Invested a large amount of money, but the audience did not come.
Author Zhang Xue
Word count 3319
Hand Crafted Ratio丨80% AI Content Ratio丨20%
35 billion yuan, can it buy a sport?
The Saudi tycoon tried for four years. The answer is that it can buy star players, rewrite the payroll, and force centennial giants to reform overnight, but it may not be able to buy an audience.
Recently, LIV Golf and its associated companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New Jersey, USA. Court documents show that LIV Golf’s assets are valued between $100 million and $500 million, with liabilities ranging from $500 million to $1 billion.
However, over the past four years, it has been lacking nothing but money. Data shows that the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) has invested approximately $5 billion in LIV Golf through associated entities, equivalent to about 35 billion yuan.
The equity structure diagram in the bankruptcy materials records a capital scale of $5.269 billion. PIF is not only a financial investor, but also the sole financial backer and ultimate controller in practical terms, but now, the backer is unwilling to continue funding.
On April 30, PIF announced that it would only provide funding to cover the remaining events of this season for LIV Golf, and would stop injecting equity capital afterwards. The official explanation given is that the significant investments required by LIV Golf over the long term no longer align with PIF's current investment strategy.
A global professional league built from scratch by a sovereign wealth fund, declaring war on the PGA Tour with $5 billion, has only taken four years to go from rewriting golf to bankruptcy court. In fact, as of June, LIV Golf had almost no interest-bearing debt. The frightening part is that when the blood transfusion stopped, it immediately lost its viability.
Want to be the rule-breaking barbarian
The story of LIV Golf is very simple; it was originally intended to carry the narrative function of the Saudi national image.
In 2016, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman proposed the "Vision 2030" plan and established detailed goals to break free from dependence on oil and reshape the national image. Among them, sports, entertainment, and large infrastructure projects served a narrative function in the initial years, requiring the world to see them.
Thus, LIV Golf was born in 2021, with its first season kicking off in 2022. Its name comes from the Roman numeral 54, with each match initially consisting of 54 holes, no cut line, with all players teeing off simultaneously from different holes.
This design runs counter to traditional golf every step of the way, featuring 54 holes instead of 72 holes, no cut line instead of an advancing system, and 12 fixed teams competing in team events instead of individual play.
While a traditional golf event may last over ten hours, LIV Golf attempts to compress core broadcasts down to four or five hours, cramming in music festivals, concerts, drinks, and parties. Its original slogan is straightforward and blunt: "Golf, but Louder."
What truly shook the industry with LIV Golf was not the competition format, but its actual product—money.
Traditional PGA Tour players are akin to sole proprietors, bearing their own costs for flights, hotels, coaches, and teams, and receive bonuses only if they make the cut. LIV Golf offers huge signing bonuses, guaranteed annual income, event prize money, and even team equity.
Individual event prize money of $25 million is several times higher than that of most PGA events. Signing bonuses directly reach nine figures; reports indicate that Phil Mickelson's contract is worth about $200 million, Bryson DeChambeau's exceeds $125 million, Dustin Johnson's around $125 million, and Brooks Koepka's about $100 million. Just by recruiting top players like Mickelson, DeChambeau, Koepka, Cameron Smith, and Jon Rahm, LIV Golf is estimated to have spent about $1 billion.
This approach had an immediate effect. A group of major champions left the PGA Tour, splitting men's professional golf in half. The PGA Tour suspended the playing qualifications of defector players, while LIV Golf countersued for alleged monopoly. The war on the course soon escalated into a conflict among courts, Congress, and television stations.
From a strategic perspective, LIV Golf has not gained nothing. It forced the PGA Tour to significantly increase prize money, propelled player equity programs, and made professional golfers realize for the first time that they are not just event participants but also the most core means of production of the sports league.
In 2024, the PGA Tour secured up to $3 billion in investment from the Strategic Sports Group led by Fenway Sports Group, with the first phase of $1.5 billion already arriving, providing nearly 200 players the opportunity to become shareholders of PGA Tour Enterprises.
The Saudis used $5 billion to prove one thing: professional golf can change; the problem is that no one was willing to pay for that change. The issue lies in that changing an industry does not equate to owning a good company.
This design contains a detail easily overlooked by outsiders: since day one, LIV has not intended to sustain itself through broadcasting fees, ticket sales, and sponsorships. Its business model is "sovereign capital direct supply," where the entire significance of commercial income is just to make the financial statements appear like a legitimate business.
In other words, it is not a business; it is a narrative asset wrapped in seasonal financial statements.
Bought the stars, but didn't buy the audience
The most alluring aspect of professional sports is the perception that it has a threefold leverage: scarce stars, media rights, and team appreciation.
According to LIV Golf's vision, as long as they buy star players first, the audience will follow; when the audience comes, television stations and sponsors will pay; after revenue increases, teams will appreciate according to the logic of the NBA, NFL, or F1 teams. This is the entire premise for its business model.
However, after four years, the chain broke at the first link.
In 2025, during the seven Sundays that directly overlapped with the PGA Tour, the PGA Tour averaged about 3.1 million viewers on CBS and NBC, while LIV Golf averaged only 175,000 viewers on FOX, FS1, and FS2, a nearly 18-fold difference. Even when only comparing broadcast networks, the audience gap between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour still exceeds six times.
The star players switched platforms, but the audience did not proportionately migrate with them.
