The End of LIV as We Know It: How We Got Here, and What Now?

For nearly a decade, the carcass of the Jeddah Tower blighted the skyline of one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest cities, a monument to the Kingdom’s ambition and fickleness. The Tower was supposed to be the tallest skyscraper in the world but construction abruptly halted in 2018 about a third of the way through, leaving pedestrians to gawk at the building’s exposed ribs. It is an easy metaphor for LIV Golf, a monument to excess that has now been abandoned by the Saudis and is publicly falling apart.

LIV has looked vulnerable since last December when Brooks Koepka, one of its founding fathers, defected to the PGA TOUR. Then Masters champ Patrick Reed bolted, too, even though he did not have a direct path back to the Tour and instead had to earn a promotion by way of a season on the European Tour. LIV was built on starpower; losing two of its most accomplished players felt like the beginning of the end. The hits just kept coming.

On April 14, Ryan French, a.k.a. Monday Q Info, had the biggest golf scoop in decades, reporting on Twitter that the $925 billion Saudi Public Investment Fund was on the verge of divesting from LIV. Two weeks of frenzied speculation and posturing ensued, including LIV’s CEO, Scott O’Neil, pronouncing that its season would continue “exactly as planned, uninterrupted, and at full throttle.” But now the artifice has crumbled.

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On April 28, the state of Louisiana pulled the plug on the inaugural LIV New Orleans, which was to be played in June; the chef’s kiss was Governor Jeff Landry beginning the press release by thanking the PGA TOUR for its recent staging of the Zurich Class in New Orleans. On April 29, news broke that His Excellency Yasir Al-Rumayyan had stepped down from LIV’s board of directors. Al-Rumayyan is the governor of the PIF and a golf tragic. LIV has always owed its existence entirely to the man known internally as The Investor. Al-Rumayyan’s retreat was an act of extreme cowardice; the captain should be the last person to abandon a sinking ship. On April 30th, the PIF made official that it would, in fact, stop funding LIV after 2026, having already lost a tidy $5 billion.

After four years of bluster and bitchiness, disruption and innovation, LIV Golf is done. At least, the days of the LIV golfers living like Louis XIV are finished as the tour desperately searches for alternative funding to try to endure in a smaller, less decadent manner. How did we get here? It is a tale with all the great Shakespearean themes: greed, hubris, betrayal, vengeance. It begins at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, in 2017…

After having outmaneuvered an uncle and a cousin to be named crown prince by his octogenarian father, Mohammed bin Salman quickly consolidated power. In May 2017, the 32-year-old ruler tightened his grip on Saudi society by rounding up hundreds of members of the ruling class and imprisoning them in the Riyadh Ritz, which overnight had been retrofitted with doors that would not open from the inside. Among the detainees in this so-called “Sheikdown” were billionaire tycoons, a dozen princes, and the head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Officially, this was a corruption probe. There were allegations of torture and abuse; one detainee, Major General Ali Al-Qahtani, died during an “interrogation.” By the end of that unprecedented public humiliation, the prisoners had transferred more than $100 billion back to the state. Many of the transactions were overseen by Al-Rumayyan, a relative unknown installed by MBS in 2015 to oversee the PIF. Al-Rumayyan’s outsider status had been an asset, as MBS was looking to weaken the influence of the old guard. Now Al-Rumayyan’s fealty at such a high-stakes moment secured his place in the crown prince’s inner circle.

A year later, a commando group that reports directly to MBS assassinated dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, then a resident of the United States and a columnist for the Washington Post. MBS had turned himself into a darling of the international business community but became radioactive once Khashoggi’s murder was made public. Jeff Bezos canceled his appearance at the second annual Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel backed out of a $400 million investment from the PIF that he had been chasing for years, and Richard Branson pulled out of a $1 billion deal for his space travel company. Referencing Khashoggi’s murder, Branson said that it “would clearly change the ability of any of us to do business with the Saudi government.”

Golf played an unlikely role in the unfolding geopolitical drama. Al-Rumayyan had been wooing the European Tour for years, culminating in the launch of the inaugural Saudi International tournament to be played in January 2019…three months after Khashoggi’s assassination. At a moment when Saudi leaders were desperate for allies, the European Tour did them a monumental favor by not canceling the tournament. “We are a global tour that plays all over the world,” said Keith Pelley, then the Tour’s CEO. “Our board members and players were consistent in expressing the sentiment ‘We don’t mix politics with sport. You can’t be hypocritical and single out one country now.’”

