At his Tuesday press conference ahead of the 2023 U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club, World No. 2 Jon Rahm expressed his frustration with the uncertainty regarding the future of the PGA Tour and the way its leadership went about the proposed alignment with LIV Golf and the DP World Tour.

“There's a lot of unanswered questions,” said Rahm. “It's the week before a major. I'm trying not to think about it … It gets to a point where you wanna have faith in management. I wanna have faith that this is the best case for us, but that's clearly not the consensus. … I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a bit of betrayal from management.”

Last week, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan and Yasir Al-Rumayyan — the governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) — shocked the worlds of sports, geopolitics, and international business by announcing an alliance that would reshape global golf. After spending more than a year urging PGA Tour players not to join the Saudi-backed LIV Tour for moral reasons, Monahan and a few cohorts spent the last seven weeks secretly brokering a deal with PIF.

If the deal passes government antitrust scrutiny — far from a guarantee — the PGA Tour would continue to operate as a non-profit enterprise while also launching a for-profit branch that would be financially backed by PIF.

PGA Tour members, including Rory McIlroy, were incensed at being blindsided by the announcement. Many of them surrendered tens of millions of dollars by not joining LIV, which may fold back into the PGA Tour after this year, anyway.

Last week, McIlroy said that he feels like a “sacrificial lamb” after publicly speaking on the PGA Tour's behalf — and operating as a shadow commissioner behind the scenes — though he ultimately believes the proposed arrangement will benefit golf fans and players in the long run.

Jon Rahm sounded similarly optimistic about the business upside of the deal but voiced frustration over the lack of clarity.

“I understand why they had to keep it so secret,” he said. “It’s just, it's not easy as a player who's been involved like many others to wake up and see this bombshell. We're all in a bit of a state of limbo cause we don’t know what is going on … It’s that state of uncertainty that we don’t love. At the end of the day, I’m not a business expert. Some of those guys on the board and involved in all of this are, so I’d like to think they’d make a better decision than me.”

The 2021 U.S. Open champion said he believes the PGA Tour values player opinion “to an extent … They've certainly heard us throughout the whole process on some of the issues.”

“But,” he added, “we're certainly in a spot in time where there's a big question mark. Where we don't have the answers we would like.”