How LIV Golf burned $5 billion and still lost

On April 30th, 2026, after 4 years and nearly $5 billion, the Saudi government announced that they were no longer going to be supporting upstart golf league LIV Golf. The league that once paid stars like Phil Mickelson, Rahm, Johnson to join and paid them hundreds of millions of dollars was pulling the plug. It's one of the wildest business stories of the last century. And this video is going to explain what happened and what we can learn from it. This is the rise and fall of LIV Golf. If you enjoy these videos, I turn each and every one of them into a cheat sheet document you could download to go along with the video. You can find them all on my website, girdley.com/youtube. Oh, and by the way, thanks to Fora for sponsoring this video. More on them later. Why it all failed actually starts back from the very beginning. In October 2021, the Saudis and their Public Investment Fund, which is called a sovereign wealth fund managed by the state, Hires a golfer. His name is Greg Norman to manage their golf investments. Greg is a golf legend. I remember watching him when I was a kid on TV. He's Australian, had a great look to him, and he's had a 30-year grudge against the establishment of golf. Back in 1994, Norman had tried to launch for the first time something called the World Golf Tour, and it was designed to break the stranglehold and monopoly that the PGA Tour had on the professional golf industry. The PGA Tour, the NBA, the NFL, to some extent, these are all natural monopolies. Everybody wants to watch the most popular, biggest sporting league because it attracts all the best players. So therefore, in the end, you typically end up with just one. And that's what we have in the PGA Tour. So Norman's venture back in the 1990s, it was crushed by the PGA and Greg Norman. He never forgot that. So 30 years later, Norman was back trying again. This time he had an unimaginably large war chest. Backed by the Saudis with a $700 million sovereign wealth fund, uh, basically controlled by the Crown Prince bin Salman. In the world, there are two types of power. There's hard power and there's soft power. Hard power is things like aircraft carriers and militaries. Soft power is cultural influence. America tends to lead in both of those things. Hollywood for decades has exported all of our culture. Meanwhile, the seas are patrolled by you know, our destroyers and aircraft carriers. Due to oil revenues, the Saudis are immensely wealthy, and with $700 million in assets, they're pretty long on hard power. They've got a pretty decent-sized military in the Middle East. What they're lacking in is soft power. If you look at why so much Saudi money flows its way into certain things like this, it's at its core about soft power. That's why you see them in so many sports teams, sports leagues. But golf is a special sport. It really highlights and targets a specific type of buyer. They are executives, business people, the elite. And it was a perfect venture for the Saudis to try to build more soft power into. Norman was pretty creative. LIV is actually short for the number 54 in Roman numerals, which is exactly what you'd shoot on a 72-hole course if you birdied every single hole. Kind of creative. World Championships, the Players, the Masters, and stuff like that, they actually play 72 holes. So 4 rounds of 18. In this case, LIV had named their whole thing about just playing 3 rounds as opposed to 4. They wanted to rethink the typical formula of a, you know, golf tournament, which is typically everybody comes in, you play a couple rounds, there's a cut, and then a few more people stay for the weekend and compete with a smaller field. Got the formula that makes Formula 1 work. Well, they were gonna do that but with golf. To get started, they decided to write big 9-figure checks to many icons of the 2010s. I mentioned some of their names early on. Mickelson, Johnson, these guys all got $100 million, $200 million, some more. And look, this is an incredible amount of money, but it's also about to be a testament in how no amount of money can break the stranglehold that some of these, like, basically sports leagues have on human attention. By 2022, those enormous checks were so big that these players started to defect. And many of them started to move over to LIV. But before I tell you how that went down, it's also interesting to note that before the whole thing even got off the ground, LIV almost died twice. The first was that LIV was never actually competing on anything really interesting. There was nothing novel. If you do look back in the 1970s when things like the ABA, the American Basketball Association, came in to compete with the NBA, they brought in some unique things: the 3-point line, the red, white, and blue ball. It's pretty cool. Something would happen that would demonstrate that the reason for the Live to Exist wasn't actually about love for the game like the ABA had been. It was about actual hate. And leaked audio in February 2022 came out where Phil Mickelson was recorded as saying that the PGA Tour and the people that controlled golf in the United States, they were, quote unquote, obnoxious, greedy bastards. Mickelson went off to say as well on tape that he didn't really care that the Saudis had murdered a journalist and dismembered him in an embassy. I think it was in Turkey. And carted his body out in trash bags. He just cared about the money and he cared about hating on PGA Tour. After that stuff came out, Mickelson, who was making a lot of money from sponsors, basically they all dropped him. Huge financial pocketbook hit by a couple sentences. Perhaps the most expensive sentences uttered by a sports person in history. Greg Norman gets asked at a press conference about his feeling about Khashoggi. His quote is, "We all make mistakes." Yep. And remember, the CIA published a report saying that the murder of this journalist, Khashoggi, was ordered personally by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. This created a perfect opportunity whenever the PGA Tour or any establishment person wanted to talk about LIV Golf. All you had to do is just point to the actions of the people's money behind it, the Saudis. 