Image: Keith Pelley and Yasir Al-Rumayyan at the 2019 Saudi International at the Royal Greens Golf & Country Club in King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia. (Photo by Andrew Redington/WME IMG/WME IMG via Getty Images )

Determined to make its first tournament a smashing success, Al-Rumayyan’s Golf Saudi earmarked an unprecedented $20 million for appearance fees, with Koepka and Dustin Johnson each receiving in excess of $1.5 million. Reed, the reigning Masters champ, and Bryson DeChambeau also made the trip and spouted the predictable pablum about “growing the game.” Other players were loath to participate in such publicity stunts. Rory McIlroy turned down a reported $2.5 million appearance fee, saying, “One hundred percent, there’s a morality to it.” The battle had been joined for the soul of professional golf.

Buoyed by the success of the Saudi International, Al-Rumayyan went all-in on golf as a way to sportswash the criticism of his government’s human rights record. Golf Saudi pledged $500 million to the upstart Premier Golf League, an English concern that was trying to modernize professional golf. The PGL was proposing a jazzy 54-hole format with 4-man teams, a shotgun start, $20 million purses and a heavily international 14-tournament schedule. The PGL could never achieve lift-off, even after trying to partner with the European Tour and then the PGA TOUR. Burned by both failures, Al-Rumayyan finally accepted that getting a seat at the table would not be possible through partnership or compromise. No, he would have to buy it with the crushing weight of the PIF’s money. (Not for nothing, a McKinsey report commissioned by Golf Saudi to assess the viability of a breakaway league was referred to as “Project Wedge.”)

Image: Greg Norman and Dustin Johnson during the LIV Golf Invitational London Draft on June 07, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Aitor Alcalde/LIV Golf/Getty Images)

LIV Golf was born in 2022, having essentially cut-and-pasted all of the PGL’s ideas. (In April 2026, the PGL sued Golf Saudi and the PIF for damages after years-long settlement talks broke down.) Al-Rumayyan installed Greg Norman as the figurehead, nearly three decades after the Shark had tried to form his own breakaway World Tour to compete against the PGA TOUR; it would have been funded by a fellow Australian iconoclast, Rupert Murdoch. “They could not possibly have selected a more divisive, controversial, or, frankly, disliked figure than Greg Norman,” says Deane Beman, the man who built the modern PGA TOUR as commissioner from 1974-94. “It was a very clear signal that they did not want to work within the existing structures of professional golf. What Norman did with the World Tour amounted to insurrection. The PGA TOUR gave him a platform to become an international star and make more money than he ever dreamed of, and he tried to tear it down. Those of us who love the Tour, who helped build it, the players who supported it and benefited from it all these years, we will never forget, and we will never forgive.”

Leaning into the disruptor role, LIV christened itself “Golf but louder.” The renegade pose appealed to a certain personality. As Tour loyalist Peter Jacobsen said, “It can’t be a coincidence that all the assholes went to LIV.”

But the press conference spars and cheesy music blasted across the venues made LIV seem as cool as a divorced dad wedging himself into skinny jeans. It is testament to the corrosive power of money that Al-Rumayyan was able to so easily purchase the loyalty of 48 players, including various major champions and Ryder Cup stars.

One of the glum realizations in the tour wars was that professional golfers—who, by definition, play the game for money— are not romantics like the rest of us. Surely Phil Mickelson would always play Pebble Beach to honor his beloved grandfather who caddied there, right? No way Reed would jilt his hometown event in Houston!

Turns out that for many big names, the tournaments between the major championships are just filler to keep themselves sharp and build their brands, and they don’t have the emotional attachment to the towns or the venues that we presume. Swapping out a Tour event in Hartford for a LIV event in Portland wasn’t a big deal—if the price was right. “What you have to understand about professional golfers is that they are all whores,” says a longtime agent with clients on both LIV and the PGA TOUR. “That is the starting point.”

Image: From left to right: Pat Perez, Talor Gooch, Team Captain Dustin Johnson and Patrick Reed of 4 Aces GC celebrate with the team championship trophy at the 2022 LIV Golf Invitational in Portland at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club in North Plains, Oregon. (Photo by Chris Trotman/LIV Golf via Getty Images)

For Al-Rumayyan, LIV was an exercise in soft power, a means to buying acceptance in the Western world and access to power. He found a kindred spirit in Donald Trump, a similarly transactional personality, whose eponymous courses hosted two of the eight tournaments in the inaugural 2022 season. “Hey, we have to play where people want us,” Sergio García said.

In the days before he hosted his first LIV event, at his Bedminster course, Trump inevitably stirred the pot. In a post on Truth Social he wrote, “All of those golfers that remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year. If you don’t take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.”

