{"id":608238,"date":"2026-04-16T15:29:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T15:29:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/608238\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T15:29:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T15:29:32","slug":"liv-golf-made-the-other-tours-smarten-up-but-if-the-saudis-kill-it-off-it-wont-be-missed-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/608238\/","title":{"rendered":"LIV Golf made the other tours smarten up but if the Saudis kill it off, it won\u2019t be missed \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

LIV Golf<\/a> was never an enterprise driven by logic. Not the conventional kind, at any rate. Throughout the entirety of its four-year run, the upstart golf league has never had to live by the rules that apply to every other sports business in the world. <\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t have to turn a profit, it didn\u2019t have to break even. Backed by the bottomless well of the Saudi Investment Fund<\/a>, it was impervious to the forces of financial gravity that keep everyone else in sport tethered to reality.<\/p>\n

There was a freedom in that. It fed the swaggering, louche, shrug-at-the-normies kind of attitude that typified LIV from the start. It\u2019s mostly forgotten now but on St Patrick\u2019s Day in 2022, when LIV announced its inaugural eight-tournament schedule, the organisers had no idea who was going to be playing in them. They were in talks with the likes of Dustin Johnson<\/a> and Bryson DeChambeau<\/a> but nothing was agreed yet. They knew they\u2019d have Phil Mickelson<\/a> but that was about it.<\/p>\n

In any other sports league, that would have constituted a full-blown crisis. The first event was less than three months away and nobody had a clue who they\u2019d get to fill out the 48-player field. Even worse, the players they were courting knew the pickle they were in and so the agents acting for those players leaned into their leverage. LIV Golf\u2019s response was to simply open the Saudi swag bag and started dishing out limitless cash.<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s price to sign up went through the roof \u2013 he eventually got $150 million before he ever stuck a tee peg in the ground. DeChambeau\u2019s people got LIV up to $125 million, which was still five million less than Brooks Koepka<\/a>. Cam Smith won the British Open that summer and extracted $143 million to defect. <\/p>\n

\"CameronCameron Smith signed a $143 million deal with LIV Golf. Photograph: EPA <\/p>\n

LIV could never hope to make that money back. And they definitely couldn\u2019t dream of recouping the reputed $400 million they paid Jon Rahm<\/a> to leave the PGA Tour in December 2023. But, as was repeatedly pointed out from the jump, balancing the books was never the point. The point was \u2013 and remains \u2013 the Saudi government\u2019s place on the world stage. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Denis Walsh: In the end, oil money outlasted all the protests and sportswashing wonOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In the early part of this decade, one of their strategic aims was to use sport to wield soft power. They set up LIV, they bought Newcastle United, they brought Formula One to Jeddah and Tyson Fury v Oleksandr Usyk to Riyadh. We all said that this was blatant sportswashing, they did it anyway. And it worked. Other than a few early skirmishes in press conferences, people mostly stopped mentioning all that human rights business very quickly.<\/p>\n

The world moves on. Priorities change. The Saudis are still interested in what they can get for buying into sport but their sights are higher now than a second-rate golf league played out with no jeopardy to dismal TV viewing figures. In December 2024, they secured the football World Cup in an uncontested bid. Hardly anyone said a word about sportswashing<\/a>. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0LIV and let die: Reed\u2019s return to PGA fold shows why Saudi golf experiment is doomedOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

So maybe LIV has served its purpose and is about to run its course. Certainly, if reports on Wednesday are to prove correct, this looks like being the breakaway golf league\u2019s final season<\/a>. Late on Wednesday night, LIV CEO Scott O\u2019Neil moved to scotch the rumours that had been rippling through the golf world but ended up sounding like a man who was protesting too much.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to be crystal clear: our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle,\u201d O\u2019Neil wrote in an email to LIV employees. \u201cWhile the media landscape is often filled with speculation, our reality is defined by the work we do on the grass. We are heading into the heart of our 2026 schedule with the full energy of an organisation that is bigger, louder and more influential than ever before.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe life of a startup movement is often defined by these moments of pressure,\u201d O\u2019Neil continued. \u201dWe signed up for this because we believe in disrupting the status quo. We have faced headwinds since the jump, and we\u2019ve answered every time with resilience and grace. Now, we answer by doing what we do best: putting on the most compelling show in sports.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notably, in the 48 hours since the first rumours that LIV was in trouble started spreading, there hasn\u2019t been a word out of Saudi Arabia<\/a>. It would be very simple for Yasir al-Rumayyan, close ally of Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the ultimate chief of LIV Golf, to set everyone straight with a simple statement on the tour\u2019s future. But that hasn\u2019t come and the silence speaks volumes.<\/p>\n

\"USUS golfer Phil Mickelson with Yasir al-Rumayyan during the Pro-Am ahead of the LIV Golf Invitational at The Centurion Club in June 2022 in St Albans, England. Photograph: Charlie Crowhurst\/LIV Golf\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In the end, it looks like the Saudis have decided they have bigger fish to fry. In the final accounting, their outlay on LIV Golf will wash out at somewhere in the region of $5 billion. A big chunk of change, yes. But just last month, the same Saudi Investment Fund poured $12 billion into multimedia conglomerate Paramount Skydance to support its acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. They\u2019re not running short of cash anytime soon. They\u2019re just spending it elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Did LIV disrupt golf? Undeniably yes. It wasn\u2019t just that it made a small band of golfers on both tours a lot wealthier \u2013 it was the biggest injection of money into the game since Tiger Woods<\/a> arrived. It made the PGA Tour<\/a> and the DP World Tour<\/a> smarten up and it elevated the four majors to an even higher status, given that they were the only time the public got to see the best players face each other.<\/p>\n

Ultimately though, the golf world is too small and the audience too niche to survive splitting its best players into separate competitions. Last Sunday, CBS carried the Masters live on free-to-air TV in America and as Rory McIlroy<\/a> holed out for his second green jacket<\/a>, an average of 14 million viewers were tuning in. It was the biggest Masters TV audience in more than a decade, the most people to have watched any golf tournament in the US since 2015. And still, it was about five million short of an average Sunday afternoon NFL game in October.<\/p>\n

If this does turn out to be the end of LIV, golf won\u2019t miss it.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Rory McIlroy is the greatest European golfer and he is not finished yetOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LIV Golf was never an enterprise driven by logic. Not the conventional kind, at any rate. Throughout the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,1977,178632,5279,1976,13341,229478,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-608238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-jon-rahm","12":"tag-liv-golf-invitational-series","13":"tag-phil-mickelson","14":"tag-rory-mcilroy","15":"tag-saudi-arabia","16":"tag-saudi-arabia-s-public-investment-fund","17":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}