35 billion down the drain, even the wealthy tycoons from the Middle East have suffered a major setback.

Can 350 billion RMB buy you a whole sport?

Deep-pocketed Saudi investors have spent four years trying. The answer is that they can sign star players, rewrite payrolls, force century-old giants to carry out overnight reforms, but they cannot necessarily win over audiences.

Recently, LIV Golf and its affiliated companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New Jersey, the United States. Court documents show that LIV Golf's assets are valued between 100 million and 500 million US dollars, while its liabilities stand between 500 million and 1 billion US dollars.

Over the past four years, money has never been a shortage for it. According to public data, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia has injected a total of about 5 billion US dollars into LIV Golf through affiliated entities, equivalent to about 350 billion RMB.

The equity structure diagram in the bankruptcy filing records a total equity of 5.269 billion US dollars. PIF is not only a financial investor, but also the de facto sole funder and ultimate controller. But now, the funder is no longer willing to keep the money coming.

On April 30, PIF announced that it would only provide LIV Golf with funds covering the remaining events of this season, and stop injecting additional equity capital afterwards. The official explanation given was that the significant long-term investment required by LIV Golf no longer aligns with PIF's current investment strategy.

A global professional league built from scratch by a sovereign wealth fund, which spent 5 billion US dollars to declare war on the PGA Tour, only took four years to go from reshaping the golf industry to appearing in bankruptcy court. In fact, before June, LIV Golf had almost no interest-bearing debt. The scary part is that once the capital transfusion stopped, it immediately lost its ability to survive.

The Barbarian That Tried to Break All the Rules

The story of LIV Golf is quite straightforward: initially, it was designed to serve the narrative function of reshaping Saudi Arabia's national image.

In 2016, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman put forward the "Saudi Vision 2030" initiative, and set a clear goal to get rid of the country's dependence on oil and reshape its national image. In the first few years of the initiative, sports, entertainment and large-scale infrastructure projects all undertook this narrative function, aiming to gain global visibility.

As a result, LIV Golf was born in 2021, with its first season kicking off in 2022. Its name is derived from the Roman numeral 54: each event originally only had 54 holes, no cut line, and all players started from different holes at the same time.

This format runs counter to traditional golf in every way: 54 holes instead of 72, no cut line instead of an elimination system, 12 fixed teams competing in team events instead of individual matches.

A traditional golf event can last for more than ten hours, but LIV Golf tried to compress the core broadcast to four or five hours, and fill the rest of the time with music festivals, concerts, drinks and parties. Its original slogan was straightforward and unapologetic: "Golf, but Louder".

What really sent shockwaves through the industry was not its competition format, but its real product: money.

Players on the traditional PGA Tour are similar to self-employed individuals, who pay for their own flights, hotels, coaches and team costs, and can only get prize money if they make the cut. LIV Golf, by contrast, offered huge signing bonuses, annual guaranteed payments, event prize money, and even team equity to players.

The prize pool for a single event is 25 million US dollars, several times higher than that of most PGA Tour events. Signing bonuses even reached nine figures. It is reported that Phil Mickelson's contract is worth about 200 million US dollars, Bryson DeChambeau's over 125 million US dollars, Dustin Johnson's about 125 million US dollars, and Brooks Koepka's about 100 million US dollars. It is estimated that LIV Golf spent about 1 billion US dollars just to recruit top players including Mickelson, DeChambeau, Koepka, Cameron Smith and Jon Rahm.

This strategy delivered immediate results. A number of Grand Slam champions left the PGA Tour, splitting men's professional golf in two. The PGA Tour suspended the playing privileges of the defecting players, and LIV Golf filed a countersuit accusing the tour of monopolistic practices. The conflict on the golf course soon escalated into disputes in courts, congress and television stations.

From a strategic perspective, LIV Golf did not achieve nothing. It forced the PGA Tour to substantially increase prize money, push forward the player equity plan, and make professional players realize for the first time that they are not only event participants, but also the core production factor of the sports league.

In 2024, the PGA Tour secured up to 3 billion US dollars in investment from Strategic Sports Group, led by Fenway Sports Group, with the first 1.5 billion US dollars already received, and nearly 200 players got the opportunity to become shareholders of PGA Tour Enterprises.

The Saudis proved one thing with 5 billion US dollars: professional golf is not unchangeable, it is just that no one was willing to pay the cost of change before. The problem is that reshaping an industry does not equal owning a well-performing company.

There is a detail in this design that is easy to ignore for outsiders: LIV never planned to support itself with broadcast fees, ticket sales and sponsorships from day one. Its business model is "direct supply from sovereign capital", and the entire significance of commercial revenue is to make its financial statements look like a viable business.

In other words, it is not a business, but a narrative asset packaged with seasonal financial reports.

It Bought Star Players, But Never Bought Audiences

The most appealing part of professional sports is that it seems to have three layers of leverage: scarce star players, media rights, and team value appreciation.

According to LIV Golf's vision, as long as it signs star players first, audiences will follow; when audiences come, TV stations and sponsors will pay; after revenue grows, teams will appreciate in value following the logic of NBA, NFL or F1 teams. This is the entire premise of its business model.

But after four years, the chain broke at the very first link.

In 2025, across seven Sundays that directly overlapped with the PGA Tour schedule, the PGA Tour had an average of 3.1 million viewers on CBS and NBC, while LIV Golf only had an average of 175,000 viewers on FOX, FS1 and FS2, a gap of nearly 18 times. Even when comparing only over-the-air networks, the viewership gap between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour still exceeded 6 times.

When star players switched platforms, audiences did not migrate proportionally.

