LIV Golf roiled the game for years. What will its legacy be now? | News

Five years and one week ago, a press release hit the web at 8 a.m. It announced, for the first time, a new, Saudi-backed golf company helmed by Greg Norman named LIV Golf Investments. It was, of course, the parent of LIV Golf, a rival league designed to completely alter the professional side of the sport. And it did. But now, more than half a decade later, that company will soon cease to exist as LIV will “not proceed with a LIV 2.0 plan,” according to its lawyers in bankruptcy court Thursday morning, and will move to wind down its business.

The beginning of this end came seven months ago, when the Saudi Public Investment Fund — after injecting more than $5 billion into the outfit — elected to suddenly cease funding the league, just weeks after one of its most successful events in South Africa. The world had changed since 2021, and even since 2025, particularly in the Middle East, where Saudi Arabia and its neighbors were pulled into geopolitical conflict. The PIF had decided LIV was “no longer consistent” with its strategy, and a report from the Financial Times confirmed it, calling into question if the league would even be able to finish its 2026 season. After all, it was funded entirely by repeated installments from the PIF, signed for by its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, which often cleared $300 million.

What wasn’t clear then has become clear in recent months — that the decision did not involve any LIV management at all. It came from the top of the PIF, which officially added two investment bankers who specialize in bankruptcy restructuring — Gene Davis and Jon Zinman — on April 13, one day after the 2026 Masters and two days before reports of the league’s demise. Though it set off a harried week in Mexico City, where LIV was playing that week, with reports of players not receiving expected payments, the PIF decided to fund the league for the rest of its season. But quietly, the finances of the league did not add up.

In June, during the U.S. Open, the PIF materially changed its financial relationship with the league, loaning LIV money rather than injecting it with funds for greater equity. From June through its initial bankruptcy filing, that secured loan tallied to $495 million, much of which was paid to players and league employees, like CEO Scott O’Neil, who received a retention payment of $6.375 million in late June. On the short side of that draw were dozens of vendors that had been doing business with the league for months and were not paid. The spectrum of companies varied widely, from numerous broadcast technology brands to the State of Louisiana, to Uber and Equinox, all the way down to a Georgia catering company — a reminder of just how extravagant the league’s spending had become. LIV’s unpaid bills eventually came to the fore in August in the form of lawsuits, which O’Neil was asked about, point-blank, during LIV’s final event in Indianapolis. He balked at clarifying any resolution and at the reality of bankruptcy, but just days later O’Neil and LIV began the formal process of stripping team ownership from the stars it had once wooed into its ranks.

The last eight weeks of bankruptcy court have forced LIV to share its warts in public, adding context to statements the league might have previously gloated about. The league was hosting $30 million events but making next to no money from its broadcast rights — the golden goose for sports leagues around the world. In August, it earned a $300 million investment proposal from London-based BC Partners Credit, which the league was quick to revel in but what amounted to exit financing from what the league owed to the PIF. Documents revealed it to be a last-ditch deal that gave BC Partners near-total control. In the event that enough players agreed to stick with the league, BC Partners would take a minority (though significant) ownership stake and benefit from LIV’s billions in net operating losses, a sizable tax asset. But it had to land enough commitments from players — particularly its biggest stars — to earn BC Partners’ approval. A big part of that came down to Jon Rahm, the league’s sure-fire best player, whose contract was worth 40 times that of lesser LIV players. Rahm was coy about his interest in the league’s future all summer, right until an October court hearing, where his representation announced he was not accepting the terms of LIV 2.0. Rahm’s lack of interest proved to be a domino, setting off a number of departures from the league’s biggest names: Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter, Louis Oosthuizen, Tyrrell Hatton.

That all led to a Wednesday report from the Financial Times that LIV had not landed enough commitments to convince BC Partners to finalize its financing. On Thursday morning, the announcement lasted about 10 minutes and was succeeded by a statement from a BC Partners spokesperson:

“While there was great support for the league, we are disappointed that mutually acceptable terms could not be reached among the various stakeholders. We commend LIV Golf’s management for their tireless efforts and thank the players who supported the future of LIV and engaged constructively throughout. We wish them every success as they continue their careers.”

In a matter of minutes, LIV issued perhaps its final press release, saying, “The league is proud of the role it has played in shaping the broader golf landscape, from introducing team golf at the professional level to bringing world-class events to new markets, and it believes its impact on the sport will be felt for years to come.”