The reason is that the content value in golf is determined not only by the stars but also by decades of tournament history, the points system, major championship qualifications, course memories, and stable broadcasting habits. LIV Golf can buy a major champion but it cannot buy the majors themselves.
For a long time, LIV events have been unable to gain official world golf ranking points. The closed player list, lack of open advancement pathways, and initial 54-hole format with no cut line make it hard to be included in the existing competitive evaluation system.
As a result, even if top players receive more money, their world rankings continue to decline, and ordinary viewers find it hard to understand what exactly an LIV event determines besides the particularly high prize money.
Similarly, in the most expensive golf tours, it is not the stars that are valuable, but the suspense. LIV Golf offers assured appearance fees, a guaranteed lineup, and significant prize money, but fails to provide strong competitive consequences. It weakens athletes' unpredictability and diminishes the audience's tension.
By 2025, only then did LIV Golf’s commercialization begin to show signs of improvement. Court documents indicate that its sponsorship revenue grew from about $16 million in 2023 to $102 million in 2025, accounting for about 49% of that year's revenue; hosting fees paid by cities and courses accounted for 22%, ticketing and hosting accounted for 16%, while merchandise sales accounted for 5%. The truly key media rights contributed only about 5%.
Backtracking from the aforementioned structure, LIV Golf's total revenue in 2025 is approximately $208 million. By the end of 2025, it had accumulated a net operating loss of about $5 billion. The $5 billion capital investment did not yield a copyright business matching the expenditures.
Another core story of LIV Golf is the teams. The league established 13 teams, including Crushers GC, 4Aces GC, and HyFlyers GC, where star players are not only captains but can also hold a minority equity stake. The management's vision is to first incubate teams through PIF, then sell off portions of equity to outside capital.
If each team could eventually be worth several hundred million dollars, PIF could recover some of its investments by selling shares, thus transforming LIV Golf from a cash-burning event into a sports asset platform. This narrative is very similar to F1. However, the reason F1 teams are so expensive is due to their extreme scarcity, with events possessing mature global copyright income, a long-standing fan culture, and cost limits.
LIV Golf's teams are largely artificially created by the league: brands designed by the league, player contracts subsidized by the league, events organized by the league, and the main revenue also rely on the league, meaning investors do not purchase independent cash flows but rights to continue believing that the parent company will provide funding.
By early 2026, although LIV Golf once envisioned team valuations reaching $300 million or even $1 billion, no team equity has actually been sold to external investors.
On the eve of bankruptcy, this valuation bubble was completely punctured.
On August 24, 2026, LIV Golf cancelled the minority equity stakes originally held by players and some sponsors, reintegrating the 13 teams back into the league structure. The company’s reason was to protect tax assets formed by cumulative net operating losses.
The next stop after bankruptcy
If we simply attribute the outcome of LIV Golf to Saudi Arabia running out of money, it would not be fitting.
As of when PIF announced its strategy for 2026 to 2030, its managed assets still exceeded $900 billion, with an annualized total shareholder return exceeding 7% since 2017. However, no matter how much money a sovereign fund has, there are opportunity costs. Now PIF is leaning towards sustainable value creation, emphasizing investment efficiency, financial returns, private capital participation, and driving Saudi domestic industries.
At the same time, Saudi Arabia also needs to prepare capital for tourism, artificial intelligence, new energy, aviation, the 2034 World Cup, and massive infrastructure projects. Under the new strategy, LIV Golf indeed finds it hard to regain unlimited patience.
After PIF announced the cessation of long-term capital injection in April 2026, LIV Golf immediately hired restructuring lawyers, AlixPartners, and investment bank Ducera, and pitched the project to over 300 potential investors. 104 institutions signed confidentiality agreements, about 30 conducted detailed due diligence, but only two submitted non-binding proposals.
The winning BC Partners plan aims to lead an investment of $300 million into LIV 2.0. PIF will provide up to $49.6 million in financing during the bankruptcy as a creditor.
According to current progress, LIV 2.0 will roughly be led by BC Partners to exit financing, along with potential minority investors to complete the restructuring. Afterward, 10 events will be held in 2027, with reduced prize money, maintaining event locations in Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong, and England while striving to remain in the United States. Ultimately, players will hold a majority equity stake, and individual commercial rights will revert to the players themselves.
In simple terms, it’s about using lower costs and a smaller scale to exchange for a self-sustaining company.
Honestly speaking, this plan contains some genuine real options. LIV Golf is not without a market; for example, the live audience at the Adelaide event grew from 77,000 in the inaugural year to 115,000 in 2026. Additionally, there is real demand in golf markets like Australia and South Africa that the PGA has ignored.
However, the financial realities are harsh. The old LIV had annual net expenditures of about $1.2 billion, while the new LIV will raise between $250 million to $350 million from the market. This is not the same business trying to survive; it is a group of people deciding to run a much smaller company.
LIV Golf plans to emerge from Chapter 11 in early 2027, but the deal still requires approval from the court, PIF, BC Partners, and a sufficient number of players. The restructuring agreement stipulates that the company must reach an acceptable support agreement with a certain number of players within 35 days after filing for bankruptcy.
What ultimately determines whether LIV Golf can survive is still that group of star players who were bought with large sums of money. But this time, there are no nine-figure checks on the table.
$5 billion has burned out a global benchmark for a cautionary tale; in the world of sports business, this could well be the most expensive lesson ever purchased by a sovereign wealth fund.
Original by 投中网
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