9/11 families piled onto this as well. Many of them started protesting LIV Golf events, uh, basically tying what had happened on that day to the Saudi involvement. Well, they were kind of right. Greg Norman, before all of this, had been basically an icon in golf, winning multiple majors, decades at the top. Heck, you know, I'm not a golf fan and even I remember the guy. I can picture him in my mind right now. And here he was not really thinking through this whole thing. His hate for the PGA Tour and the feeling of mistreatment that he had and the mistreatment of the other players as well. He'd basically allowed that to cloud his judgment and gotten himself into a PR quagmire by associating with, well, a state actor that had not done some amazing stuff. But the money kept moving. And June 9th, 2022, LIV has its very first event. The PGA Tour turns around and immediately bans every player who plays in the upstart league. Stenson had been the European Ryder Cup captain just a few weeks earlier. He joins, and within 24 hours, he loses his captaincy. In August 2022, 11 LIV golfers sue the PGA Tour for antitrust violations. The PGA Tour, they turned right around and they went and sued not the LIV Corporation, they went and sued the Saudis personally. In the hearings, a judge rules that the PIF, the, uh, basically the name of the fund from the Saudis, has to open up its books and its records, meaning they weren't going to be able to hide obfuscate things, uh, in the upcoming trials and hearings. On June 6th, 2023, the whole story takes a weird wild turn. Jay Monahan, who's in charge of the PGA Tour at this time, calls a press conference and he rolls out the Saudi head of their investment fund announcing that there's a consideration to merge their tour, the PGA Tour, and LIV, and some other stuff into a new entity. Just a few months before, the Saudi money that these guys had once been denouncing as dirty and bad, suddenly they're shaking hands looking to get their part of it. Guys like Rory McIlroy, who's famous in the golf world as a high-end golfer, like, he finds about it that morning, same as everybody else, via the press. Guys like Rory had turned out hundreds of millions of dollars from the Saudis only to find that they had just been kind of stabbed in the back by the PGA Tour. And look, all of this was suddenly demonstrating to folks like me that Greg Norman and those guys were right about the way the PGA Tour treated their golfers. And here was the PGA Tour doing it all over again. And the PIF, the Saudis, they wanted to settle because of that court ruling. Suddenly they were going to have to open up all their books and show their dirty laundry, and they were ready to make a deal and get out of harm's way. The sides produced a framework agreement that was supposed to close by the end of 2023. The problem was that deadline came and went with no deal getting done. While the LIV Tour had put together a number of the players and got them to defect, the PGA Tour still had the most important thing, which was the big events themselves. It was like a couple of teams had left, but the PGA Tour still controlled the Super Bowl. Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship. None of those had gone anywhere. Till 2025, players on the LIV Tour couldn't actually even get world ranking points. So they actually had no reliable way to get into those events. Not that the PGA Tour wanted them in there anyway. Two of the elite golfers, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, they started to slide into the 100s in the world rankings just because they didn't get any points anymore when they were playing on LIV. Here the PGA Tour had realized that who cares if LIV pays Phil Mickelson $200 million to come to their tour if he wasn't going to be able to get into the Masters? They would eventually win out. Here the PGA Tour was demonstrating they really held the cards no matter how much money the Saudis brought. And in January 2024, the PGA Tour is about to twist the knife again. Thanks to today's sponsor, Fora, for sponsoring this video. Look, if you're somebody that likes to travel and you always seem to have folks that are asking you about travel options and that sort of thing, there is an interesting business model out there that's worth taking a look at. Basically, it gives you the opportunity to become a travel advisor in a box. You can basically become a consultant for people you know, that you network, strangers if you want to, on how to plan amazing trips and experiences. And in today's world, in which people, including folks like me, are caring less and less about material things and more and more about having amazing experiences with the time we have on this amazing planet, Fora is a great thing to be involved in. And you can find more about it at foratravel.com/youtube. But basically, when you sign up for it, you have access to this entire world of resources, different options, different experiences, different providers, tours, all that kind of stuff. All available through a single platform. As part of the Fora network, you have access to things that normal people don't have access to. So if you're interested in becoming somebody who is in the travel planning business, consulting for people, individuals, families, all the way up to big organizations and being part of helping them plan these