Contract Chaos, Bankruptcy Rumors...and the U.S. Open: Jon Rahm's Future Hangs in the Havoc

Five years ago, Jon Rahm arrived. After he snatched the 121st United States Open with a walk-off 18-foot birdie putt, Golf Digest declared, “Sometimes, if we’re lucky, the man and the moment collide on the 72nd hole, producing transcendence.” The victory propelled Rahm, then 26, to number one in the World Ranking. Less than two years later he won the Masters.

Rahm resonated because of his magisterial presence and the scale of his achievements. He’s a big man who burned hot on the golf course but in front of a microphone had a professorial air; in his second language he summoned Old World words like “fealty.” LIV Golf had debuted between Rahm’s major championship triumphs, turning the golf world into a bitchy mess defined by greed and seething grievance. Yet as Rahm slipped on the green jacket at the 2023 Masters, he had achieved the impossible: in a fractured sport he was somehow universally respected and admired. The future belonged to him.

All of that now feels very far away. Despite having pledged his allegiance to the PGA TOUR on numerous occasions, Rahm took barrels of LIV money in December 2023, roiling the golf world. Five years after his U.S. Open breakthrough, he is now one of the most polarizing figures in the sport. His near-miss at last month’s PGA Championship—his best chance to win a major championship since going to LIV—was a reminder of both his talent and his glaring absence on the biggest stages over the last two and a half years. At the upcoming U.S. Open, one question looms largest: whither Jon Rahm?

I was hoping to ask the man himself last month outside the Aronimink clubhouse, but Rahm’s agent Jeff Koski stuck his elbow in my ribs and shoved me out of the way, a wildly inappropriate overreaction. Everyone around Rahm is edgy because, as it stands today, he will go down as the biggest casualty of the tour wars, even though he has already vacuumed up a couple hundred million Saudi petrodollars. Rahm took the biggest risk of his career to go to LIV in the heart of his prime. The LIV experiment will be a colossal failure if he continues to come up snake eyes at the majors, no matter how many top-10s he piles up on his home tour. Previewing the final round of the PGA Championship, Golf Digest’s Joel Beall tweeted, “Joining LIV cost Jon Rahm’s legacy. He can start earning it back on Sunday.” LIV’s Lee Westwood shot back, “What a judgemental prick you are.”

This now passes for everyday discourse about Rahm.

The 31 year-old Spaniard, once one of golf’s most insightful talkers, has built a well-guarded fortress around his inner self. Asked at Aronimink what he has learned, “That is for me to know. And that’s about that.” LIV Golf is fighting for its survival in real-time, scrambling to attract new investors and sponsors now that the Saudi Public Investment Fund has announced it will divest at the completion of this season. Along with Bryson DeChambeau, Rahm is LIV’s most valuable asset. On the eve of the final round of the PGA Championship, as Rahm was tied for second, only two strokes off the lead, I asked him if a win would have extra gratification because it would strengthen LIV in the marketplace and potentially help its survival. “Honestly, in a week like this, one, I'm thinking more about myself,” he said. “I'm not going to take on anything outside what I can control when it comes to competing tomorrow. If I do get it done and I sit here again tomorrow, then you can ask me the same question, and I'll give you an answer.” He shot 68 on Sunday but got blown off the golf course by Aaron Rai, so, as always, we are left to guess about Rahm’s feelings.

Rahm cemented his status as an enigma in early May, at LIV Virginia, when he was asked what it would take for him to wriggle out of his five-year contract, should he want a fresh start elsewhere. “I'll say I'm also not a lawyer,” Rahm said. “I have no idea. I couldn't tell you. I have very few talents in my life, and reading a contract or business are not two of them. As of right now, I have several years on my contract left, and I'm pretty sure they did a pretty good job when they drafted that. So I don't see many ways out, and as of right now, I'm not really thinking about it since we still have a season to play and majors to compete for.”

It’s a total clusterfuck.

