Michael La Sasso’s final putt had barely disappeared before the champagne came out, his teammates dousing the former NCAA champion as he captured LIV Golf’s season finale in Indianapolis. The extravagance carried an uncomfortable dissonance, considering blue-collar workers were asking LIV to pay for labor already performed while millionaires emptied bottles over one another in celebration of additional millions. Still, LIV had reached a finish many doubted it would see, and La Sasso had earned his moment, even if this was almost certainly the last time anyone could spray champagne and pretend the league had a future worth toasting.
Because Sunday marked the end of LIV Golf as the sport had known it. An entity bearing the name may continue, with a schedule and teams and maybe a familiar face or two. But golf’s civil war is effectively over and what remains is worth accounting: What LIV ultimately represented and what it changed, whom it exposed and, after the billions spent and a sport fractured in two, what the hell any of this was actually for?
There is no shortage of suspects in LIV Golf’s likely demise. The league’s five-year run was littered with strategic blunders, inflated claims and minor-league execution, a tradition maintained through its apparent final week by misspelled signs around the Indianapolis grounds. Those failures deserve their share of the blame. They were survivable for as long as Saudi Arabia remained willing to pay for them. Yet weak ratings did not kill LIV. Neither did an inferior product, public indifference or the human-rights controversy that followed the league everywhere it went. Had ordinary market judgment possessed that authority, LIV would have disappeared years ago. LIV was wounded by forces that had almost nothing to do with golf and could do nothing to save itself once those forces turned against it. Saudi Arabia’s investment priorities shifted as its sovereign wealth fund began emphasizing domestic commitments and reassessing foreign expenditures amid a regional war and broader economic pressure. The same structure that allowed LIV to operate outside the laws of a normal business left it dependent upon a government whose interests were always larger than the league. Those who insisted LIV was never truly a golf league had their argument affirmed by the manner of its undoing.
The decline began as a slow drip after the Public Investment Fund announced in April that its support would end. LIV canceled its New Orleans event, publicly citing summer heat and a desire to avoid competing with the World Cup. Reports of unpaid vendors emerged. LIV CEO Scott O’Neil endured a series of halting media appearances in which his abundant optimism was rarely accompanied by supporting detail. A potentially costly lawsuit from the Premier Golf League alleged that LIV had appropriated the concept it spent billions trying to establish. Players and agents began contacting the PGA Tour about possible returns, only to discover that the welcome mat had been rolled up.
Then the drips became a current and LIV began drowning in its own absurdity.
The league initiated WARN proceedings that laid the legal groundwork for mass layoffs. Its Asian Tour relationship fractured, while the DP World Tour informed LIV members that its partial amnesty would not continue. After months of industry certainty that the team championship in Michigan would never be played, LIV waited until the week before the event to formally cancel it. Players reportedly experienced delays in prize payments. A concert series was scrapped days before its scheduled opening, and the individual purse in Indianapolis was cut in half without public explanation. Reports emerged that LIV officials were resigned to losing Jon Rahm. Tyrrell Hatton selected Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” as his walk-up song at the party hole, then reportedly made clear inside the locker room that the choice was no accident.
The human cost is easy to lose beneath the fortunes and geopolitical stakes, but it exists beyond the players who leave with generational wealth. One lawsuit filed this week alleges that LIV offered a small-business owner $200,000 against more than $1 million in unpaid bills, a proposal that effectively asked an ordinary operator to absorb the consequences of a league’s recklessness. For LIV’s opulence its a rounding error; for a small company, it can determine whether employees are paid, families remain secure and the business survives. LIV’s own workers have endured a quieter version of the same uncertainty, listening as leadership preaches hope while offering few details capable of supporting it. They read the reports, witness the shrinking schedule and understand that their jobs may disappear within weeks. The players can retreat to their guarantees and contemplate where they will compete next. Vendors and employees are left to wonder how LIV’s collapse will follow them home.
Even on the final Sunday, the most prominent LIV stories had little to do with its season champions. An Indiana public course announced that Harold Varner III and his group had been asked to leave earlier in the week following a dispute over whether six players could play together. (Varner disputed portions of the course’s account.) Later, video emerged of Bubba Watson confronting a fan during the tournament. These consumed more oxygen than the competition supposedly deciding LIV’s year.
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LIV did not go quietly, exactly. Its final days retained the petulance that had defined much of its existence. Lee Westwood responded to Rory McIlroy’s skepticism about the value of returning LIV players by citing his sponsor invitation into the upcoming Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. Left unmentioned was that Westwood’s invitation did not reflect newfound competitive demand so much as his relationship with the sponsor. O’Neil accused a DP World Tour official of contacting LIV players to discuss their options, while subsequent reporting indicated the traffic had largely moved in the opposite direction. He also offered an unlikely case for peace, repeatedly insisting LIV now wanted to “complete, not compete” with golf’s existing ecosystem. Bryson DeChambeau asked the sport to give LIV “one more shot,” arguing that the league and its players still offered value.