That a former president was hosting a Saudi-backed venture in the shadow of Ground Zero touched off a series of protests on the roads leading into Trump Bedminster. (Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and questions about the extent of any Saudi government links have been debated for years.) Trump was unmoved, saying, “Nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11”— an obfuscation that was outrageous even by his standards, given that the 9/11 Commission Report runs to 585 pages. He batted away questions about the demonstrators. The Saudi question has always been a shadow over LIV, sometimes expressed in thinly-veiled Islamaphobia.

During the second round at Bedminster, without giving anyone at LIV a heads- up, the former president hosted in his private box by the sixteenth tee two of that era’s most polarizing figures in American public life: Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, who earlier in the week had done long on-air interviews with DeChambeau and Norman, brokered by LIV consultant Ari Fleischer, a contributor to Fox News. From the aerie by the sixteenth tee, Greene led the crowd in pro-Trump (“Four more years!”) and anti-Biden (“Let’s go, Brandon”) chants while Carlson looked on approvingly.

Image: Captain Cameron Smith of Ripper GC hits his shot from the 16th tee at the 2023 LIV Golf Invitational at Bedminster at Trump National Golf Club on in Bedminster, New Jersey. (Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

The LIV Golf–Trump nexus was easily explained: both built their brands as oppressed underdogs fueled by grievance, paradoxically railing against the elites. For LIV— populated by golf royalty, funded by actual royals, fronted by a man who had spent 331 weeks as the world number one—that meant battling the staunch traditionalists at the PGA TOUR and the old boys running the OWGR. Trump—born into great wealth, educated at expensive private schools, builder of hotels and high rises and private golf clubs that are strictly for the 1 percent—convinced working-class folks that he was taking on the establishment that birthed him. The LIV Golf–Trump connection further complicated the public image of the upstart tour.

Then there was the lawfare. Three days after LIV Bedminster ended, eleven LIV players sued the Tour for antitrust violations in federal court. Their complaint centered on their year-long suspension by the Tour for playing in LIV tournaments without having been approved for a conflicting-event release. The plaintiffs were Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Ian Poulter, Abraham Ancer, Carlos Ortiz, Pat Perez, Jason Kokrak, Peter Uihlein, Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford, and Matt Jones.

LIV’s complaint would come to be identified by the name of the tour’s chief muckraker: Phil Mickelson et al. v. PGA TOUR, Inc. The Tour countersued, claiming that LIV had committed “tortious interference with contract” while seeking damages for lost profits and reputational and brand harm. The gentleman’s game had entered an era of unprecedented rancor.

Image: Scott O'Neil CEO of LIV Golf talks to Phil Mickelson of Hyflyers GC at 2025 LIV Golf Hong Kong at The Hong Kong Golf Club. (Photo by Zhizhao Wu/Getty Images)

Attorney fees for the Tour began to exceed $5 million a month, an unsustainable burden. A titan of the financial world, Jimmy Dunne, was brought in to forge a truce. He delivered on June 6, 2023, when Al-Rumayyan and PGA TOUR commissioner Jay Monahan shocked the world by appearing elbow-to-elbow on MSNBC to announce that the war was over.

The so-called “framework agreement” was billed as a merger between LIV and the Tour but was really just a way to end the lawsuits and provide an opportunity to discuss the PIF investing in the Tour. For six months the talks went nowhere, largely because the PGA TOUR board had been hijacked by Patrick Cantlay, who was bitter from having turned down a $75 million offer from LIV and wanted to punish the players who cashed in, and Tiger Woods, who brought an Old Testament sensibility by insisting those who went to LIV were traitors who should never be welcomed back. A frustrated Al-Rumayyan decided to send a shot across the bow, signing Jon Rahm to a $300 million deal in December 2023. Conventional wisdom was that if another big name bolted, the Tour would have to come with hat in hand to beg the Saudis to consummate a deal on whatever terms they saw fit. As one Tour executive told me in the days after Rahm’s signing, “It’s not full-blown panic around here, but close.”

Image: Jon Rahm of Legion XIII speaks to the media during a press conference ahead of LIV Golf Hong Kong at Hong Kong Golf Club on March 03, 2026 in Hong Kong, China. (Photo by Kate McShane/Getty Images)

Noting correctly that LIV’s economics made no sense, PGA TOUR commissioner Jay Monahan had labelled his adversaries an “irrational threat.” But Monahan belatedly began to fight dollars with dollars. In 2023 the Tour rolled out its first slate of $20 million “designated events” (later rebranded as Signatures) and slush funds like the $100 million Player Impact Program, which was a made-up way to funnel gobs of money to the top players who remained loyal.