magical experiences, Fora is an option for you. And if you're the type of person who would want to check it out and it sounds like fun to you, well, check out foratravel.com/youtube. And thanks to them for sponsoring today's video. The PGA Tour formed a thing at that point in January 2024 called the PGA Tour Enterprises, a for-profit entity that they would use to generate even more money from golf. They announced a $1.5 billion investment from a bunch of rich old white dudes, as you could imagine. Guys like Arthur Blank, who owns the Falcons and founded Home Depot, Steve Cohen of the Mets, and a bunch of other kind of big-time investment firms. The PGA Tour before had been competing with endless puddles and piles of Saudi money, Now they were basically fighting with clean money and money that didn't have the baggage of all the Saudi kind of negative PR. So when the Saudis came back in 2023, hat in hand, trying to make a deal happen, the PGA Tour was now even stronger than they were in 2022 and definitely not interested in making a deal, especially at the Saudi terms. Mid-2024, any framework of merging the rival kind of tours is totally dead, and the PGA Tour is now able to charge $700 million a year to NBC, CBS, and the other broadcast networks to carry their product. And LIV, it ended up on the CW. If you don't remember that, I don't even remember what network that was, but it's on basic cable. And the LIV basically had to give away their product to get on TV. LIV would get upwards of 300,000 viewers per event. The PGA Tour events would get over 3 million just in the UK alone. LIV was— lost $1.1 billion over 2 years around 2023. Some of this was their own fault. By tripling the cost of talent and paying up for all these folks and buying them out of their PGA Tour relationships, uh, they had basically made it so they were going to lose money even faster, uh, than anybody thought possible. But interestingly enough, something happened that actually made this whole LIV experience pretty good for the PGA Tour. On its side, but also good for the PGA Tour players. In 2021, the average PGA Tour purse was $8 million. By 2025, it would be $20 million. PGA Tour launched a thing called Elevated Events, 8 tour stops a year with prize packages in $20 million-plus range, specifically designed to funnel more money to players and keep them from going to LIV. The threat of LIV had actually helped a lot of these players. At the cost of the Saudi money. But trust me, they'll be okay. They have plenty of money. But at the same time, the PGA Tour decided not to play nice. Those folks that had left like Phil Mickelson for a couple hundred million dollars, even if they wanted to come back, suddenly the PGA Tour had decided they were not welcome. The governor who'd been executing all this on behalf of the Saudis and appeared in that press release or press conference with the PGA Tour, he quietly kind of disappeared from the scene. A lot of times people send lots of messages not by what they say, but by what they don't do. And in this case, by disappearing from the scene, the message was coming out very clear about the future for Liv. Norman himself came out and publicly announced he was leaving Liv in September 2025. He described the entire experience as "very draining on me." Liv brings in a new CEO, a guy named Scott O'Neill, who had formerly been CEO of different sports franchises in the US, including the Philadelphia 76ers of the NBA. Then in early 2026, something happens in the Persian Gulf, and that is the United States starts to declare war against Iran. And suddenly all the economies of the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia are suddenly looking at, well, what their economy is going to look like in the future. That's why on April 30th, 2026, the Saudis announced publicly they were going to cease funding LIV Golf by the end of the year. Their total losses on the whole thing, $5.3 billion. A big chunk of that had gone directly to the key players they were trying to bring over. $1.36 billion of that $5 billion had been in prizes and that sort of thing. Another billion plus had gone directly in bonuses to folks like Phil Mickelson to come over to the new upstart league. Now make the types of corporate announcements about strategic pivots and strategic investors, which is basically code for We are in trouble and we've got to figure out what we're going to do to try to survive. A lot of people in the industry think there's no hope. There's a lot of talk about the Saudis' role in all this kind of stuff and how dirty the whole thing turned out to be. But I think if you look at this whole story, the lesson for everybody is about the extent to which establishments go to try to protect themselves when they're under attack. The PGA Tour is perhaps the most establishment of establishment things. It targets a certain group of elites and folks who go to places like the Masters. The moment you start to threaten that experience and the joy and the social structure that they have in those types of establishments, that's when they fight back with a vengeance. If you look at the way the PGA Tour has treated these players, the ones who defected for larger money and are maybe trying to come back, it's pretty clear what the PGA Tour is about. Much more about protecting the status quo and the gravy train than being fair and good partners with the players themselves. As business owners, you can often get into situations in which you're fighting an establishment. Uh, it turns out the establishment will get extremely vicious on you, and you just got to be prepared for that if you're going against it. All right, that's it for Live Golf. If you enjoyed this video, tell me so in the comments below. It encourages me to make more. Catch you next time.