Phil Mickelson makes ‘bullish’ prediction over LIV Golf future

As LIV Golf forges ahead with its plans for 2025, it remains unclear what the future holds for some of the league’s first big name signings. 

The three-year contracts signed by some golfers after the breakaway league’s inception will expire in 2024, with player turnover therefore expected to ramp up at the end of this season.

LIV CEO Greg Norman has made no secret of his plans to coax more big name players from the PGA Tour, while bosses are also exploring new territories to stage tournaments.

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But while LIV and the main tours continue to operate independently from each other, many players face uncertain futures.

Chief amongst them is Phil Mickelson, such a key figure in LIV’s emergence back in 2022. Mickelson, 53, was one of the first high-profile stars to sign a multi-year LIV deal, but his form has waned on the Saudi-backed circuit.

It is unclear how long Mickelson, the captain of HyFlyers GC, will continue to play LIV events into his mid-fifties, but he is still hugely optimistic about the direction of the enterprise.

“I think there’s a lot of things that are going to transpire over the next five or ten years,” the six-time major champion said at this week’s event in Singapore. “I’m very bullish and excited about what that means for LIV Golf.

“But there’s also a lot of uncertainty. I think the things that I do know is I think the quality of the players will continue to get better each year. I think that the ability and the sites that we move throughout the world will continue to excite players and excite fans. We’ll be going to more countries outside of the United States that really are starving for world-class professional golf, and we’ll have a lot more receptions like we had at Adelaide.

“With Singapore and the tourism department getting involved and loving the event that transpired last year and wanting us to come back, that seems to be the case right now where a lot of countries are negotiating and trying to get a LIV event there. So I see the global game of golf growing at an extremely high level.”

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Bryson DeChambeau, the Crushers GC captain, is similarly spirited about LIV’s long-term future.

“We know it’s going to be here, bigger, badder and better than ever before,” DeChambeau added. “It’s just going to continue to keep growing over the next five to ten years.Where I see it heading, I think there may be an opportunity for this to be from an audience perspective even bigger.

“You’re going to see a lot more interactions from teams. I think the competition between the teams will get heightened. The rivalries will get heightened. There’s already some sort of rivalries going on right now, but as the years go on and people are going to win championships, that team championship at the end of the year last year like the Crushers did.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of rivalries to be produced that you’ll see, and it’s stories to be told I think will be pretty insane over the next five to ten years.”

Ben Parsons joined bunkered as a Content Producer in 2023 and is the man to come to for all of the latest news, across both the professional and amateur games. Formerly of The Mirror and Press Association, he is a member at Halifax Golf Club and is a long-suffering fan of both Manchester United and the Wales rugby team.