Is LIV Golf Finished? Restructuring and Potential Bankruptcy Could Decide the Tour’s Future

LIV Golf’s Future in Doubt: Can the Saudi-Backed Tour Survive After 2026?

The last LIV golf tournament of 2026 ended last week in Indianapolis and there’s a good chance it will be the last LIV event ever. A team event was scheduled for this week in Michigan, but it was cancelled due to funding issues and an LIV tournament in New Orleans was cancelled as well for the same reason. Consequently, there were a total of 12 LIV tournaments played in 2026 and it’s doubtful any real golf fans will be able to recall highlights from any of them.

How Greg Norman’s LIV Golf Vision Started

In 1993 Greg Norman, unsatisfied that the PGA was garnering huge revenue while paying the players only a fraction of that revenue through tournament prizes, drew up the idea of the World Golf Tour that would give players ownership of the tour to provide them more equity, media rights, control over their name and likeness and allow them to play fewer tournaments while getting more money.  In 1994 he moved forward with it signing a deal with FOX as a promoter and broadcaster, but due to pushback by the PGA Tour and players not willing to risk their careers for an unproven concept, Norman backed down and the idea wen by the wayside.

Saudi Arabia’s PIF Launches LIV Golf

n 2020, however, the Saudi Arabian based Public Investment Fund (PIF) indicated they wanted to start investing in golf to grow the game globally and modernize it by creating a team environment. They also indicated they did not want to compete with the other tours but rather work alongside them. They hired on Norman as the CEO of LIV, who again said he wasn’t trying to compete against the PGA Tour but work with them. Many skeptics believed that PIF had no interest in actually growing the game of golf or diversifying their investments as they claimed but instead wanted to use sports as a way of hiding their human rights abuses. The term used for their actions by many skeptics was “sportswashing”,  akin to how criminal enterprises invest money in legal businesses to hide the true origin of ill-gotten gains, which of course is known as money laundering.

Huge Signing Bonuses Lure PGA Tour Stars to LIV

Realizing players wouldn’t simply give up their PGA or DP World career to join LIV golf out of the goodness of their hearts, Norman provided incentives that many players could not turn down. Norman promised fewer tournaments, higher purses including guaranteed payouts to all participants, no cuts, a 54-hole tournament rather than 72 holes and a team option that allowed players to make additional money by setting up groups of four with the best scoring teams winning  additional money. Consequently, lesser players could join good teams and win good cash. Norman also provided huge signing bonuses to the best players that many simply couldn’t refuse. The first to sign with LIV was Phil Mickelson who got $200 million as a signing bonus with the agreement that he would not only play, but also help recruit other players and be a spokesman for the league. Even though Mickelson was 50 years old at the time he signed, he was still a marquee name, having just won the PGA Championship.

While Mickelson was excited about the opportunity, he did little to help PIF’s efforts to improve its image. In an interview with Golf.com’s Alan Shipnuck, Mickelson called the Saudi government “scary motherf*ckers” and acknowledged its terrible human rights record. He added, however, that those concerns were secondary to the opportunity to give professional golfers more control over their careers. Mickelson was forced to backtrack those comments and said they were off the record, but the damage was done.

Aside from Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka signed bonuses over $100 million prior to the first tournament in 2022, and Masters winner Cam Smith, along with Henrik Stenson, signed a deal for $100 million later that year. In 2023 John Rahm signed the biggest deal with LIV for $300 million. Hideki Matsuyama, Rory McIlroy, Ricky Fowler and Tiger Woods were all apparently offered deals far exceeding Rahm’s but declined. In total it is reported that PIF gave out guarantees of $1.6 billion in signing bonuses for all players during the four years since it started and over $3 billion in total, including prize money. President Donald Trump in its early days said that the PGA players who did not move to LIV would regret not taking the money and effectively called them stupid for being loyal to a league that were disloyal to the players, but later he said he wanted the leagues to work together and even approached the PGA Tour when he became president again in 2025 to work something out.

LIV Golf Struggles to Win Over Fans and TV Viewers

LIV just assumed that golf fans and TV stations would just flock to see the best players but that never happened. The Tour never got a contract with a major TV station and as a result the viewership on the places it aired like YouTube TV ad the CW network was terrible. In fact, the tour never got more than 500,000 viewers until the last event at Indianapolis which had 702,000 viewers, likely because golf fans understood it was likely the last LIV event they would see. For some events in Asia, there were less than 100,000 viewers.  In comparison the PGA Tour events had almost 4 million viewers and the U.S. Women’s Open had over 1.2 million viewers. More importantly few people attended the events compared to other tours and many tickets for events, particularly at Trump owned golf courses in the U.S., were giveaways. As well, for the players, Norman was never able to convince the OWGR governing board to award world golf ranking points for LIV events so the majority of players became ineligible to compete in any majors. Only players who won major tournaments and hence had a lifetime exemption could compete.

