LIV Golf spent four years as the most expensive participation trophy in sports. A $5 billion bet by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) that you could buy your way into golf's establishment. 

Last week, the bet ended. 

PIF announced it's pulling funding after the 2026 season, Yasir Al-Rumayyan resigned as chairman, and the press release announcing it all somehow never mentioned Saudi Arabia. 

Do with that what you will, but that’s practically the corporate equivalent of leaving the room without saying goodbye.

The new board tells you the rest. Gene Davis spent his career restructuring Delta, Aeromexico, and Trump Resorts. Jon Zinman runs a turnaround shop. Guys with that resume aren't hired to grow anything. Their job is to figure out what's still worth something and quietly move the rest off the books.

In 2024, LIV did $64.9M in revenue against a $461.8M loss. That's $8.50 burned for every dollar earned. The Riyadh season opener pulled 23,000 viewers. The RBC Heritage that same Sunday pulled 4.35 million. One of those is a golf league. The other is a hobby with a marketing budget.

So this week I'm doing something different. I'm writing the memo I'd hand to whoever buys LIV next. A CFO's turnaround plan for a league that has to learn how to actually sell something. 

My thesis is straightforward: the only way to save LIV Golf is to kill it first. Kill the strategy, kill the spending, kill the idea that you can outspend a sport into loving you. Then rebuild it on revenue instead of a sovereign checkbook.

My number is $750 million to $1.5 billion all-in, with a few strategic moves to get there.

Let's go.

First job: fix the cost stack. 

LIV burned $1.6B on signing bonuses and another $1.4B in prize money before anyone watched a tournament. Jon Rahm has $300M guaranteed through 2027. Phil Mickelson took $200M to play 14 events a year in his fifties. Dustin Johnson took $125M and a polo shirt. Bryson DeChambeau is now asking for $500M to re-sign.

That is frankly embarrassing.  

Instead, let every guaranteed deal expire and copy the F1 model, which solved this exact problem a decade ago. Cap team payroll around $50M, tie the rest of player pay to actual results, and hand the stars equity instead of cash so their upside lives or dies with the league. F1’s receipts speak for themselves: the cost cap came down from $145M to $135M, average team value climbed to $1.88B in four years, and franchises that nobody wanted became some of the most valuable assets in sports.

Bryson wants $500M cash? Give him $50M and 5% of the Crushers. If he's the brand, he can own the brand.

The next problem is the calendar.

LIV runs 14 events a year. Of that, only four make money. The other ten solely exist to lose money in new time zones, which is a strange business to be in on purpose.

Adelaide is the league's best night by a mile. 115,000 fans last season, 38,500 on Saturday alone, both LIV records. Hong Kong, Bedminster, Indianapolis, and a handful of others earn their place on the schedule. Mexico City, Miami, Korea, and Virginia, on the other hand, do not. Those four can't draw 50,000 viewers between them, and no city is paying a hosting fee large enough to make a $40M event pencil out for that kind of crowd.

Louisiana ran the experiment for everyone. LIV postponed New Orleans on April 28, and the state quietly clawed back $1.2M of the $3.2M it had already paid. A year ago, no host city would have tried it. They tried it because nobody fears LIV anymore. 

The model from now on has to be Adelaide. South Australia is paying to build a Greg Norman course in the CBD for 2028 because the tourism revenue is worth more to them than the hosting check is worth to LIV. Clearly, if you run ten events a year in cities that actually want you there, the calendar starts paying for itself. 

Now the controversial one.

The team format was Greg Norman's big idea. It is also the single thing doing the most damage to LIV as a product.

Start with what it cost them. 

The Official World Golf Ranking is the system that decides who gets into the majors and who shows up on the leaderboards everyone actually reads. The OWGR refused to give LIV a single point for two and a half years because the team format made the league impossible to rank against the rest of the sport. 

They finally caved for 2026, and even now, only the top-10 finishers at each event earn points. Three LIV players currently sit inside the world top 50.

Jon Rahm is the cleanest example. He ranks 97th in the OWGR. He ranks 5th in DataGolf's strokes-gained, which is the model the smart money uses. LIV paid $300M for one of the best players alive and built a format that hides him from the casual fan.

The fix is the most obvious thing in the world. Run 72-hole stroke play and let individuals carry the story, the way every golf property worth watching has done for a century.

Then move the teams off the leaderboard and onto the merch table. Apparel, social, gambling tie-ins, NIL deals, the whole catalog. F1 didn't get rich off Ferrari and Mercedes alone. It got rich off a Netflix show about the drivers called “Drive to Survive”. 