That is undoubtedly true. The ubiquitousness of $20 million purses (or higher), the prevalence of team golf and increased importance of the major championships are all results of LIV Golf’s five-year journey. But the league’s funnels of money being turned off by its ultra-wealthy backer is fitting, if not ironic. Its existence has always been entirely about money — how much of it the Saudi PIF wanted to provide, and how much top-end pro golfers wanted to chase.

THE END OF LIV GOLF WAS, IN WAYS, LIKE ITS BEGINNING. Its infancy was ominous, back in February 2022, when its leading man, Greg Norman, boastfully railed against then PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan. Norman had inked a number of players to non-disclosure agreements, but the league couldn’t fully come forward with its plans for fear of Tour retribution. That spring, it was just waiting for months to pass before it could officially launch. But Phil Mickelson quotes published that month called into question the purpose of the league and its Saudi Arabian backing. Numerous players flipped — at least publicly — pledging their allegiance to the PGA Tour while Mickelson eventually took a leave of absence — losing longtime sponsors in the process — shrouding the forthcoming league in mystery. Even LIV staff was unsure how the league would proceed. 

But it was during those immediate weeks after Mickelson’s quotes were published that Al-Rumayyan seemed to double down, and with pace. Before long, the operative was to not only launch in 2022, but to get it done in a three-month timeframe. It signed 17 of the top 100 golfers in the world, held a swanky draft party on the outskirts of London and produced a very loud tournament that kicked off on June 9, 2022. Music blared through speakers all over the property, a jarring change for golf traditionalists, but the most emphatic news was delivered in print: a letter from Monahan promising that the 17 players who held some sort of PGA Tour membership were suspended. Ten of them had already resigned, making it clear — if it wasn’t already — that this was a golf war.

LIV moved forward bold and nimble — even getting Al-Rumayyan to pledge a $54 million prize to any player who might card a perfect score of 54 in a round — while the PGA Tour held tightly to its membership regulations, which players sign every year. The Tour faced the ominous, near-constant threat of more players defecting — Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed and Cam Smith would join LIV in the coming weeks — while LIV faced something more political. Victims of 9/11 families protested at some of its events — accusing the players and the league of sportswashing Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. Monahan even invoked that tragedy in a broadcast interview on national TV alongside Jim Nantz: “I would ask that any player that has left, or that would ever consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”

Within months, LIV players and the league filed a lawsuit against the Tour for anti-competitive practices and restraint of trade. The Tour filed a countersuit in return, and the legal process inched ever so expensively toward deposition of Al-Rumayyan. Legal costs mounted for the Tour, tallying near $50 million, according to a source with familiarity of the proceedings. And so, in April 2023, Jimmy Dunne, then an independent director for the Tour’s policy board, reached out to a representative of Al-Rumayyan to coordinate a meeting between the Tour and the Saudi PIF. In a matter of weeks — and following numerous international meetings in San Francisco, Milan and London — a “Framework Agreement” was signed by both sides and made public on June 6, 2023. It was a deal to reach a definitive deal, with a roughly 7-month deadline. Monahan and Al-Rumayyan broke the news to the world in a joint interview on CNBC’s morning show, Squawk Box, before Mohanan flew to Toronto to face the Tour membership, which was blindsided.

That evening, Monahan held a virtual press conference with golf media, uttering a phrase the Tour would soon regret. It was particularly attractive, Monahan said, “to take a competitor off the board, to have them exist as a partner, not an owner.” 

All manner of ideas were bandied about during those tense and secret few weeks leading up to the agreement, like the fanciful thought of Al-Rumayyan earning membership at Augusta National, or Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy owning LIV teams. But ultimately, the peace deal was about two things: 1) Ceasing legal action against each other; and 2) Trying to reach a place of unity that would allow the PGA Tour to receive Saudi investment, where players who left could return and where LIV could find sturdy footing in the global golf calendar. 

When the dust settled, the eight months following the signed Framework Agreement will likely serve as the most important era in the league’s existence. For starters, the United States government perked up, grilling representatives from the Tour in Washington D.C. about the anti-competitive nature of such a merger. Monahan took a five-week medical leave, returning with a promise that progress was “ongoing.” Every few weeks, staffers from each tour provided similarly cagey updates about a definitive deal that was nowhere near definitive. In late November, 2023, the PGA Tour — famously a 501(c)(6) non-profit — filed initial paperwork for PGA Tour Enterprises, a new for-profit arm of its business. Right around that time, Rahm became the newest major LIV signing, agreeing to a deal worth a reported $300 to $400 million. And then, two months later, the PGA Tour announced a landmark investment from Strategic Sports Group, headed by John Henry’s Fenway Sports Group. SSG would be investing $1.5 billion into the Tour, marking a valuation of roughly $12.9 billion.