Those overtures found little sympathy across the professional game. LIV had attempted to raid national opens and established DP World Tour events for its proposed “LIV 2.0” schedule. DeChambeau, who participated in litigation against the PGA Tour, expressed surprise that the same organization would not immediately recognize what his return could do for it. To those who had spent five years absorbing LIV’s lawsuits, poaching attempts and unsustainable purse escalation, the sudden call for unity felt less like diplomacy than the desperation of a blitzkrieg that had finally run out of ammunition.
And yet this ending feels curiously subdued for an enterprise once marketed as “Golf, But Louder.” Perhaps that is because the three men most responsible for setting the fire were nowhere near it as the flames receded. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Public Investment Fund and LIV’s architect, stepped down as chairman when PIF announced its exit in April. Greg Norman, who used LIV to prosecute his decades-long grievances against the PGA Tour and displayed an almost athletic ability to intensify controversy whenever he spoke, had already been removed as CEO. Phil Mickelson, the league’s most eager player-evangelist at its inception, spent most of the season away while attending to a family matter, an absence now overshadowed by an allegation of inappropriate conduct that had him removed from his home club. Even Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed, two early signings who supplied LIV with a measure of competitive credibility, left earlier in the year to pursue their returns to the traditional game.
In the resulting vacuum, DeChambeau became the league’s principal advocate. His resurgence in the majors, popularity through YouTube and willingness to engage fans made him better suited to the role than anyone remaining. But DeChambeau does not possess Norman’s appetite for combat, Mickelson’s instinct for provocation or Al-Rumayyan’s access to a trillion-dollar fund. His deepest allegiance has always been to the construction and protection of his own brand. He has worked to keep LIV alive because its survival serves that brand and because the PGA Tour has shown little interest in welcoming him back. His support should not be mistaken for martyrdom.
The restraint surrounding Indianapolis therefore carried its own message. The chest-beating and bombast of 2022 had disappeared. LIV no longer acted like an insurgency certain of victory and instead resembled a league that had finally looked at the scoreboard and understood that the game had moved beyond its control. Still, O’Neil continues to say that LIV has a future. In the most generous interpretation, he may be right. He has sought between $250 million and $350 million in new financing and says the league has secured a lead investor, widely understood to be BC Partners, the London-based private-equity firm connected to GSE Worldwide, an agency representing a significant portion of LIV’s roster. Nearly every meaningful detail remains unresolved: whether the financing is equity or debt, whether additional investors must join and whether enough prominent players must recommit before the agreement becomes real. LIV needs golfers exploring escape routes to persuade outsiders that the property remains worth saving.
An entity bearing LIV’s name may survive, but it would operate with a fraction of the former backing and perhaps even less of the limited star power that gave the league relevance. The departures of Rahm and Hatton would further weaken an already shallow field, while a diminished schedule and roster could threaten LIV’s recently acquired Official World Golf Ranking accreditation. LIV has spent years rejecting the exhibition label but the 2027 incarnation may finally earn it as a showcase built around DeChambeau, former rank-and-file members and a scattering of YouTube personalities, staged beneath familiar logos with considerably less money and even less consequence.
Rahm was the only true star LIV managed to add after its original swoop. The promised procession never came. Scottie Scheffler stayed. Rory McIlroy stayed. So did Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Tommy Fleetwod, Xander Schauffele, Cam Young, Rickie Fowler and Viktor Hovland. LIV’s threat depended as much upon fear of the next defection as the strength of the roster it assembled. Once that fear subsided and the Saudi treasury closed, the menace disappeared with it.
The more unsettling question was why professional golf had come so close to buckling before either happened.
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Saudi Arabia’s analysis of professional golf revealed an understanding that had eluded industry veterans, media observers and governing bodies alike. Beneath the tradition and mythology, the elite game had become a sophisticated commercial platform whose competitive product could be used to sell almost anything. LIV did not create the weaknesses in that model. It found the load-bearing cracks and applied pressure.
The PGA Tour schedule was bloated, its television product repetitive and its leadership almost philosophically opposed to creative risk. Too many tournaments looked and sounded the same. By the time one champion raised a trophy Sunday, another event was arriving without much explanation for why it deserved anyone’s attention. The tour had confused familiarity with devotion and possessed no practical defense against an opponent willing to lose billions, or against accomplished players willing to exchange portions of their reputations for additional zeros in their bank accounts. The first departures made the wall appear weaker than anyone had imagined. Dustin Johnson left. Koepka, DeChambeau and Cam Smith followed. Rahm’s eventual signing delivered the sharpest blow because he remained in his prime, still winning majors and positioned to help define the next decade.
