The swirl around LIV Golf’s tenuous state reached the White House on Thursday.
In an Oval Office press conference, President Trump was asked to reflect — against the backdrop of the Saudi Public Investment Fund announcing that it is pulling its LIV funding at the end of the 2026 season — whether he believed the PGA Tour should welcome “the defectors back with open arms”?
Trump, seated at his desk, said that, yes, he would like to see LIV’s top players reintegrated. “I want to see Rory [McIlroy] playing Bryson DeChambeau,” he said. “I want to see big Jon Rahm playing Scottie [Scheffler], who is so great.”
But as for what the future holds for LIV, the president, whose Virginia golf property will play host to a LIV event next week, sounded like he is as uncertain as the rest of us.
“I’m not sure what’s happening with LIV,” he said.
What we do know is that the PIF is out, by way of a larger strategic pivot from the Kingdom’s coffer keepers and oil-revenue stresses caused by the war in the Middle East. The beginnings of a new LIV board also are in place, led by corporate restructuring veterans Gene Davis and Jon Zinman, who LIV said in a statement have been charged with “institutionalizing the league and evaluating the range of strategic opportunities that have emerged with the league’s rise.”
Read: sell it or unwind it.
Selling LIV will, of course, not be easy, at least not in its current form. The league, according to published estimates, has lost anywhere from $5 to $8 billion since its 2021 inception and spends more than $100 million per month. Its own CEO, Scott O’Neil, has said any hope of profitability could be a decade away. You don’t need an accounting degree to understand that the math, at least in the short term and quite possibly in the long term, too, just doesn’t work. So now it’s Davis, Zinman and Co.’s job to put together an offer that will entice an investor or investors. If the board is unsuccessful in that quest, it’ll shift into disassemble mode.
With financial questions suddenly lingering over LIV, I consulted two mergers-and-acquisitions executives to get a better sense for what the league’s next steps might look like; both experts requested anonymity for professional concerns.
“What happens is people come in, they’re independent and they are looking to maximize value,” a corporate restructuring expert with experience in the sports world told me in a phone interview Thursday. “They will identify all the options that there are, and they’ll pursue all those options to a point that what makes the most sense. And then at the end of the day, they prepare a plan for the worst options, whatever that is. That includes a going-out-of-business option, which is the floor value.”
That floor-value figure is anybody’s guess, but the league does have significant assets that include contracted players, 13 team franchises and hundreds of millions of dollars in sponsorships. The “LIV Golf” name also is worth something.
“There’s brand equity there,” a second executive, who oversees transactions for a global professional services firm, said on Friday. “You also could argue whether there’s value in the way they run the organization. It’s very different than golf as we know it.” The same executive added that as part of the commercial due-diligence process, a prospective buyer would likely analyze LIV’s fan base. “If it’s 10 percent more people that wouldn’t normally watch the Masters or Players or something like that, then maybe there’s value there.”
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That LIV is a sports property also could benefit it, both executives said. A deep-pocketed “vanity buyer” could emerge, drawn by the appeal of having entrée to the golf world and brand-name golfers. The first executive, who has experience in buying and selling teams, said sports sales typically aren’t driven by traditional economics.
“[Teams] are not based on what their actual cash flow value is,” he said. “It’s based upon somebody wanting to own a sports team. And there’s only so many of them.”
The second executive posited that another “completely outside-of-the-box” suitor also could come along, like, say, a casino or sportsbook. As with any sale, it’s hard to predict who might show interest.
Trouble is, despite LIV’s push to market team golf, the league still is largely known for and powered by its stars, like Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm, who were drawn away from the PGA Tour by nine-figure deals. If a new investor can’t see a path to turning a profit with that kind of recurring outlay, the buyer would be left either trying to convince LIV’s shiniest players to take pay cuts or reimagine the league with a less heralded roster of players. Either route would be challenging. “I’m usually a creative guy,” the first executive told me. “But I’m hard-pressed to come up with a rationale as to why someone would buy something that is hemorrhaging billions with no light at the end of the tunnel.”
Said the other executive: “This could be one of those situations where the purchase price is a dollar, and someone just takes the liabilities off your hands.”
Sports law and business professor Andrew Brandt was wowed when LIV came along. He said he could never have imagined that one of the established U.S. sports leagues could have its stars wooed away by an upstart competitor, but he also could never have imagined that a wooer could have the financial might of the PIF.
“It was just such an extraordinary time in sports,” said Brandt, a former sports agent and NFL executive who is now executive director of the Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at Villanova Law. “You have these leagues, you have these tours, you have these elite properties and there’s never any challenges. But the one thing that could make it a challenge, of course, is unlimited funding. That’s what made LIV so different than any other sports league rival. It appeared that there was unlimited funding.”
Until there wasn’t.
“It’s something I never contemplated,” Brandt said of the PIF’s pivot. “I just thought, OK, unlimited funding, throw a few billion at the LIV tour, have your billions for whatever else you want to do. But there’s a change of heart from the PIF and that to me is the most surprising part of all this.”
LIV has seven events left on its 2026 schedule. That number was eight before the Louisiana event, slated for June, was unexpectedly postponed earlier this week. LIV Virginia, at Trump’s course, begins Thursday. Then comes a three-event run overseas (Korea, Spain and England) followed by the season’s final three-event finale back in the U.S. (New Jersey, Indiana and Michigan).
And then? That’s a question to which we might not have an answer for months. If a sale or some kind of merger is unsuccessful, LIV could be no more. In that scenario, one of the executives said, “You would take each of the liabilities and try to negotiate with each of the parties to an end.” If any parties are still owed money, they could potentially file lawsuits, the executive said, “but who wants to get involved with suing a Saudi sovereign fund? That could take a while.”
