LIV Golf Spent About $5 Billion in Five Years. Now It's Selling Off the Trademarks
The Saudi-backed league told a bankruptcy court Thursday it will liquidate after its last rescue investor walked. The money is gone; the golfers kept theirs.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
LIV Golf's lawyers told a New Jersey bankruptcy court on Thursday, Nov. 5, that the league is giving up on restructuring and moving to full liquidation, with the wind-down set to begin by Monday. The last hope, BC Partners, had pledged $300 million in August and then pulled it, deciding there weren't enough golfers, or enough famous ones, to make the thing work. Its remaining assets, including real estate and trademarks, will be sold.
It's a sad end for a league that was never short of anything except a reason to exist. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund had poured in around $5 billion since 2022 before announcing in April that it was done, and LIV filed for Chapter 11 in September. Five billion dollars. You could have bought every golf course in Ohio, and Ohio, if you'd asked Don Jr. nicely, might not even have been a state.
And what did the money buy? It bought Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm, and it bought a few years of the sport's grown men calling each other traitors at country clubs. It bought team names and shotgun starts and music on the tee, which is the first time in history golf tried to be cool and the last time anybody will let it. When it came time to sign up for a LIV 2.0, The Athletic reported, Rahm and Tyrell Hatton said no thanks. They'd already been paid. Even a mercenary knows when the war is over.
There's something almost noble about it, if you squint, the way there's something noble about a man who bets his house on a horse named Sure Thing. Here was a project that spent like a government and drew like a public-access fishing show. The players took the checks, the fans took a pass, and the PGA Tour took a nap and woke up stronger.
Now the trademarks go on the block, and somewhere a man in a golf cart is going to buy the LIV logo for his son's bar mitzvah. That's the circle of life in professional sports. Money can buy you the best players in the world, but it can't buy you anyone who wants to watch them, and that is the only lesson golf has ever taught anybody for free.