LIV Golf’s Saudi Funding Ends: How a Billion-Dollar Golf Disruption Flopped Despite Star Power

When LIV Golf launched in 2022, skeptics doubted a new professional golf tour could survive commercially, even with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) bankrolling it and the backing of global power brokers. On Wednesday, the PIF announced it would no longer fund LIV Golf after the 2024 season, validating those doubts.

As a soft-power strategy disguised as sports entertainment, LIV Golf underperformed. Yet it wasn’t a complete failure—it succeeded in distributing financial incentives to key figures. The PGA Tour, criticized for being stagnant and exploitative, was vulnerable to competition. But LIV Golf’s approach was less about improving golf and more about disruption: flooding an established industry with venture capital to fracture it profitably.

The results were mixed at best. LIV Golf’s signature changes—54-hole, three-day events and a party atmosphere featuring music like the Chainsmokers—alienated purists without winning over new fans. The league’s real innovation was blending sports with the ethos of Trump-era excess: lavish, obviously corrupt, and executed with visible desperation.

From the start, LIV Golf was a high-budget nuisance lawsuit masquerading as a sports league. The partnership between Phil Mickelson and Saudi Arabia produced appalling optics, even by the standards of modern sports business. Yet its backers—disgruntled golfers, Donald Trump’s inner circle, and wealthy Gulf investors—bet that money and influence could override the league’s flaws.

That gamble failed. The league’s inability to secure lasting fan engagement or commercial stability proved that no amount of capital could compensate for a product that felt both doomed and inevitable in its failure.