LIV Golf Hopes Screwing Its Own Players In Bankruptcy Will Secure Its Future

LIV Golf recently sent out a mass email to mark the conclusion of its 2026 season. I imagine this was a somewhat slapdash operation given that the outfit, recently dumped by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, had to lop off the final event on its schedule, the team championship, which was scheduled for the final weekend of August, in Plymouth, Mich. Instead, the player championship and the team championship were both settled in Indianapolis, with stripped down entertainment offerings and drastically reduced player bonuses. In the week between the season's sudden conclusion and the arrival of the email, LIV Golf laid off a majority of its employees, writing in a statement to Golf Digest that the operation had "informed many of our colleagues that their employment under LIV 1.0" had concluded. Perhaps the exodus and confusion explain how they got the email wrong: Mine addressed me as "Dear LIV Golf Fan" and thanked me for supporting their terrible league. Not me! I've been to two LIV Golf events and both sucked mega shit. The email encourages recipients to "stay tuned for more LIV Golf," without offering any details whatsoever about where a LIV Golf Fan might do that, or for how long. The promotion's future is very much up in the air. In the statement announcing the layoffs, a LIV Golf spokesperson insisted that whoever is left over there is still working "toward making LIV 2.0 a reality." A couple of weeks removed from CEO Scott O'Neill announcing that he'd secured a new investor to take the place of the PIF, the arrangement has not been finalized. The new proposed savior, an "alternative investment management" firm called BC Partners, is reportedly waiting for a commitment from some critical mass of LIV Golf's higher-profile players. That will be a very tricky arrangement. Per a report from Financial Times, LIV Golf intends to clear its books and right-size its operation for LIV 2.0 in part by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as early as sometime this week. But some huge part of the obligations it would need to clear are the cartoonishly large payments owed to the very players it would need to retain in order to successfully extract the $300 million it wants from BC Partners. O'Neill is offering settlements to those players, but the math is eternally fucked. The PIF, with essentially limitless wealth, absorbed a whopping $5 billion in "net operating losses" since launching the promotion in 2022, and a large chunk of that—multiple billions—came from player signing bonuses and prize money.

Read it at Defector ↗

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