The Saudi golf league resists dying. This Thursday, the third-to-last event of the season begins in New York (only Indianapolis and the team final in Michigan remain), but the question is whether the groundbreaking LIV circuit will find the necessary funding to survive once the Saudi Sovereign Fund (PIF) has announced it will shut off the petrodollar tap this summer, which has flooded the League with more than 5 billion since 2022. The CEO of the Saudi competition, Scott O’Neil, announced this Wednesday in New York “an agreement in place with a lead investor” of which he gave no further details, neither name nor amount, and hopes to close in September.
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According to the New York Post, the investment will be around 250 million annually, an amount that would allow the League to survive but not maintain the current format of 14 annual tournaments with prize pools of 30 million each, plus the expenses of organizing each event and the very high contracts of stars like Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau. LIV can survive, but it will in any case be a LIV 2.0 with a lower profile, a slimmer checkbook, and fewer tournaments: 10, five in the United States and five abroad, which would act as a kind of majors in destinations like Austria, South Africa, and possibly Spain.
“LIV has an agreement with a lead investor, approved by the Board, to anchor the transaction and play a key role for the next era of the League, driven by and for the players. We are also seeing strong interest from more than a dozen additional parties to potentially act as minority investors, creating a multi-partner model designed for stability and long-term growth,” O’Neil said, noting that some of these top golfers will become majority shareholders to offset the overall decline in prize money and contracts they have left to collect.
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It remains to be seen whether this new formula will convince figures like Rahm or if some will decide to return to traditional circuits.
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