LIV Golf Is Dying of Boredom
You shouldn’t count other people’s money, but I can’t help thinking that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia could’ve found better uses for five billion dollars than sinking it into the upstart golf league LIV. Several news outlets have reported that the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which has been pumping about a hundred million dollars a month into LIV since the league’s launch, in 2022, will be pulling its funding at the end of the year. The league isn’t officially dead, but it doesn’t seem long for this world. What happens, then, to LIV’s players, who received absurdly lucrative contracts to defect from the P.G.A. Tour, and may be banned from returning? Was this all just a waste of time? What do I do now with all of my team merch for Cleeks Golf Club and the HyFlyers?
In the end, LIV was less evil, as a geopolitical project, than many people claimed, and more soulless, as a sport, than I thought possible. Since LIV’s inception, the press has widely labelled it an exercise in “sportswashing”—image rehabilitation for Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, after the murder and dismemberment of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In LIV’s first season, I spoke with Saudi and U.S. officials, some of whom did business with M.B.S., who said that the sportswashing idea made no sense. Starting an expensive professional golf league was a roundabout way to launder the reputation of a violent autocrat.
LIV was one element of Vision 2030, M.B.S.’s effort to transform and diversify Saudi Arabia into a post-oil economy. The Saudis wanted to attract Western business, and to have Riyadh supplant Abu Dhabi and Dubai as the Middle East’s economic capital. The project was outrageously ambitious; it called for, among other things, building a city from scratch, called Neom, whose plans, at one point, included an artificial moon. Golf was part of the plan’s goal to make Saudi Arabia a sports-and-entertainment destination; the leaders of the PIF, the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund, also thought that golf would attract business executives, and the league ended up being a useful tool with which to curry favor with President Donald Trump, who would go on to host LIV tournaments at his golf clubs. It didn’t hurt that Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the PIF’s governor, was an avid golfer. If LIV was a vanity project, it would have been Rumayyan’s. M.B.S. is a video-game guy. Although he has loomed large in the golf world’s imagination, there have been no indications that, to any disproportionate degree, the business mattered to him.
Vision 2030, as a whole, has let some air into the repressive Saudi state. It has been a liberalizing force, moderating religious rule, neutering the religious police, and expanding the rights of women. The country, for the first time in decades, has cinemas. There are concerts, comedy shows, malls, sports. For the golfers, this didn’t make the moral choice of joining LIV any less fraught. Some gestured, comically, at their excitement at helping to reform Saudi society. (“We’ve all made mistakes,” Greg Norman, LIV’s first C.E.O., said, of Khashoggi’s murder.) Many golfers, frustrated by the P.G.A. Tour’s status as a near-monopoly, in which players had little negotiating power, simply used LIV as leverage to get paid. Phil Mickelson told the golf writer Alan Shipnuck, “We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights.” He went on, “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 P.G.A. Tour operates.” One golf agent told Shipnuck, “What you have to understand about professional golfers is that they are all whores.”
More than fifty golfers were willing to debase themselves in order to grab some of the Saudis’ cash. Mickelson, who ultimately joined, and was paid some two hundred million dollars, played a round with Rumayyan, and could be heard gushing, “Great shot, Your Excellency!” Jon Rahm was reportedly paid at least three hundred million. The money bitterly divided the golf world. Loyalists to the P.G.A. Tour, the dominant existing league, viewed the defectors as sellouts who gave up on real competition. The LIV defectors saw the loyalists as hypocrites who were jealous of their deals. Both were probably right.
It wasn’t that the money ruined the sanctity of the sport. If money did that, we’d have no sports at all; Juan Soto makes nearly eight hundred million dollars to play for the Mets. Rory McIlroy, perhaps the P.G.A. Tour golfer most vocally opposed to LIV, told me he wasn’t offended by the greed: “I’m gonna make a shit ton of money here, that’s the thing!” LIV’s problem was that it was a sport run by people who seemingly misunderstood something fundamental about sports: you can’t manufacture attachment. LIV’s most innovative idea was to have golfers play on teams, rather than only as individuals. Teams were assembled via a draft, which, it turned out, was a sham—some players had agreed, beforehand, on who’d play where. The team names (Crushers! Fireballs!) and branding (“Just like a majestic performance on the golf course, the Majesticks Golf Club team identity aims to sparkle and excite!”) had the charm of a consultant’s pitch deck. Rooting for them felt like rooting for a brand of toothpaste. Sports franchises everywhere can be tacky, rapacious, incompetent, extortionate, and otherwise exploitative, but only because their customers, the fans, are essentially captives. Your team is like your family; the new owner may be an oligarch or a war criminal, but what are you going to do, leave? LIV was as if the biggest boor you know tried to pay you to become your uncle. It didn’t work. I attended a LIV tournament at Trump Bedminster, in New Jersey, where people were doing almost everything other than watching the golf: drinking to excess, gawking at Tucker Carlson hanging out with Donald Trump. I saw one guy, next to a green, watching porn on his phone.
