Name: Why Saudi Arabia’s $5 Billion LIV Golf Experiment Failed
Uploaded: 2026-05-02T15:00:00Z
Duration: 5 min 26 s
Description: Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is pulling its funding from LIV Golf at the end of the 2026 season. With the league’s survival in question, star players face massive challenges to return to the PGA.

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Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is pulling its funding from LIV Golf at the end of the 2026 season. With the league’s survival in question, star players face massive challenges to return to the PGA. Photo: Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images

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Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is pulling its funding from LIV Golf at the end of the 2026 season. With the league’s survival in question, star players face massive challenges to return to the PGA.

Why Saudi Arabia’s $5 Billion LIV Golf Experiment Failed

Oh, my goodness me!

For years, Liv tried to dominate professional golf by poaching top talent.

Like, I hate Liv. Like, I hope it goes away.

I think Liv is gonna do a lot of good for the game.

It's a slap in the face to the rest of the members of this tour.

This was one of the biggest sports league battles we'd ever seen. Liv Golf launched in 2022, and it pretty much immediately divided men's professional golf into two. With enormous sums of money, it attracted some of the biggest name golfers on the planet.

It's backers. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund spent more than $5 billion building the league. Now, Saudi Arabia is pulling its funding at the end of this season, leaving the league on life support, and its star players in limbo.

It's not officially the end of Liv, but it's not difficult to see how this is the beginning of the end.

So, what went wrong?

Bibles.

From the start, the Saudi-funded golf league was incendiary.

Yes.

Yeah, he does.

When Liv launched, it was accused of sports washing and people basically saying Saudi Arabia is a country that has been charged with human rights abuses, and it was using the popularity of the game of golf to kind of whitewash its reputation. And they always denied that.

When you partner with a country that stands in stark opposition to American ideals and often ranks amongst one of the worst human rights abusers in the world, you aren't just playing golf, you're taking a political stance.

Liv Golf? To me and to so many more of us, to so many of us, it's more like death golf.

Another source of controversy. Liv was changing the traditional golf tournament format.

Golf tournaments are famous for polite clapping. An almost cannabis stoic atmosphere beyond the roars of a giant putt. You'd go to a Liv tournament and there would be electronic music buzzing throughout the place. They was trying to make golf young and fun.

Unlike PGA tournaments, which typically have 72 holes over four days, Liv tournaments were initially 54 holes over three days with all golfers teeing off simultaneously from different holes. It also introduced a team element to the competition. The PGA Tour viewed Liv as a direct attack, so it didn't allow its members to compete in Liv tournaments. Liv responded by offering stars like Brooks Koepka and Jon Rahm massive guaranteed contracts to leave the PGA, and that sparked major resentment from other athletes.

The PGA Tour basically tried to cast Liv as a foreign monarchy that was trying to buy the game of golf. It had been clear for a while that Liv Golf was a money loser. But last year we actually got a pretty good look into just how much money it was losing.

In 2024 alone, Liv Golf burned through hundreds millions of dollars. It spent lavishly on A-list players, but ticket sales flagged and blue chip brands were slow to sign on as sponsors. The biggest issue? Liv never got a massive broadcast deal like other sports, where media rights often reached the billions. That left the league almost entirely dependent on Saudi funding. But in April, they got cut off. The fund released a strategic vision for 2026 through 2030, focused on domestic priorities and projects bringing in significant revenue. Liv didn't make the cut. Without Saudi backing, Liv faces a daunting task of securing outside investors to subsidize its massive overhead and eight-figure player contracts. For pro golfers who left the PGA to compete with Liv, this is a disaster.

They might be left trying to crawl their way back onto the PGA Tour, which they spurned, some of them sued. These are players who went and joined a rival that was pretty actively attacking the PGA Tour.

They made their bet. They shouldn't be coming back over here to play DP World Tour or the PGA Tour.

Some may be allowed to return, but the PGA has all the leverage now. The Tour's Chief Executive told the Wall Street Journal that athletes who break its rules have to be held accountable. Recently, Brooks Koepka became the first superstar to rejoin the PGA Tour through a one-time program. It reportedly cost him up to $90 million in charitable donations, forfeited bonuses, and lost equity. For many of these athletes, it could come down to a case by case review and there's no guarantee they'll be reinstated. Though many hope at least the top players will be brought back.

The great golfers should be playing against each other. I do believe, you know?

Liv Golf may have been one of the most expensive experiments in sports history, but its collapse will leave a permanent mark on the game. The PGA Tour has emerged from the chaos with a higher pay scale for its athletes and more innovative leadership.

A kind of sleepy industry was really woken up. And so, the changes will be falling out for years to come because I think one of the things that the PGA Tour realized throughout all of this is that it was a little bit ripe for disruption. Professional golf hadn't really changed its business model and modernized in a lot of ways that other sports leagues do. And this was the moment that really forced that for the PGA Tour.

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