PIF Pulls Funding and LIV Golf Faces an Uncertain Future

Consequently, the plan to build up PIF’s image by creating this league was not working and in April of this year PIF told LIV CEO Scott O’Neill that it was pulling its funding at the end of 2026. As a result, LIV was forced to cancel events, fire staff and look for new investors. And earlier this month O’Neill said they reached a deal with an investor to continue the league beyond 2026. While not officially named it is believed that group that will take over are affiliated with London England based private equity firm BC Partners.

Could LIV Golf Enter Bankruptcy Protection?

But the exact details of how that released are not known and there is serious speculation that in order to make it work, BC Partners will put LIV into bankruptcy protection to restructure its debt. Several widely publicized reports show that PIF’s investment in LIV was not as a true equity investment but rather was run through debt facilities. And it has also been reported that BC Partners will be extending LIV a line of credit to help it refinance rather than giving it true unrestricted capital. So, in better words this is not a true investment in LIV, but rather a means to help the league continue by trying to restructure its debt. And that debt is significant as it not only includes payments owed to golf courses and other partners but also to the players. Forbes indicated that LIV owes hundreds of millions of dollars in future contractual obligations to players such as Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Tyrrell Hatton and Joaquin Niemann and plans to offer those players equity in the new revised LIV 2.0 rather than paying out the money they are owed from the signing bonuses and unpaid prize money.

Will LIV Golf Stars Return to the PGA Tour?

The question is whether those players want equity in a league that seems to be more of a pipe dream than a good investment or whether it’s in their best interest to eat crow and go back to the PGA Tour? Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed clearly saw no future in LIV and went back to the PGA Tour under its terms and it is believed many other players are prepared to do the same. Bryson DeChambeau and Phil Mickelson are apparently excited about the new opportunity according to O’Neill, but if there are only one or two marquee names sticking with the new league it will clearly go nowhere. Rahm has stated dissatisfaction with LIV and if the player that won the last three LIV championships goes back to the PGA Tour it could be a nail in the coffin of LIV. And in truth, Phil Mickelson is a non-entity at this point as he hasn’t been the least bit successful on LIV, and aside from the PGA Championship he won in 2021 he hasn’t even been competitive in the major tournaments that he is eligible to play in. Moreover, by all accounts the players on the PGA Champions Tour are completely against him returning there.

I spoke to a sports analyst, who has a background in corporate accounting and he told me LIV never stood a chance because the concept was not based on sound business principles but rather greed and deception.

“Who wouldn’t want to get rich by doing less and getting paid more? That was the promise of LIV to players in the PGA Tour but it was all a shell game. The concept was all based on what we call deficit economics where a company or organization spends more than it brings in but keeps itself going by constantly restructuring debt to hide its real financial situation. The league simply hoped that over time it would start generating enough revenue to be in a surplus and could start repaying the debt but there was no facility for that to happen. In normal circumstances a sports business would do a soft launch where they would run one or two events to see the impact and then make adjustments, but PIF took advantage of the Covid pandemic, player greed, and a new Biden government that was about to hold them responsible for their human rights violations and went in guns a blazing promising the best players the world and many bought into it. Never mind the Rahms or DeChambeau’s, but mediocre players like Graeme McDowell and Kevin Na jumped to LIV when guaranteed prize money they knew they could never make on the main tour. 

If LIV has taught the sports world anything it’s how not to conduct business and unfortunately some other leagues are doing the same thing. There will almost certainly be a lockout in 2027 for the MLB season and you can thank that on owners who paid exorbitant salaries to decent but not outstanding players simply to stop another team from getting that player. And one need only look at the L.A. Dodgers who gave an obscene contract to Kyle Tucker who is barely hitting above the Mendoza Line, and now with Mark Walter in serious financial trouble there is a good chance he will need to sell the team. If that happens and the guaranteed contracts go away look for all the free agents as well as Ohtani to exercise their options to go elsewhere to get away from the mess. That’s what happens when a team or league does things out of greed rather than the good of the game. In the end everybody connected to it suffers.”If LIV does eventually just fold or goes into complete obscurity, players on the PGA Tour can thank the league for forcing the Tour to come up with a concept to match LIV by instituting the eight signature tournaments. This has given

How LIV Golf Changed the PGA Tour

the best players a chance to compete only against each other in a no-cut format with far higher purses and the opportunity for players to indeed play less and keep their world golf rankings. That isn’t unique either. Often leagues grow due to competition from other leagues but in the end the real leagues win out while the feeder leagues built on fantasy rather than true economics like the XFL or USFL go by the wayside. But it also shows the leagues that they cannot operate status quo and not expect pushback so they make new changes that benefits everyone.

What Happens to LIV Golf in 2027?

So while LIV is painting a rosy picture for 2027 the truth is it is in dire straights after PIF pulled it’s funding and is just now trying to figure out if it can survive. As I said, the league was never viable but like everyone who invests in get rich quick schemes, they feel the chance of riches beyond their wildest dreams are worth the risk, although they almost always just end up losing their money. So you can’t blame players for jumping at the opportunity to play less and get more but now expect the best players to return to the PGA Tour or DP Tour with their tails between their legs and the understanding that there is a real life consequence to every decision in life. For golf fans and bettors they’ll just be happy to see all the best players again competing against each other. again.

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