This felt like either utter poppycock or a staggering lack of due diligence. When I asked Koski (who doubles as the general manager for Legion XIII, Rahm’s team on LIV) if he knew the details of his client’s contract, Koski said nothing but speed-walked away, literally dodging the question. Three other agents, each of whom has been a party to a mega-deal for a LIV team captain, laid out the state of play under the cloak of anonymity. “It’s a total clusterfuck,” said one. In the early days of LIV, its staffers liked to say they were building the plane as they were flying it. Even something as basic as a signed contract betrays LIV’s organizational messiness. A deal that was inked this past offseason listed the following controlling parties: LIV Golf Holdings, registered in New Jersey; LIV Golf Inc., a Delaware corporation; and LIV Golf Ltd., operating out of England and Wales. Zombie LIV has become a popular term on Golf Twitter for the possibility that a lesser, mostly starless tour limps along in 2027 and beyond. Given that DeChambeau’s contract ends this year, he could simply walk away, leaving Rahm with an even more bereft competitive landscape. Is there any way for Rahm to break free? Says one of the agents, “The contract we signed calls for 14 tournaments with purses of at least $25 million. If they put together a smaller schedule for less money, which is obviously the only path forward, the contract we signed is voided. At least, that’s how we see it. If they disagree, the lawyers are going to have to sort it out.”

Says the second agent, “But we don’t even know who has jurisdiction. LIV has offices in New York, Palm Beach and London. And obviously the PIF is based in Saudi. Where does a lawsuit get filed? What are the enforcement mechanisms? Would the players be able to play while this is getting decided or would they be put in some kind of enforced limbo? The whole thing is a mess. So when Jon Rahm says he has no idea how his deal works, he’s probably being accurate, because nobody does.”

The players may think it’s fucked-up, but it’s legal and it’s smart.

The newest wrinkle in these real-time negotiations is the prospect of LIV filing bankruptcy at the end of this season. This is not necessarily a prelude to shuttering the league; it could be the most effective way to keep it alive. This past off-season, Dustin Johnson signed a new three-year deal at $20 million annually. Rahm is owed double that per year. Throw in all the other guaranteed money and LIV is faced with a nine-figure annual burden that is a massive impediment to becoming a self-sustaining entity. “They are going to declare bankruptcy as a way to get out of all the contracts, and then they’ll take new funding,” says agent number three. “It’s a practical way of breaching contracts to wipe out their debt without inviting lawsuits. Then you seek an orderly reorganization, an element of which is renegotiating every contract. The players may think it’s fucked-up, but it’s legal and it’s smart.”

So yes, there are scenarios where Rahm can leave LIV at the end of 2026. But he would still have to face a reconciliation tribunal at the PGA TOUR. Brooks Koepka was forced to donate $5 million to charity, along with lesser stipulations, to be welcomed back. But unlike Koepka, Rahm was not in the first wave of LIV signings in the madcap summer of 2022, so he can’t claim he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. And unlike Koepka, he wasn’t coming off major surgery on his knee and questioning his future. Rahm defected six months after the so-called framework agreement had been signed in June 2023, which was supposed to secure peace in our time; Rahm’s signing with LIV was a provocative breach of trust. He also secured the largest contract ever doled out by the Saudis, a reputed $300 million over five years, with a third of it paid as a signing bonus. “He’s going to have to pay tens of, if not hundreds of, millions of dollars if he wants come back and play on the PGA TOUR,” Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee recently predicted on the Talking Golf podcast. “That’s what he was paid to go to LIV. If he wants to come back [to the Tour], he’s gonna have to pay for the privilege. You want to be a part of this, get in line.” Rahm never resigned his membership with the PGA TOUR so he has been in breach of its rules for the past 2.5 years. Even if he wins the U.S. Open or another co-sanctioned event this summer he would not be able to claim the PGA TOUR membership that is normally conferred with the victory. A TOUR spokesman offered this pithy explanation: “Rahm is still under contract with LIV Golf. He competes in a series of unauthorized events and is therefore ineligible.”