But the knockout punch never arrived. LIV’s source of strength remained inseparable from the reason much of the audience rejected or ignored it. PGA Tour players were not an exploited labor force whose true value had finally been recognized. The prices LIV paid bore little relationship to the revenue those golfers generated. LIV created an artificial market, then cited its own extravagance as evidence that the existing system had been unjust.
There was cruelty in professional golf’s traditional arrangement, but also an honesty. A player began each week with nothing guaranteed and was paid according to where he finished. Status had to be earned, maintained and occasionally recovered. LIV regarded that uncertainty as a labor defect without appreciating how much of the sport’s drama lived inside it.
Guaranteed contracts insulated players from urgency. Poor play carried little consequence. The purses were so enormous and so detached from public interest that the figures became abstractions. LIV’s most consequential moments occurred away from the course, when a player received an offer and decided how much money was required to abandon his previous life. The signings made news. The golf that followed rarely did. Once the transaction was complete, everything else felt secondary.
The attention surrounding those acquisitions also created a false impression of the league LIV had assembled. At its strongest, the roster possessed perhaps a half dozen current stars or very good players capable of contending at the game’s biggest tournaments. The rest consisted of average professionals, recognizable names whose best golf had passed and players largely unknown beyond the sport’s most devoted audience. The teams reflected the same misunderstanding. LIV assigned names, colors, captains and logos, then spoke of franchise valuations as though identity naturally followed branding. But allegiance accumulates. It forms through place and memory, through shared suffering and the stories one generation hands to another. LIV wanted the benefits of tradition on startup time. Its franchises represented little beyond the players temporarily assigned to them, while its captains resembled highly compensated employees adorned with ceremonial titles. Three years after Johnson’s 4Aces team won LIV’s championship, he could not name the other three players who had shared it with him.
Some players prospered competitively. Hatton sharpened his stature, Joaquin Niemann sustained his ascent and Talor Gooch became one of the league’s most accomplished early performers. LIV also allowed Anthony Kim’s return, and his win this year resonated beyond the league’s confines. They were exceptions rather than evidence of a functioning competitive league. Their success could not overcome the broader impression that LIV’s results carried little meaning beyond the men paid to produce them, that LIV mattered most, and sometimes only, to those whose pockets it had lined.
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There remained a higher barrier, present before LIV launched its first tee shot and impossible for much of golf to clear. The league was financed by Saudi Arabia as part of the kingdom’s broader movement into global sports, a soft-power campaign shadowed by accusations of sportswashing. Every tournament existed beneath the weight of Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record: the repression of dissidents, restrictions imposed upon women, the criminalization of LGBTQ people, the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. These were the political realities surrounding the government that made LIV possible, regardless of how often league officials dismissed them as the inventions of hostile media or jealous tour officials.
The players tried to narrow the conversation. They were golfers who merely wanted to—everyone together now!—“grow the game.” They suggested sport could encourage change, although few could explain how. Some pointed to the compromises of Western governments and corporations, establishing hypocrisy elsewhere without resolving their own. Others admitted the choice was financial, an answer whose honesty confirmed the league’s transactional character. Their invocations of family carried a particular hollowness, as the suffering of other families could be compartmentalized so their already-comfortable families might become unfathomably rich. Their names and accomplishments gave the kingdom an association a conventional public-relations campaign could not purchase as effectively, leading to moments like Mickelson shouting, "Great shot, Your Excellency!" and DeChambeau asking fans to find a pathway to forgiveness when confronted with Saudi Arabia's 9/11 ties.
The campaign arguably backfired at first, acquainting more Americans with Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record. Yet declaring the project a failure would misunderstand how sportswashing works. LIV strengthened the kingdom’s relationship with President Donald Trump, whose properties hosted the league when much of American golf wanted nothing to do with him. That alliance ultimately helped provide Saudi officials access to the White House during Trump’s second term.
The greater return was quieter. The moral outrage of 2022, briefly reignited by the surprise framework agreement a year later, gradually dissolved into fatigue. Golf’s audience had little appetite for a conflict consumed by endless whataboutism and obscured by global economics, institutional hypocrisy and relentless speciousness. Sports are supposed to impose a little order upon an incoherent world. LIV repeatedly confronted fans with the nonsense they had turned to the game to escape. Eventually, many stopped arguing, stopped listening or stopped caring altogether.
This is sportswashing’s true power. It wears resistance down until outrage becomes exhaustion, exhaustion hardens into numbness and moral emergency fades into background noise. Acceptance is unnecessary because familiarity finishes the work.
