The LIV golf is a global force in the sport. The name "LIV" refers to the Roman numeral 54, the number of holes that used to be played at LIV events (now 72 since the 2026 season).
The first LIV Golf Invitational Series event started on 9 June 2022, at the Centurion Club near St Albans in Hertfordshire, UK. The Invitational Series became the LIV Golf League in 2023.
LIV Golf is financed by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Some journalists and commentators have said the tour is part of efforts by the Saudi monarchy, which has been criticised for its corruption and human rights abuses, to improve its public image through sport
LIV Golf Adelaide was awarded the best golf event in the world from 2023 to 2025 at the World Golf Awards.
The early framework for a new golf tour to rival the PGA Tour became public in 2019 with announcement of a league to be known as the Premier Golf League. PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, responded by implying that golfers who choose to play in a new league would be barred from PGA Tour events.
Later in 2020, the PGA European Tour and the PGA Tour formed a "strategic alliance" to work together on commercial opportunities, scheduling, and prize funds for each tour's membership.
The Premier Golf League held talks with Saudi investors about a financial partnership but Golf Saudi (a division of the Public Investment Fund) instead funded a new entity in 2020 which had its own plan to establish a global professional league; often referred to as the "Super Golf League." This entity formally launched in October 2021 as LIV Golf Investments,[9] with former professional golfer Greg Norman named as CEO.
It has now reached a crisis point as funding for it has been cut.
LIV Golf—the circuit that has spent five years and $5 billion trying to crack a sport that never fully cracked back—is reportedly about to lose its funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF); signaling LIV could be done by the end of the season. There’s even the idea the league may not reach the end of the season.
If there's been one throughline in this whole saga, it's that nobody—players, executives, journalists—ever had a complete picture of what was actually going on. We'll do our best to explain what LIV's collapse means, where its players land next, and what the sport looks like on the other side.
Multiple outlets—the New York Times; the Athletic; the Wall Street Journal; the Financial Times, to name a few—have reported that PIF will no longer fund LIV. The Telegraph reported that LIV executives were called to an emergency meeting in New York City, while the Athletic noted LIV executives are seeking "life rafts" out.
Golf Channel has reported players and vendors haven’t been paid for recent services. The league has some investors, although the biggest ones tend to be offshoots of PIF like Aramco and Riyadh Air.
LIV officials have stated they continue to believe they have a bright future and that, for now, its business as usual for the league. However, without immediate and significant backing, LIV will not be able to continue after this year.
The regional war involving Iran has created serious financial pressure on Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth vehicle that bankrolled LIV from the start. The PIF's resources are vast but not bottomless and a destabilised Middle East has a way of concentrating minds about where money goes.
At the same time, the PIF unveiled a new strategic direction this week that amounts to a fundamental rethinking of its mission. For the better part of a decade, Saudi Arabia used the fund as an image-laundering operation; pouring money into global sports, entertainment and technology as a means of projecting a modernised, westernised face to the world.
That approach is being shelved. The new priority is domestic investment and any international ventures that survive the cut are expected to generate returns. LIV Golf, which has done nothing but lose money in a foreign market that largely rejected it, was never going to survive that audit.
LIV CEO, Scott O’Neil, has acted like all the reporting is wrong, except what he has said—and hasn’t said—has essentially confirmed the reporting is correct.
O’Neil, who has repeatedly asserted LIV had funding into the 2030s, changed his tune this week. First in an e-mail to staffers, citing the league is funded only through 2026 and again in a TV interview posted on Friday where, when asked about future funding, replied: "That’s not how the world works."
He continued that funding is secured through this season and then he has to "work like crazy to keep it going." The interview was promptly deleted from social media.
Also in his e-mail, O’Neil nodded to the speculation, but instead of dismissing it, he said startups are defined by "moments of pressure."
There doesn't appear to be much life left in LIV, which, even in the early days of its unlimited cash and immeasurable bluster, seemed inevitable.
Scott O'Neil e-mailed his staff on Wednesday that the 2026 season will continue "as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle." That includes this weekend's event in Mexico.
He didn't address all the media reports that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund is going to pull funding after dropping about $5 billion in five years on the oil-pipeline-funded pipe dream that it could create the world's preeminent professional golf tour.
Whoever first sold the PIF on this idea, sold it a bill of goods. A lot of people got rich off it, golfers mainly, both in huge LIV salaries and eventual PGA Tour reforms. The gravy train was likely always going to end though.
Soon enough, sure enough, the losses were going to be too great, the American television ratings too small and the United States-based PGA Tour simply too deep-rooted to be toppled.
