Bankruptcy filings are notoriously cumbersome, but every bankruptcy judge would admit the tedious paperwork is necessary. If a company is declaring bankruptcy, and thereby seeking some sort of legal protection against its current state, it had better be able to explain why.
But the process of doing so is a nightmare for lawyers as much as it is for their printers. It doesn’t take long for the number of pages to cross the threshold of tens of thousands. On Thursday evening alone, thousands of pages were filed in LIV Golf’s bankruptcy case, across its lot of international entities, its 13 franchises and dozens of other subsidiaries. Staring at it might send you into a daze, but there’s plenty that can be gleaned from these documents, which were prepared by LIV’s management and advisors. Thursday’s trove offered one main theme: LIV Golf owed many companies money.
Of course that’s probably implied by all we’ve known from the Saudi-backed company. But a closer look shows just how expensive it is to run any golf league, but in particular one that wanted to stunt on its competition with flashy tech and deep pockets.
Thursday’s filings included a massive list of assets and liabilities for LIV Golf Incorporated, with amounts ranging from $13.46 owed to FedEx up into the millions owed to Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau. Many of the contracts that LIV Golf maintained into September have been rejected or are expected to be rejected, but that’s beside the point. The documents are a reminder that many companies had struck a deal with LIV Golf.
Take the $178,087.50 that LIV owed to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, presumably for licensing music to play at its events and on its platforms. In that case, it costs a lot of money to be Golf But Louder.
There’s the $9,350 that LIV owed to ASAP Sports, the transcription service for interviews and transcripts used across the golf industry. LIV owed $28,689.24 to AT&T and $49,609.59 to Avalara Inc., a tax and compliance company (and that’s just a few of the companies that start with the letter “A”).
There are companies for printing, insurance, travel management, public relations. There are plenty of well-known brands, like Equinox gyms, which LIV owed $22,850, or Uber, which LIV owed $89,407. And then there are several generic-sounding others, like Exciting Events Inc. (owed $7,000), Narrative Strategies LLC (owed $27,000) or SportsMEDIA Technology Corp (owed $352,418.50, a number LIV has disputed).
There are recognizable names, like broadcaster Jerry Foltz, or the Club at Chatham Hills, the host course of LIV’s final event in Indiana. But then there are others that sound a bit goofy on the surface. According to the filing, LIV owed $25,804.26 to Run Like a Deer, Inc. — the company owned by comedian Andrew Santino, who created broadcast content with LIV Golf over the years — though LIV marked it as a disputed claim.
Over the course of doing business, the league was constantly racking up one helluva tab. A lot of that became public via lawsuits it was pulled into over the summer, once the Saudi PIF made clear it was no longer funding LIV into the future — forcing LIV CEO Scott O’Neil to face questions about bankruptcy weeks before he was ready to publicly commit to it.
But beyond what was owed, there is further proof of what was paid. Like the quarterly payments of $4.946 million to Rahm — totaling just short of $20 million annually, for his Player Participation Agreement (read: contract). There was a massive settlement paid to Greg Norman in September 2025, for $5.8 million. On the same day, another $3.6 million bonus was paid to Norman, roughly eight months after he was replaced as CEO. Not far from Norman’s name on the sheet are Eugene Davis and Jon Zinman, whom LIV brought in as independent directors in April to oversee restructuring of the business, each earning $150,000 a month. (That’s right, the people brought in to settle the structure of the business and determine how new money will flow throughout it, they make a pretty penny, too.)
There’s another word that is used throughout the most recent filings: Undetermined. In the 292-page document outlining LIV Golf Incorporated’s assets and liabilities, that U-word is found 808 times. Sometimes to explain the definition of how things are noted in the filing, but otherwise to explain that the number owed to, say, Phil Mickelson, is undetermined. The amount of money LIV Golf may owe the parties who had been suing it, like World Golf Group and Premier Golf Group — who claim LIV took concepts from its original ideas — is undetermined.
All of which should just serve as one final memento of LIV Golf 1.0. It wanted to be everything, and it was paying for everything. And in the end, that didn’t work out.
