Before you consider the enormity of the task facing LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil — before you debate the merits of TV ratings and PR battles and a sport in a prolonged state of competitive upheaval and $5 billion in Saudi funding — you must first remember something very critical.
Scott O’Neil chose this.
“How you live is truly a choice,” O’Neil wrote in his book, “Be Where Your Feet Are.” “What you’re going to do and who you are going to do it with, those are choices only you can make. That was my ‘aha’ moment.”
In two decades as a sports executive (mostly in basketball), O’Neil has earned an MD in organizational surgery — first as a rising marketing and sales executive with the New Jersey Nets and Philadelphia Eagles of the early-to-mid-90s, then as president of Madison Square Garden Companies with the early-Carmelo Anthony Knicks and finally as the CEO of the Process-era Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils. In all of those jobs, O’Neil found himself selling the business of losing — and navigating the path back to winning.
These experiences forged a worldview O’Neil leans on today, as the chief executive of a golf league still in its infancy. Since replacing Greg Norman as LIV CEO in January 2025, O’Neil has sought to overhaul LIV’s business, reorient its standing in the pro golf world and lay the groundwork for a pathway to profitability. These goals might sound opaque, but they’ve yielded some tangible shifts: In November, O’Neil announced LIV — an organization so attached to 54-hole tournaments it is named for the roman numeral for 54 — was extending its events to 72 holes, effective immediately.
As the calendar turns toward 2026, there are still many questions left for O’Neil’s league to answer: About LIV’s changing tune over the “rivalry” with the PGA Tour, its long struggle for financial viability and, perhaps most pressingly, how the league judges itself. Earlier this week, I spoke to O’Neil about all of these topics and more; our conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Scott, I’ve heard you refer to yourself a few times as a “change agent.” What did you think needed to be changed about LIV Golf when you took the job?
Yeah, I would say any four-year-old business in a very mature industry needs to be nimble, hard-charging, relentless. Needs to be on the journey of evolution, if you will. What the group went through here to build and break through in golf — I don’t know if we’ll ever see it in our lifetimes again, and I think it’s somewhat spectacular.
What I’m coming here to do is to take that foundation and build the business. There are a whole host of paths that may lead us on. One is clearly on the golf side — on the golfer side. When you start to see faces like Tom McKibben, Josele Ballester and David Puig and Caleb Surratt — when you start to see an emerging next generation of talent, it should give us confidence that this is going in the right direction.