The initial argument was that the Saudis had a bottomless well of money to waste. Maybe. What they never had, and no one has, is an endless willingness to be embarrassed for playing the fool.
Burning piles of cash is all fun and games until someone realises that they paid Talor Gooch nearly $70 million.
Back in 2023, LIV was so convinced of its eventual dominance that firebrand CEO, Greg Norman, proffered that LIV golfers would hold a group celebration behind the 18th green of Augusta National if one of them won the Masters.
Golf traditionalists recoiled at the tackiness. Everyone was spared when Jon Rahm, then of the PGA Tour, won instead. LIV countered by signing him, eight months later, to a deal worth a reported $300 million-plus.
Just last week though, LIV was little more than a whimper at Augusta.
Critics had long argued LIV's lack of intense competition and high-end courses would soften its stars.
LIV made a lot of noise and caused a lot of nervous days at the PGA Tour. It was jarring when a parade of the sport's most marketable names were leaving. At one point, some sort of merger felt inevitable.
LIV was, at times, a positive force. It stages events in Asia and Africa where the sport rarely ventures. Its tournaments are fan-friendly. More golf is never a bad thing.
It forced considerable reform on how the PGA Tour deals with its players. Its light schedule even helped DeChambeau to embrace YouTube and better convey his personality.
For most golf fans, though, these were abstract concepts. All they really want is to tune in on Sunday afternoon and see the best play the best on the best courses. Tradition matters in golf. And it's hard to buy.
LIV wasn't merely trying to compete with the PGA Tour and deliver a better product, it was trying to change the core tastes of golf fans to deliver a slightly, but noticeably, different product. That's even harder to buy.
At some point, most of golf will share a laugh over this, perhaps in some entertaining "30 for 30" that reminds future audiences that this fever dream actually occurred.
The 54-hole tournaments. The resort courses. The shorts. The shotgun starts. The way Augusta National so disliked Norman that it wouldn't extend an invitation to the Masters; causing him to buy a badge on the secondary market like any old schlub carrying a folding chair up Washington Road.
There could be three key reasons why the league appears to be heading toward closure. Firstly, LIV Golf reportedly suffered losses of more than $1 billion before the start of the 2025 season. Backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the league was expected to spend $6 billion by 2027.
However, recent reports suggest the tour may not even last that long. Despite hefty spending on salaries and contracts, LIV Golf has struggled to draw viewership; which brings us to the second reason. The league averaged 175 000 viewers on Fox networks last year, compared to the PGA Tour’s 3.1 million average audience.
Both tours often clashed for viewership during scheduled events, giving the PGA Tour a clear advantage over its rival. The decline in demand for the league has also seen some major names, such as Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed, return to the PGA Tour.
The third and final reason is its Official World Golf Ranking standing. Initially, the tour followed a 54-hole, no-cut format.
After shifting to a 72-hole format, LIV Golf eventually met the OWGR ranking criteria. However, points were only awarded to the top 10 finishers, making qualification for major championships challenging for most players in the field. The OWGR’s limited recognition of the tour has hurt its relevance in the global golf landscape and made it difficult for LIV Golf to compete with the PGA Tour.
PIF announced a new five-year strategy on Wednesday that will reduce international investments from 30% to 18-20% of the portfolio and place greater emphasis on Saudi domestic initiatives to promote sports. LIV Golf does not fit into that category and was not mentioned.
"PIF will continue to support Saudi Vision 2030 objectives by delivering competitive domestic ecosystems," Al-Rumayyan said in the announcement. “The 2026-2030 strategy is a natural next step in PIF’s growth journey.”
PIF approved more than $250 million in additional funding for LIV Golf this year, hiking the total investment to more than $5.3 billion since the league was launched four years ago. Documented losses are more than $1 billion from 2022 to 2024, according to Forbes.
LIV Golf executives were rushed from various corners of the planet to a meeting this week in New York where the future of the operation was discussed in private and decisions were made.
A few flew in from Mexico City, where this week’s tournament began on Thursday at the Club de Golf Chapultepec. It is one of the highest-altitude golf courses in North America, and LIV golfers took deep breaths before answering press questions about reports that the organization was on the verge of collapse.
"For me, it didn’t make sense to think about it or waste time thinking about,” superstar golfer Jon Rahm said after shooting a first-round 65. “Since everything happened so suddenly and so quickly, I wasn’t very worried about it because normally, before the rumors start, we already know something — there’s always someone within the league who knows something."
Money can't solve everything. At one point, it will dry up and the people involved will get lost when that happens. They won't know what to do. Traditional golf fans will be having a big laugh at those who liked the LIV Golf.
It looks like it's the beginning of the end for the organisation.