LIV lost a staggering amount of money. In 2024, LIV’s U.K. entity alone reported revenues of sixty-five million, and expenses of around five hundred and twenty-five million. Many assume its American branch is a similar money pit. This surprised no one, except, apparently, the Saudis. LIV incinerated so much money that one can understand why it was taken to be a sportswashing exercise. It was, however, a business proposition, albeit one with metrics in addition to just profit and loss—proximity to Trump, wooing foreign executives, the knock-on effects of building up a domestic sports-and-entertainment sector. Still, it was supposed to make money. Eventually, the Saudis found better means of achieving their strategic goals. A two-billion-dollar investment in Jared Kushner’s private-equity firm helped court Trump. Executives, it turned out, would come to Riyadh to beg for money whether they could do so on a golf course or not. (Also, the five billion and counting spent on LIV could’ve been used to build actual golf courses; the country still has only around a dozen.) M.B.S. has recently been more interested in investing in movie studios. The PIF contributed twelve billion dollars to Paramount’s takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. (Films and CNN, incidentally, are more effective means of shaping perceptions.)
LIV’s imminent demise comes now for two reasons: the war in Iran stressed the Saudi economy, and the PIF has refocussed after years of underperformance. The Wall Street Journal reported that the PIF, which was more than nine hundred billion dollars in assets, is “strapped for cash.” It’s pulling back on Neom, the city from scratch, which means they’ll probably be stuck with just the regular old moon. It has stopped work on a hundred-mile-long “horizontal skyscraper” called the Line; all that’s left is a seventy-five-mile-long trench in the desert. One expert estimates that the fund had a return near zero in 2024; the S. & P. was up twenty-five per cent that year. Between 2017 and 2025, the PIF’s annual return has been seven per cent. The S. & P. averaged double that. A hedge-fund manager, presiding over such failure, would be out of a job.
When the reports surfaced that the Saudis were cutting off LIV’s funding, the league was playing a tournament in Mexico City. The TV broadcast cut out—technical issues, LIV said—but it was ominous. Players, who are paid in quarterly installments, didn’t get their paychecks when they expected to. According to the golf writer Eamon Lynch, they debated whether they should refuse to play. The PIF ultimately agreed to keep the league funded for the rest of the season, and the checks went out, but the league appears to be on a death march. Earlier this week, the hosts of one golf podcast began recounting the results of the Mexico City tournament, when they recognized the futility of the exercise: “This just feels like talking about who’s winning the dominos game on the Titanic.” Scott O’Neil, LIV’s C.E.O., is trying to find more investors. Maybe he will, but the odds aren’t great. In February, O’Neil told the Financial Times that LIV was five to ten years away from turning a profit. A few months ago, the league was working with Citibank to try to sell stakes in the individual teams. Earlier this year, the league said it had hoped the franchises would eventually be worth a billion dollars each. Now the league says it hopes to sell the teams for three hundred million dollars each. With seemingly little revenue, it is unclear where such a valuation comes from. As McIlroy explained to me, a few years ago, the value of the franchises are “all tied to the economics of the league, and right now that league doesn’t have any economics.”
What did LIV accomplish? M.B.S. is now a normalized leader and source of funds, but that was hardly LIV’s doing. A lot of golfers got paid. But over four years, I never got a convincing sense that the competition mattered to anyone. The stakes felt empty. For all of the P.G.A. Tour’s problems, at least you knew the players were desperately trying to win. For a sport to work, you need the players to care. Absent that, once you got past LIV’s business drama, and the sniping and backbiting, what you were left with was watching sensationally wealthy, morally compromised middle-aged men go to work. The market for such a product is saturated. If you find yourself missing it, next season, might I suggest tuning into a Cabinet meeting? ♦