Enterprises was formed for a number of reasons — and has delivered a number of important results, like housing the player equity grants Tour members have since received — but one of them was to create an investment opportunity for the Saudi PIF, which the announcement of Enterprises even acknowledged. Negotiations crawled slowly — Tiger Woods hosted Al-Rumayyan and the Tour’s player directors in the Bahamas in March 2024 — but produced no results. Discussions between the two parties continued all the way to the White House in February 2025, where new President Donald Trump hosted Woods, Al-Rumayyan, Monahan and Adam Scott. While the meeting was publicly deemed “constructive,” it was the final time the sides would meet.

The ensuing 12 months saw each side go about their business on their own, with little discussion of reunification. The PGA Tour hired Brian Rolapp as its new CEO, who instituted an aggressive plan to recreate its competitive structure based on fewer events an a greater promotion and relegation system. As Rory McIlroy said just this week in Abu Dhabi, “There’s never been a better time to be a professional golfer. You know, talk to Jack Nicklaus or any of these older guys, they would have loved LIV to come around in their day, they would have made more money, and we are all making more money because of it.”

But McIlroy, who never feared speaking out on the topic, continued with an ominous hindsight that is growing in popularity these days: “But I do think there has to be a bit of a reset. I’ve talked about this it. They created a false economy within men’s professional golf, and I think that there is going to be a bit of a reset here, just for things to be a little bit more sustainable.”

LIV spent its final years finding sporadic success internationally, particularly in Australia and South Africa, golf markets the PGA Tour has not visited for years. But a few key factors mattered far more that their inroads abroad: how many events could it host in the United States, and how many people would tune in for them?

The league had settled into a yearly cadence where most of its early events took place all over the world, with its summer events in America. And despite setting domestic attendance records in August 2025, between stops in Chicago and Indianapolis, hosting events in far-reaching corners of the world caused issues for television audiences that were already paltry. The time zone differential between, say, Saudi Arabia for the league’s season-opener, and the American East Coast, required tee times be scheduled late to catch some of the American TV audience … or ignoring that audience altogether.

For any number of reasons — like the decades-old viewing habits pushing golf fans to CBS and NBC, not LIV’s home of FOX Sports — golf viewers never tuned in to LIV competition like they have for other pro events. The broadcast was decidedly different and flamboyant, but even its best events were out-rated by the PGA Tour by a scale of 10 to 11x, GOLF.com’s James Colgan reported. Considering that a dominant majority of the PGA Tour’s core revenues are tied up in television rights — similar to other pro sports leagues — it was a massive failure that only 5% of LIV’s revenue came from TV rights. It is virtually impossible for a league to operate on its own if its IP wasn’t being widely viewed enough for a major TV network to pay serious money for it.

Despite that, LIV continued to spend lavishly. From its very first event, no cost was spared in building its futuristic fan villages, locking in host courses and, most importantly, collecting talent. In March, LIV flew internationally revered DJ Calvin Harris’ to Africa for his first ever performance on the continent — a multi-million-dollar expense for roughly 70 minutes of runtime. But LIV’s promise of a sporto-cultural festival experience — one of the few unique things it brought to the golf world — became untenable when Saudi Arabia stopped paying for it. After the PIF pulled funding, LIV hosted just three concerts across seven tournaments, ultimately obfuscating how it canceled concerts in Indianapolis. If anything has been learned, it’s that creating mega-wattage events with massive musical acts and building out a different version of what golf tournaments could look like is not cheap. And pro golf may not be big enough to sustain those costs, no matter what league is hosting the events. According to business filings in the United Kingdom, LIV’s international events alone incurred losses north of $1 billion over the last four years — losses BC Partners was once interested in, just not interested in enough.

But therein lies the irony to the rise and fall of a rival golf league: it was never making significant money, and yet, it was always flush with Saudi cash, receiving more than $1.3 billion in capital injections in the 15 months before the PIF began turning off the faucet. What was once a firehose splashing the entire industry has been reduced to a slow, court-monitored drip.