Rahm lives in Scottsdale, with wife Kelley and three young kids, but if he leaves LIV the European Tour could become his new home tour now that he has begrudgingly ended his feud with the circuit that helped launch his career. LIV had already paid nearly $2 million dollars in fines for Rahm but the league made it clear late last year that, beginning in 2026, it would no longer pick up the tab for any players who run afoul of the European Tour’s conflicting event regulations. In February, eight LIV golfers settled their differences with the tour, agreeing to play in 2-4 additional tournaments to be chosen by the Euro Tour. (Each player was dealt with differently based on the length of their tenure on LIV and their value to sponsors and broadcast partners.) It is a measure of his standing in the game that Rahm’s defection was judged to have been the most damaging to the European Tour so his penance had to be the most onerous: six additional tournaments. Rahm bristled at the workload and refused to settle. He continued to accrue fines with the European Tour as he competed in LIV events throughout early 2026. Rory McIlroy publicly hectored Rahm to pay up and secure his eligibility for the ‘27 Ryder Cup but Rahm is a man of immense pride. He refused to budge. Then the world changed all around Rahm. Once the PIF pulled up stakes, the European Tour became a crucial Plan B. Negotiations accelerated and a deal was announced on May 5th: Rahm would pay $300,000 in fines out of his own pocket while the Tour agreed to lower his required starts from six to five. Rahm’s posturing cost him three hundred grand or earned him back a week of free time, depending on how you look at it. An entire continent exhaled.

“He’s so important for Team Europe,” says Nicolai Højgaard, who was paired with Rahm in Friday afternoon fourballs as a Ryder Cup rookie in 2023. “The way he carries himself in the Ryder Cup, we all feel it. He's a big person—he's slightly intimidating when you play against him. He’s a great partner because we all trust him a lot. He was very calm, he was very direct with things. He explained everything to me: boom, boom, boom, this is what we're going to do. Then you have it and you can deal with it. It frees you up to play your best because you know he is always there for you.”

Rahm still commands respect among his peers, even those on the PGA Tour. “He’s still Jon Rahm,” says Tommy Fleetwood. “No one doubts he’s still one of the best players in the world.” Indeed, Data Golf currently has Rahm second on the planet; he has finished outside of the top-10 only once in 33 (non-team championship) LIV starts…and on that occasion he was 11th. Fleetwood, the reigning FedEx Cup champ, spent eight full seasons seeking his first Tour win so he empathizes with Rahm’s struggle to win a major championship since joining LIV. “It’s tough, there’s only a four a year,” says Fleetwood. “But I guess for the guys on LIV, it might feel like a tighter window because it’s the only time they get to compete against most of the best players in the world. And with Jon, yeah, it’s tough when the narrative builds around you. I know that from experience. It might not be fair but the narrative's there and that's just how it is. Sometimes it's warranted, sometimes it's not. Either way, you go out there and play golf and if you win, the narrative changes.”

Sounds easy.

“It’s not,” Fleetwood said with a wary smile.

I asked Rahm during a PGA Championship press conference if he ever thinks about his place in golf history. He sounded unimpressed with himself: “I think there's a lot of people with my resume.” Indeed, Lee Janzen won two major championships. So did John Daly. And Bubba Watson. But none of them were on Rahm’s Hall of Fame trajectory. “I think I need to accomplish a lot more to even think about it,” Rahm said. “The best way I can say it is I hope I can put myself in a situation where I can dream of thinking about where my career is all time.” Even he knows that is not going to happen by winning LIV Riyadh.

So Rahm will carry various burdens on his broad shoulders as he arrives at Shinnecock Hills. His mentee David Puig says, “He's playing amazing golf, obviously, but because he's a superstar he probably has tons of pressure coming into majors. Especially because he hasn't really performed the way everybody expects him to perform at the majors, maybe. I'm lucky enough to play with him every week and he's definitely the best player I've ever seen. He's amazing. I know he's working really hard, and I know he's going to win a major soon. I think it all comes down to all the pressure he has from the outside. And I'm sure that Scottie and Rory—all the big guys—they definitely have a lot of pressure, too, but I just feel like the fans might like them a little more, in a way. They feel that energy. And Jon, there's a lot of people that actually support him, but then there's also a lot of people who wish him the worst just because of decisions that’s made.”

In America, winning usually takes care of everything, to borrow the phrasing from one of Tiger Woods’s post-scandal Nike ads. This would seem especially true at the United States Open. A Rahm victory at Shinnecock Hills—or next month at Royal Birkdale—will go a long way toward changing the narrative. For now, it’s not about what Rahm has won, but rather how much he’s lost along the way.