LIV Golf Pros Meet Their New Investor Overlord At Season’s Sudden Conclusion

The 2026 LIV Golf season will end this weekend at LIV Golf Indianapolis. The 4 Aces GC fellows have a narrow lead over Ripper GC in the team championship, which I guess they will uhh look to maintain or whatever. Don't worry about it. That team title was supposed to be decided the final weekend of August in Plymouth, Mich., but that event has now been officially cancelled, as was long anticipated. The stupid, broke league simply lacks the money to run it. The payouts for the finale will be significantly reduced. Without the outrageous support of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, LIV Golf cannot continue to dump huge prize money into its noisy, broadly three-quarter-assed events. The bonus pool for the player championship, per Golf Magazine, will be $10 million, down from $30 million in 2025. The bonus pool for the team championship—an utterly inconsequential competition to every living creature on Earth except for the handful of people in line to win a share of the prize—will be $30 million, down from $50 million in 2025. The bonus pool for the LIV Indianapolis event, separate from the championships it will decide, has also been cut in half. That's still a lot of cash to hand out for 54 holes of golf. It's mighty expensive to run a golf promotion designed to compete directly with the PGA Tour. It made sense to pour grotesque sums into this mess when it was hoping to meaningfully disrupt men's professional golf; now that the PGA Tour has shrugged off the incursion and LIV Golf has settled in as nothing more than its own stupid tagline, $80 million in year-end bonuses starts to look more precisely like what it is, which is an enormous waste of money.

Read it at Defector ↗

← Front page