Last I checked, nobody is making “Drive to Survive” about a golf team called Torque GC.

Same problem, different room.

LIV pulled $3.2M in international broadcast revenue last year, which is a polite way of saying the league pays to be on TV in most of the world. The Fox deal at home is a modest fee plus a revenue share, and LIV eats its own production costs on top of that. 

Think of it this way. The PGA Tour is making roughly $1B a year through 2030. LIV is earning three-tenths of one percent of what the Tour earns. No amount of Saudi money closes a hole that size.

The way out is the Apple-MLS model. Sell global rights to Apple, Amazon, YouTube, or DAZN for $200 to $300M a year guaranteed, with a Drive to Survive-esque content commitment written into the contract. Liberty Media took F1's ESPN fee from $5M to $90M after one Netflix season. 

The 800M international households are already there. It’s just that nobody took the time to sell to them.   

One catch. The shotgun start has to die first. No serious broadcaster pays real money for four hours of golf with no ad breaks.

Last move, and the one that funds the other four.

The most valuable thing LIV owns is not a team. It is a tournament franchise. Adelaide draws 115,000 fans across four days, sells out well in advance, runs on a state-government hosting contract locked in through 2031, and is paid for with foreign government money that happens not to be Saudi. 

Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa sit a half step behind on the same model. Those four regional events are the only pieces of the league a strategic buyer would underwrite without a discount for sovereign risk.

So carve them out. Bundle the four hosting contracts and a regional brand license into a standalone Asia-Pacific Golf Co, and sell 25 to 40 percent to a Liberty Media, an SSG-style consortium, or a regional sports holdco. (TKO's Mark Shapiro has already said publicly that they're not interested.)

The pricing is the part nobody at LIV headquarters wants to read. Citi opened the team-stake process in January at a $300M-per-team target, but that number assumed PIF subsidies that are about to disappear. The honest mark is closer to $150–200M. Stack a regional carve-out on top of a few team stakes at that price and you raise $1B in clean equity.

The comps are what sting. TKO trades at roughly $35B on $4.7B in revenue. Liberty paid about $4.5B for 84% of MotoGP. A LIV with the cost structure cleaned up (and the regional events spun out cleanly) belongs in that conversation. 

The PGA Tour merger was always the wrong exit.

Fix the five moves above and LIV is a real business. Add this one and it's a growth story.

The reason LIV has spent $5 billion and moved nothing is that it picked the wrong fight. The 2026 Masters did 14M viewers on Sunday and peaked at 20M, the biggest final round since 2015. The PGA Tour weekend averages 2.85M, up 15% year over year. That audience has belonged to CBS and Augusta for sixty years. 

Nobody is taking it. Not even a sovereign wealth fund.

The audience that is growing is the one neither tour bothers with. Bryson DeChambeau has 2.6M YouTube subscribers, and his Break 50 with Trump did 16M views, more than the Masters final round. Good Good Golf, six guys in a Texas garage, raised $45M last year from Peyton Manning's Omaha Productions. Their tournament with a $25K purse did 415K views a round. 

LIV Riyadh did 23K with a $20M one. Yes, a handful of guys with a tripod are out-drawing a Saudi-funded league at its own sport. That’s the whole point.

So go where the eyeballs already are. Run a YouTube-first series under the LIV brand. Pro-ams, Break 50 episodes, team challenges, on the players' channels and the league's. Pay the guys taking a haircut on guarantees in equity on the creator side instead of cash. The growth is sitting right there, and LIV is the only credentialed pro tour with the players and the brand to capture it.

Time to land the plane. Two parts to it. First, what someone should actually pay for LIV. Second, the three things worth taking away once the deal is done.

Strip out the sovereign money, the vanity spend, and the assets nobody would pay for, and a real number starts to show up.

Here's how the sum-of-the-parts shakes out:

PIF spent $5 billion to build something that the next buyer walks away with for 23 cents on the dollar. That is the cost of running a league on a checkbook instead of a P&L.

A number on a page is the easy part, though. The harder part is what the number actually means, and there are three things worth pulling out of it before this thing trades.

Three things worth holding onto when the dust settles:

Four years and $5 billion to learn one thing. You cannot buy your way into a sport. You can only build your way in, and you build with a P&L, not a wire transfer.

The sovereign checkbook is closing. The restructuring guys are already in the conference room. The next chapter of LIV gets written by whoever is willing to do the unglamorous work of actually selling something.

PIF spent $5 billion to prove a CFO could have built this for $500 million.

The good news for whoever buys it next is that the CFO is finally getting hired.