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Those who resisted LIV will be tempted to treat its collapse as vindication. The PGA Tour remained standing after an opponent with limitless capital exhausted its benefactor’s patience, but it emerged with scars of its own. Nowhere is that more apparent than the tour’s current landscape, where an executive with 20-plus years experience in the NFL, Brian Rolapp, is now in the midst of adjusting to the new world order. Signature events were conceived as a retention mechanism, surrounding the game’s biggest names with larger purses, protected access and greater security. The logic made sense amid an emergency. With time, temporary fortifications began to resemble permanent walls. Wealth and opportunity became concentrated among players who already enjoyed an abundance of both, while the route into their tier narrowed for everyone below. Professional golf had long promised meritocracy. That covenant now shares space with an insulated class whose advantages were born from panic and may remain long after the danger passes.
The players who stayed carried much of that burden. They declined enormous offers, defended uncertain leadership and continued competing while colleagues attempted to weaken the institution beneath them. Loyalty brought little applause and even less protection. Then leadership unveiled a framework agreement with the same Saudi fund it had spent the previous year casting as a threat to golf’s values, surprising the membership whose fidelity it had repeatedly summoned. Those players may soon watch defectors pursue passage back into the system they sued, belittled and tried to destabilize. The sport may ultimately require reconciliation, but any honest return must recognize that the choices were different and carried different consequences.
The framework agreement also damaged the tour’s reputation. Its leaders invoked patriotism, September 11 families, tradition and the sanctity of competition, then entered negotiations once Saudi money appeared capable of securing the institution’s future. Golf’s guardians had treated principle as another form of leverage, useful until circumstances demanded a different posture. The next request for loyalty will arrive burdened by the memory of how readily the tour bargained with the source of the threat once self-preservation came into view.
Five divided seasons extracted a competitive cost that no reunification can restore. The best players gathered consistently only at the majors, leaving the rest of the calendar diminished. Careers are brief, and rivalries require repetition to acquire weight. Seasons that should have created shared history vanished into disputes over contracts, lawsuits, world-ranking points and eligibility. However the game is reassembled, those missing confrontations belong to the permanent record now. There are years professional golf simply did not get to have.
The audience absorbed the least visible loss. Golf entered the LIV era with momentum it had sought for decades, buoyed by millions of new and returning players drawn to the game during the pandemic. At the moment professional golf should have invited them into the cadence of a season, it handed them a labor dispute between multimillionaires and a sovereign wealth fund. The devoted audience endured it. Casual fans had neither the appetite nor the obligation.
That fatigue may prove LIV’s most durable legacy. The fight corroded trust among players, institutions and the public, leaving every constituency smaller in spirit when it ended. LIV’s survival was never required for it to alter professional golf. It only had to damage the ground where the old order once stood.
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Against that notion it remains difficult to acknowledge, much less quantify, whatever good emerged from this era of turbulence. The reforms cannot be separated from the damage required to produce them. But it would be obtuse to say nothing positive came. LIV underlined that underserved areas of the globe are thirsty for professional golf. Wherever the sport goes from here, Australia and South Africa should remain in the conversation, and the PGA Tour needs to make a good-faith effort to elevate its partnership with Europe. The threat also forced the tour to confront its stagnant presentation, incoherent season and prolonged neglect of those who follow it. It now has a leader whose stated true north is the fan, a constituency long deprioritized behind sponsors, television partners and player preferences. More coherent competition, sharper presentation and renewed attention to the people who make the enterprise matter are worthwhile developments.
The schism produced an inexhaustible stream of content, much of it comic, some of it surreal, all of it revealing. It turned boardrooms, courtrooms, private jets and press conferences into theater. Beneath the craziness was a more meaningful exposure. A game that speaks endlessly about honor was forced to watch its most prominent figures encounter choices that made integrity costly. Some demonstrated that their principles could withstand pressure; others discovered that conviction became negotiable. The divide clarified character, though rarely as cleanly as either side preferred. Golf learned who its people were when the virtues they celebrated finally demanded something from them.
That history will complicate the return of some LIV players. Koepka’s reception proved that sports fans can be forgiving when forgiveness is sought. His circumstances were different: He pursued a return while others now appear interested chiefly because the subsidy has vanished. Five years of sportswashing, gaslighting, litigation and greed will not be forgotten simply because the checks stopped arriving. LIV enriched its players, compromised organizations and bent professional golf around the force of its money. Now the music has faded, and many who insisted they were building the future are searching for passage back to the world they tried to destroy.
When the last of the champagne had been sprayed and his TV interview complete, La Sasso stepped off the green and disappeared from view. The celebration left its usual residue of soaked shirts, sweetened skin, the tackiness that follows manufactured joy. A shower handles some of that. Time will determine what else comes off and what has soaked too deep.