Thomas Pieters said LIV Golf was thrown into a dark mood when fresh funding worries hit the league, and he briefly considered calling time on his career if the money had vanished quickly.
The Belgian golfer said the atmosphere was “very grim” when reports surfaced that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund could pull funding from LIV, adding that he phoned home and was ready to retire on Monday if the league had been shut down. Pieters made the comments on the Dan on Golf podcast as the 2026 LIV Golf season prepares to resume Thursday in the United States with LIV Golf Virginia at Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C.
Pieters, who played on the DP World Tour and the PGA Tour before joining LIV, said he will never return to the PGA Tour and does not want that life again. “I’m definitely never going back to the PGA Tour. I’ve never liked that life. And that’s not me having a go at the PGA Tour, it’s not for me,” he said. He added that if LIV disappears, he would probably try to play some events on the European Tour or the DP World Tour, though he said he really does not know what comes next.
The uncertainty comes as LIV officials try to secure new money to keep the league going beyond next year and into 2027. Pieters said CEO Scott O’Neil faces a massive challenge to put the funding together, but he also said he is not spending all his energy on the bigger picture right now. “I’m not fussed about it at this point because I feel like I still have a duty to focus on these next six, seven tournaments on LIV and then we’ll see,” he said.
That leaves Pieters in a familiar place: committed to the tour that brought him back into the top level of the game, but no longer pretending there is a simple long-term answer. He said he has already gained a great deal from LIV and achieved more than he thought possible growing up in Belgium, even if the sport may remember bigger names first. For now, the focus is on the next stretch of tournaments, with the wider future of LIV still unresolved and Thursday’s restart opening another test of how long the circuit can hold together.
