While the broader LIV Golf locker room has spent the past fortnight working through the PIF funding withdrawal in private, Joaquin Niemann walked onto the patio at LIV Virginia on Wednesday and gave reporters a markedly different reading of the situation than most of his peers.
The 27-year-old Chilean — the league's reigning Individual MVP and one of its most marketable wins — was asked by Skratch Golf's Garrett Johnston how it had felt when news broke that the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia was preparing to cut direct LIV funding after 2026. He didn't reach for the language of crisis.
"It is what it is," Niemann said. "I mean, I guess we got to get a new business plan, and I think Scott and his team is going to do a great job doing that. I feel like people under pressure works better — that's at least on my case. So I feel like, yeah, it's going to be good to have that pressure now that we got to raise the money, got to find a new plan, going to find a new method to raise the money. And I think it's going to be good for the league. We are finally going to be sustainable if we find this business plan and it's the right business plan."
The Scott in question is Scott O'Neil, the LIV CEO who arrived in early 2025 and has spent recent months publicly recasting LIV as a turnaround story rather than a fledgling league. Niemann's framing aligned closely with the line O'Neil has been pushing in his own media circuit. The league, in this version, isn't dying — it's being forced to grow up.
Niemann also pushed back on the wider sense across the PGA Tour cohort that LIV's operating environment has been opaque to its own players.
"It's great. Scott and his team, they try to communicate as much as they can with us, with the captains," Niemann said. "I think the communication is great. It's nice to have every player, every person here on LIV trying to make this place a better place, this tour a better tour, and grow the game and go to corners we never been and different countries."
Where Niemann split most decisively from his teammate Thomas Pieters — who told reporters at the same event that he wouldn't return to the PGA Tour even if LIV folded — was the hypothetical itself. Asked what life looks like if LIV doesn't survive past 2026, Niemann walked the door open.
"I would love to just play, keep playing golf, of course," he said. "I got DP World Tour. It would be nice to — I don't have status there. It would be nice to go and play there. And then if one day we can go back to the PGA Tour, I would love to play on the PGA Tour. But the scenarios that could happen if LIV disappears, which I don't think is going to happen — I know that Thomas Pieters yesterday said that he personally with his family and his situation wouldn't have an interest in going back to the PGA Tour. But it sounds like it's different for me."
The major-championship layer underneath that openness is unmistakeable. Niemann is increasingly framed as the most likely first LIV name to win one of golf's four majors, and he didn't try to play down his appetite.
"I love golf. I'm going to keep playing as much as I want to. My game is getting better and better every time," Niemann said. "I want to win majors. I want to win golf tournaments. Whatever that brings, I'm going to be there chasing that door and chasing that dream always."
The majors get a particular kind of weight from him. "It's four weeks of the year that more people watch golf, more people come and see us," he said. "Courses, they set them up a little bit differently. So it's a lot of fun playing there. It'll be awesome to have a chance to win."
For a player who looked, for most of LIV's first three seasons, like a quiet executor of the league's preferred talking points, the Virginia patio interview was unusually layered. Niemann is publicly endorsing the reset — and quietly, methodically, leaving more of his options open than most of his teammates.