Turning around the poor state of LIV Golf reached the White House on Thursday.
In an Oval Office press conference, President Trump was asked to reflect — on the backdrop of the Saudi Public Investment Fund announcing that it is withdrawing its LIV funds at the end of the 2026 season — if he believed the PGA Tour should welcome “throwaways back with open arms”?
Trump, sitting at his desk, said that, yes, he would like to see LIV’s key players reintegrated. “I want to see Rory (McIlroy) playing Bryson DeChambeau,” he said. “I want to see the great Jon Rahm play Scottie (Scheffler), who is so great.”
But as for what the future holds for LIV, the president, whose Northern Virginia golf estate will host an LIV event next week, sounded like he’s just as unsure as the rest of us.
“I’m not sure what’s going on with LIV,” he said.
What we I DO I know is that PIF is outby means of a greater strategic pivot by the Kingdom’s coffers and oil revenue stresses caused by the war in the Middle East. The beginnings of one new board LIV 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 arisen as the league has grown.”
Read: sell or let go.
Selling LIV, of course, won’t be easy, at least not in its current form. League, according to published estimateshas lost anywhere from $5 to $8 billion since its inception in 2021 and spends more than 100 million dollars a month. Its own CEO, Scott O’Neil, has said that any hope of profitability may be a decade away. You don’t need an accounting degree to realize that the math, at least in the short term and most likely in the long term, just doesn’t work. So now it’s up to Davis, Zinman and Co. put together an offer that will attract an investor or investors. If the board is unsuccessful in that search, it will go into disassembly mode.
With financial questions suddenly lingering over LIV, I consulted with two M&A executives to better understand what the league’s next steps might look like; both experts requested anonymity due to professional concerns.
“What happens is people come in, they’re independent and they’re 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 exist and pursue all those options to the point where it 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 an exit option, which is the core value.”
LIV’s base value figure is anyone’s guess, but the league has significant assets that include contracted players, 13 team franchises and hundreds of millions of dollars in sponsorships. The name “LIV Golf” is also worth something.
“There’s brand equity there,” a second executive, who oversees transactions for a global professional services firm, said Friday. “You could also argue there’s value in the way they run the organization. It’s very different from golf as we know it.” The same executive added that as part of the commercial due diligence process, a potential buyer would likely analyze LIV’s fan base. “If it’s 10 percent more people who wouldn’t normally watch the Masters or the Players or something like that, then maybe there’s value there.”
That LIV is a sports property could also benefit from it, the two executives said. A deep-pocketed “vanity shopper” may emerge, attracted by the allure of entry into the world of golf and branded golfers. The first executive, who has experience buying and selling teams, said sports sales are not typically driven by traditional economics.
“(Teams) are not based on what their present cash flow value is,” he said. “It’s based on who wants to own a sports team. And there are only so many of them.”
The second executive claimed that another suitor “completely outside the box,” such as, say, a casino or sports book, could come. As with any sale, it is difficult to predict who may show interest.
The problem is, despite LIV’s push to market team golf, the league is still widely recognized and powered by its stars, such as Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm, who retired from the PGA Tour with nine-figure deals. If a new investor can’t see a way to turn a profit on that kind of recurring spend, the buyer(s) will be left either trying to convince LIV’s brightest players to take pay cuts or reimagining the league with a less heralded roster. Either way would be challenging. “I’m usually a creative guy,” the first executive told me. “But I’m hard-pressed to find a rationale for why anyone would buy into something that’s bleeding billions of dollars with no light at the end of the tunnel.”
Said the transaction 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 amazed when LIV arrived. He said he could never have imagined that one of the established US sports leagues could have its stars stripped by a new competitor, but he also never imagined that a winner could have the financial power of the PIF.
“It was just such an incredible 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 tournaments, you have these elite properties, and there’s never any challenge. But the only thing that can make it a challenge, of course, is unlimited funding. That’s what made LIV so different from every other sports league rival. It seemed to have unlimited funding.”
Until there wasn’t.
“It’s something I never thought about,” Brandt said of the PIF pivot. “I just thought, OK, unlimited funding, throw a few billion at the LIV tournament, take 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 it all.”
LIV has seven events remaining on its 2026 schedule. That number was eight before the Louisiana event, scheduled for June is suddenly postponed earlier this week. LIV Virginia, in Trump’s course, begins Thursday. Then comes a three-event race overseas (Korea, Spain and England) followed by the season finale with three events in the US (New Jersey, Indiana and Michigan).
And then? That’s a question we may not have an answer to for months. If a sale or some sort of merger is unsuccessful, LIV can no longer exist. In that scenario, one executive said, “You would take each of the liabilities and try to negotiate with each of the parties until the end.” If either party is still owed money, they could file a lawsuit, the executive said, “but who wants to get involved in suing a Saudi sovereign wealth fund? That could take a while.”
;)
