‘I’m going to bet on the 8 billion’: LIV CEO Scott O’Neil on the tour’s global future

STERLING, Va. — There are jobs, and then there are challenges. Scott O’Neil joined LIV Golf as its new CEO last year, and saw the job turn into a challenge last month.

That’s when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the near-trillion-dollar fund backing LIV, revealed that it would be ending its funding of LIV Golf, effective at the end of this season. O’Neil has spent the weeks since rallying potential investors, looking to chart a new path for the onetime-breakaway golf league. On Thursday afternoon, O’Neil sat down with Yahoo Sports in Club 54, LIV’s 18th-green executive hospitality suite, to talk about LIV’s short- and long-term prospects, global ambitions, and hopes for unity in the golf game going forward.

(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. ) What exactly is LIV right now? Is it a golf tour, an event, some combination of both?

I'm not sure it’s the answer exactly to your question, but there is an opportunity in golf. Because, at least since the era of Tiger Woods, let's call it 46 of the 47 biggest golf events in the world have been in the U. S.