the financial one. 'He's been hanging out at the Masters every year since LIV began,' Shipnuck said of Al-Rumayyan. 'It got him into the inner sanctums. He was part of the club. Even though there was some friction, there was some tension, but he was a golf guy and now that's gone.' His extended metaphor was even harsher. 'He didn't fly the plane into the ground. He just caught the only parachute and jumped out and now he's going to let it crash. He hit the ball in the water on 11 and he just took his ball and went home. He didn't try to finish the round.'
The second leg of the conversation was the more practical question of what LIV becomes without the PIF as primary backer. Shipnuck noted that LIV had brought in HSBC and a Rolex deal, retained an investment bank this week, and that the people running it now are restructuring specialists. He flagged a possible silver lining executives have started privately mentioning. 'How many people hated LIV Golf because of the Saudi money? How many companies were afraid to do business with LIV because of Saudi influence? That's all gone now. Can we manoeuvre in the marketplace differently if we're not attached to the Saudi identity?'
That opens the door, in Shipnuck's view, to either a sole billionaire rescue or a downsized league. 'Maybe there's some bored billionaire somewhere who can't buy the Dallas Cowboys, can't buy the Lakers, can't buy the Dodgers, but just wants to own something in professional golf. Maybe he's like a quote-unquote golf bro, he wants to play in the pro-ams. Is there someone who sees the value in LIV which has done a great job in colonising these world capitals? It does have tremendous name brand value, mixed of course, but everyone knows LIV golf in the sports world.'
The likelier outcome, he suggested, is a smaller LIV welded to existing tours. 'There's not going to be places to play for a lot of players,' Shipnuck said. 'If you could give them a home, LIV already has deals with venues, with boards of tourism, with corporate entities. The structure is there. So the $30 million purses, those are history, but $10 million is still a good purse in professional golf. And if you don't have anywhere else to play and you're already attached in some fashion to the league, maybe you're going to have enough guys and you can try and have some homegrown stars. Like zombie LIV could be interesting.'
Shipnuck thought the European DP World Tour was a non-starter for any LIV merger because of its existing PGA Tour ties, but pointed at the existing Asian Tour alliance as the obvious vehicle. 'Maybe the Super Tour becomes the third best tour in the world. Just depending on how you look at it, maybe that's a win.'
Which brings the focus back to the players. Shipnuck did not see a generous welcome waiting on the PGA Tour. 'The PGA Tour, they are in a position of strength and the biggest factor is that the PGA Tour is contracting,' he said. 'The number of tournaments is going to go down. The size of the field is going to go down. The number of playing opportunities for the tour middle class is vanishing. Rolapp's mandate is to take care of his members. So he's not going to do anything to let Talor Gooch back on the PGA Tour at the expense of someone who's been supporting the tour for the last five years. So it's going to be very hard to have any sort of welcome back for these LIV guys.'
The exception, in Shipnuck's read, is a tiny group at the very top. 'You might see some very narrowly tailored criteria for Bryson, for Rahm, maybe for Joaquin, maybe for Hatton. Those are kind of the four guys that matter.' He compared the likely process to political map-drawing. 'It's kind of like gerrymandering a congressional district. The tour is going to do that to get some of the guys back they want and everyone else is going to be left out in the cold.'
That is also why he thinks LIV survives. 'There's dozens of players who don't have an easy pathway back,' Shipnuck said. 'They have some marginal status on the Asian tour. They can try and throw in like Patrick Reed on the European tour, that's only going to get harder and harder. So if you have a critical mass of decent players who need somewhere to play and the LIV brand is considered to be valuable enough to keep it going, it might just endure. But the era of decadence is over. The hubris is over. LIV has lost the war and they're going to have to proceed accordingly.'
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*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/alan-shipnuck-yasir-al-rumayyan-liv-golf-future-pga-tour-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
