Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund is on the verge of cutting funding for LIV Golf,according to the Financial Times, a blow that would potentially — if not certainly — put an end to the breakaway tour.
A formal announcement could come as early as Thursday, according to the report.
Late Tuesday evening, a social media report put the golf world on notice that something was brewing about the future of LIV Golf.
Immediately, speculation ran rampant that the breakaway Saudi-backed tour might be abruptly shutting its doors. And why not? Despite the deep pockets of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the now 4-year-old tour is still struggling to find much traction. Television ratings are non-existent, the tour hasn’t signed a marquee player since Jon Rahm three years ago and the proposed union with the PGA Tour has never materialized.
So, no, a shuttering of LIV operations wouldn’t come as a complete surprise.
But Wednesday morning, as more speculation surfaced, LIV Golf presented a business-as-usual front, at least publicly, that included social media posts about upcoming tee times for this week’s event in Mexico City, as well as media availability ahead of the tournament, which is scheduled to begin Thursday.
Enter Sergio Garcia,fresh off his Masters meltdown, who was asked about the rumors.
“No, sincerely we haven’t heard anything,” Garcia said. “That is not what Yasir told us at the beginning of the year.”
Yasir would be Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the PIF. Garcia went on to explain that Al-Rumayyan told them prior to this season that “he is behind us with a long-term project.”
While that could have been true then, things have certainly changed. The defection of Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed, both of who took the PGA Tour’s offer to return (under certain provisions), certainly signaled that all is not well for those who took the bag to play for LIV.
Why now?
Still, given the PIF’s immense bank account — reportedly in the neighborhood of $1 trillion — why now, so abruptly, in the middle of the season?
Early Wednesday, longtime golf reporter Alan Shipnuck floated a possible explanation:
Given the contracts LIV is under, including with players like Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau, as well as venues, vendors, sponsors, media outlets and every other entity it takes to run a professional sporting league, using the war in Iran to pull the plug on something you’ve already been considering pulling the plug on actually makes sense.
The report also comes, coincidentally or not, on the same day the PIF outlined it’s future investment prerogatives, none of which mentioned golf or sport.
The PIF has reportedly sunk somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 billion into the venture, backed by Al-Rumayyan — an avid golfer. Players such as Rahm, DeChambeau, Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson all signed massive contracts to leave the PGA Tour and join the Saudi-backed venture. Some of those contracts pushed beyond nine figures.
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How LIV came to be
LIV was born in 2022 when a number of concurrent favorable elements aligned at once. Greg Norman, the maverick and outspoken former CEO of LIV, had long wanted to establish an alternative to what he saw as the overly restrictive PGA Tour. Several other entities had proposed a tour with more worldwide focus than the PGA Tour, with team elements included. Some players, such as Mickelson, wanted to retain more control of their own career paths and corporate identities than the PGA Tour would allow.
Saudi Arabia’s PIF proved to be the key factor that could bind all those disparate elements together into a viable alternative tour. Saudi Arabia has long sought to improve its image on the world stage through investment in sports — a process its critics call “sportswashing” — and through golf, the PIF and Al-Rumayyan, saw a pathway to connect with many of the world’s most influential business leaders and politicians. LIV provided that pathway, at least in theory, and the PIF’s hundreds of billions ensured that the pathway would be as long as the Saudis wished.
Before LIV Golf’s first tournament even began, the tour faced hurricane-level headwinds and troubles of its own making. Protests about the source of LIV’s funding — that is, the government of Saudi Arabia, responsible for documented human rights atrocities — dominated early coverage. Mickelson didn’t help matters by conceding that anyone who joined LIV was, in effect, sacrificing principle for cash and ulterior motives.
“They’re scary [expletives] to get involved with,” Mickelson told Shipnuck in a now-legendary quote. “We know they killed [Washington Post reporter Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
The PIF’s billions did lure plenty of notable players, including stars in their prime like Koepka and DeChambeau; notable names like Mickelson, Johnson and Reed; and longtime veterans seeking one more big payday like Ian Poulter, Lee Westwood, Garcia, Bubba Watson. For a brief period, LIV appeared to be an existential threat to the PGA Tour as rumors flew about which players would be next to jump ship.