The reason is that the content value of golf is not only determined by star players, but also comes from decades of event history, ranking point systems, Grand Slam qualification rules, course memories and stable viewing habits. LIV Golf can buy a Grand Slam champion, but it cannot buy the Grand Slam itself.

For a long time, LIV events were not eligible for official Official World Golf Ranking points. Its closed entry list, lack of open promotion channels, and the early 54-hole no-cut format made it very difficult to be incorporated into the existing competitive evaluation system.

Therefore, even if top players got more money, their world rankings kept dropping, and ordinary audiences could hardly understand what a LIV event actually decides besides the unusually high prize pool.

Similarly, the most valuable thing in golf tours is not star players, but competition suspense. LIV Golf offered guaranteed appearance fees, fixed lineups and huge prize pools, but did not provide sufficient competitive stakes. It eliminated the uncertainty for athletes, and also removed the sense of tension for audiences.

It was not until 2025 that the commercialization of LIV Golf began to show some progress. Court documents show that its sponsorship revenue grew from about 16 million US dollars in 2023 to 102 million US dollars in 2025, accounting for about 49% of its total revenue in that year; hosting fees paid by host cities and courses accounted for 22%, ticketing and hospitality accounted for 16%, and merchandise sales accounted for 5%. The truly critical media rights revenue only contributed about 5%.

Calculated based on the above structure, LIV Golf's total revenue in 2025 was only about 208 million US dollars. By the end of 2025, it had accumulated about 5 billion US dollars in net operating losses. 5 billion US dollars in capital investment did not bring a media rights business that matches the scale of its spending.

Another core narrative of LIV Golf was its team system. The league set up 13 teams including Crushers GC, 4Aces GC, and HyFlyers GC, where star players can serve as team captains and hold a small number of equity shares. The management's vision was that PIF would incubate the teams first, and then sell part of the shares to external investors. If each team could eventually be valued at hundreds of millions of US dollars, PIF could recoup part of its investment by selling shares, and LIV Golf would transform from a cash-burning event organizer to a sports asset platform. This narrative is very similar to F1. But F1 teams are valuable because seats are extremely scarce, the sport has mature global media rights revenue, long-standing fan culture and a clear cost cap.

LIV Golf's teams are basically artificially created by the league: the brand is designed by the league, player contracts are subsidized by the league, events are organized by the league, and most of the revenue depends on the league. What investors bought is not independent cash flow, but the right to keep believing that the parent company will continue to inject capital.

By the beginning of 2026, even though LIV Golf once envisioned that teams could reach a valuation of 300 million US dollars or even 1 billion US dollars, no team shares were actually sold to external investors.

On the eve of bankruptcy, this valuation bubble was completely burst.

On August 24, 2026, LIV Golf uniformly cancelled the minority team equity originally held by players and some sponsors, and merged the 13 teams back into the league system. The company stated that the move was to protect the tax assets formed by accumulated net operating losses.

What Comes After Bankruptcy

It is inaccurate to simply attribute the end of LIV Golf to the Saudis running out of money.

When PIF released its 2026-2030 strategy, its assets under management still exceeded 900 billion US dollars, with an annualized total shareholder return of over 7% since 2017. But no matter how much money a sovereign fund has, there is still opportunity cost. Now PIF is shifting its focus to sustainable value creation, emphasizing investment efficiency, financial returns, private capital participation, and driving the development of local Saudi industries.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia also needs to allocate capital for tourism, artificial intelligence, new energy, aviation, the 2034 World Cup and large-scale infrastructure projects. Under the new strategy, LIV Golf can no longer get unlimited patience from the fund.

After PIF announced the stop of long-term capital injection in April 2026, LIV Golf immediately hired restructuring lawyers from AlixPartners and investment bank Ducera, and promoted the project to more than 300 potential investors. 104 institutions signed non-disclosure agreements, about 30 conducted detailed due diligence, and only two finally submitted non-binding plans.

The winning bidder BC Partners plans to lead a 300 million US dollar investment in LIV 2.0. PIF, as a creditor, will provide no more than 49.6 million US dollars in debtor-in-possession financing during the bankruptcy process.

According to the current progress, LIV 2.0 will be roughly restructured with exit financing led by BC Partners together with potential minority investors. After the restructuring, the tour will hold 10 stops in 2027 with reduced prize money, keeping its event footprint in Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong China and England, while striving to retain its presence in the United States. In the end, players will hold majority equity, and individual commercial rights will return to the players themselves.

In short, the goal is to use lower cost and smaller scale to build a company that can be self-sufficient.

To be fair, there are some real hidden values in this plan. LIV Golf does have its own market: for example, the on-site audience of the Adelaide event rose from 77,000 in its first edition to 115,000 in 2026. In markets such as Australia and South Africa that were neglected by the PGA Tour, there is indeed real unmet demand for golf events.

But the numbers are still harsh. The old LIV had a net annual expenditure of about 1.2 billion US dollars, while the new LIV only raised 250 million to 350 million US dollars from the market. This is not extending the life of the original business, but a group of people deciding to build a much smaller company.

LIV Golf plans to exit Chapter 11 in early 2027, but the transaction still needs the approval of the court, PIF, BC Partners and a sufficient number of players. The restructuring agreement stipulates that the company must reach an acceptable support agreement with a certain number of players within 35 days after filing for bankruptcy.

What ultimately determines whether LIV Golf can survive is still the group of star players it bought with huge sums of money in the first place. Except this time, there are no nine-figure checks on the table.

5 billion US dollars has paid for a global benchmark of negative case studies. In the world of sports business, this is probably the most expensive lesson a sovereign wealth fund has ever bought.

This article is from WeChat official account "ChinaVenture", author: Zhang Xue, published with authorization from 36Kr.