It took exactly one month for new LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil to make his first bold, Greg Norman-like claim. Fitting that he did so before the final round of LIV Adelaide, the tournament that has quickly become LIV’s crown jewel.
Standing alongside play-by-play man Arlo White and LIV analysts Jerry Foltz and David Feherty, O’Neil talked about how LIV Adelaide is “the ceiling,” and how the goal is for it to become the floor. New locations on the 2025 schedule like Mexico City and South Korea, two “golf-starved” markets as O’Neil referred to them, provide two new huge opportunities to grow.
“It doesn’t happen overnight,” O’Neil said. “But you have a public-private partnership, you have corporate support, you have fans that want it, and you don’t have to look too far past our leader board to know that, outside of the majors, if you want to see the best players in the world, there’s only one place to see it. And that’s at LIV.”
https://twitter.com/NUCLRGOLF/status/1890968948113285230
That is … certainly … a take. Of course, it is O’Neil’s job to say things like this, and with names like Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and a rising star in Joaquin Niemann, the winner in Adelaide, on your roster, it’s easy to believe it. But two of the top three players in the world, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, are playing in San Diego this week on the PGA Tour. In fact, they are paired together for the final round of The Genesis Invitational. So there’s that.
Another fact check here, courtesy of Kyle Porter at Normal Sport.
There is a real argument to be made at LIV around great characters, they have a lot of them! There is no objectively sane argument to be made that LIV has the best players in the world or anything all that close to it. Data Golf has it at 5 of the top 50 right now. https://t.co/Z38xrlemDt
— Kyle Porter (@KylePorterNS) February 16, 2025
And here from Brandel Chamblee:
And yet their top 10 players average finish was outside the top 40 in the 34 majors they played last year… meanwhile Xander Schauffele and Scottie Scheffler won 3 of the 4 majors in 2024 so maybe you only have to look far enough past their leaderboard to see a PGA Tour… https://t.co/jaHoI5HGRi
— Brandel Chamblee (@chambleebrandel) February 16, 2025
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