LIV: The good and the bad
LIV’s actual golf was more spectacle than substance. Tournaments were just three rounds of shotgun-start golf rather than the usual four (“LIV” is the Roman numeral for “54,” the number of holes in a LIV tournament). Players wore shorts and music played throughout, giving the entire affair a casual, unserious air … except for the massive payouts going to the players, of course.
In that inaugural year of 2022, LIV may not have held the best cards, but it clearly held enough chips to bleed out the PGA Tour, if that’s what it took. Several LIV players, including DeChambeau, also filed suit against the PGA Tour for alleged anticompetitive practices. The Tour indefinitely banned all of its players who teed up at a LIV Golf event, but for those players already eligible to play in most or all of the majors, that was a hollow punishment.
So the golf world was stunned in June 2023 when the PGA Tour and the PIF announced a surprise “joint framework agreement” that halted all legal action between the two. Airy talk of future cooperation between the two entities never materialized, and the “framework agreement” never progressed further than a few dodged press conference questions.
But for all the criticism of the breakaway tour, LIV did force some dramatic change to the PGA Tour’s entire business model — some of which were exactly what players like Mickelson were politicking for. The tour sought outside investors, and received a $1.5 billion cash infusion from several notable professional sports owners, including the New York Mets’ Steve Cohen and the Atlanta Falcons’ Arthur Blank. The Tour increased its purses dramatically and offered up a series of bonus incentives, including equity, small-field tournaments, and the TGL indoor golf league, designed to funnel more money into loyal players’ pockets.
LIV, meanwhile, struggled to carry through on its grand promises. Ratings were dismal by any measure. The tour could not convince golf’s powers-that-be to give LIV players Official World Golf Ranking points for their tournaments, meaning LIV players didn’t have pathways into the majors without prior exemptions.
There were some small successes. Koepka captured the 2023 PGA Championship, the first active LIV player to win a major. Anthony Kim, the former star absent from the public eye for more than a decade, returned to professional golf on a LIV special invitation. LIV events in Australia and, later, South Africa proved phenomenally popular locally, lending credence to the idea that LIV was a better fit as a global tour than a domestic competitor to the PGA Tour. And in December 2023, LIV scored its biggest coup of its existence when it lured Rahm, inarguably one of the greatest players on earth, into its ranks even after Rahm had pledged “fealty” to the PGA Tour.
But Rahm’s arrival did not spur a second exodus from the Tour, and he remains, more than two years later, the last notable LIV acquisition.
The beginning of the end?
More ominously, LIV recently began making news for the players leaving to return to the PGA Tour, starting with Koepka just before Christmas and, later, Reed. The PGA Tour welcomed back Koepka with a designed-on-the-fly “pathway” that skipped right over the year-long ban that other players faced. Reed wound his way through the DP World Tour, and will resume play on the PGA Tour in August, a year after his final LIV event.
One of the key criticisms of LIV Golf is that it’s not truly a competitive tour. Without a cut, with a shotgun start, with phenomenal paychecks awaiting every player … what exactly is the incentive to play better? Koepka’s PGA Championship win, and later DeChambeau’s 2024 U.S. Open victory, seemed to counter that narrative, at least for the game’s best players. But the woeful performance of LIV’s pillars, Rahm and DeChambeau, at this year’s Masters brought that narrative right back to the forefront.
So, if this is the end of LIV, what exactly will it’s legacy be, apart from the healthy bank accounts of its players? LIV certainly spurred the PGA Tour into remaking its own entire business model, putting more money in the hands of its own players. And LIV did demonstrate that there is deep, untapped interest in golf all over the world, interest the PGA Tour has no real intention of addressing in the near future. LIV also demonstrated that sportswashing works; although virtually every story on LIV mentioned Saudi human rights violations, virtually every media outlet and fan now simply treats it like any other league, judged on its merits rather than its financial pedigree.
LIV Golf marked the most significant internationally funded disruption of an American-based sports entity to date. And while LIV may not have succeeded on its own, it knocked down longstanding walls around American sports.
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