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Suddenly, Tour players were making LIV money, and no other top players followed Rahm unto the breach. And unlike LIV, the Tour was still producing homegrown stars—notably Scottie Scheffler, who won his second Masters in April 2024. By gathering the top players at the best Tour stops, the Signature events became smash hits.

In January 2024, a month after Rahm’s defection, the Tour answered by announcing a partnership with the Strategic Sports Group, a private equity firm that pledged up to $1.5 billion to give Ponte Vedra a new warchest. Players were granted equity stakes in their own league, a first for professional sports. The Tour weathered the storm.

When Trump was elected President in November ‘24 he seemed more concerned with bringing peace to the golf world than Gaza. Upon taking office he immediately summoned both sides to return to the bargaining table. Al-Rumayyan had long been celebrated as a master dealmaker but he badly overplayed his hand. The Tour offered a $500 million valuation of LIV, despite the fact it continued to hemorrhage a billion dollars a year. Al-Rumayyan is said to have been offended by what he considered the lowball opinion of his pet project.

This was the last chance to reunite the golf world; the PIF could have owned a piece of the Tour and The Investor could have been welcomed into golf’s inner sanctums, as he had always craved. But the deal never got done and the moment passed. Shortly thereafter, Rory McIlroy won the Masters to complete the career Grand Slam and cement his status as the game’s biggest star. LIV slid further into irrelevance.

Image: Brooks Koepka at the 2026 Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines Golf Course in La Jolla, California. (Getty Images)

In between Koepka’s rebellion and McIlroy winning a second straight Masters, war broke out in the Middle East. On March 2 of this year, drones targeted the Ras Tanura oil refinery in Saudi Arabia, leading to a fire and temporary shutdown that underscored the vulnerability of an economy built almost entirely on oil.

The next day, the PIF trumpeted a new 5-year strategic plan. A key tenet was to focus on domestic projects and reduce international spending by 10%. With a war raging and the Saudi economy getting squeezed, sports suddenly seemed frivolous and expendable. The PIF pulled its funding on Tom Brady’s flag football league, cancelled the Saudi Arabian Snooker Masters only two years into what was supposed to be a 10-year commitment, and sold its stake in the soccer team Al-Hilal. LIV was supposed to set the golf world on fire but its denouement could hardly be more prosaic: just another line-item eliminated by unseen bean-counters.

So what now? Golf Twitter is already gleefully dancing on LIV’s grave; supporters of the tour have always skewed noisy and belligerent, and now it’s time for payback. But in interviews with two LIV executives following the PIF divestment, they strained to be optimistic.

“The ironic thing,” said one, “is that the business is the strongest it’s ever been. We had over a hundred thousand fans on-site this year in Australia and South Africa. In Korea we sold out of premium hospitality. We now have blue-chip sponsors like Rolex and HSBC and we just announced a new TV deal across South Asia. Revenue is going to be up $100 million over last year. We have a handful of teams that are going to be profitable and others are very, very close. In 16 months, Scott [O’Neil] has built a real business that is nothing like what your friend Greg patched together.”

It’s a good sales pitch, but is there any way forward for LIV without the Saudis underwriting the show? “As a sector of the economy, sports is booming,” said the second exec.

“Institutional money is pouring into every level of professional sports. For us, everything is now on the table. A smaller schedule with only international events. A smaller footprint. If purses come down, if the schedule contracts, if the team franchises sell, it is a self-sustaining business. And it can probably be had for pennies on the dollar. It’s $5 billion to buy an NFL franchise. What if you could own a global golf tour with massive name recognition operating in world capitals for only a couple hundred million dollars? Someone will find that enticing.”

Executive number one noted LIV’s increased respectability: “We’re getting World Ranking points now. Fred Ridley just shouted us out at the Masters during the green jacket ceremony. That the money was coming from Saudi Arabia always made people squeamish. Take away that barrier and it gets much easier for us to maneuver in the marketplace.”

But what about the huge guaranteed contracts the PIF agreed to? Rahm alone is paid out $60 million a year before he gobbles up any prize money. Even with the PIF walking away, isn’t he (and sundry others) still owed the dough they were promised, which makes the math much more daunting? “That’s what lawyers are for,” said the second LIV exec.

It is going to be messy, of course. That’s the LIV way. But maybe there is the tiniest reason for optimism: in 2025, after blowing in the wind for 7 years, construction resumed on the Jeddah Tower. It has now surpassed 100 stories and keeps rising toward the heavens. Then again, as the steel bakes in the sun, it is a reminder that all that glitters is not gold.

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