The deadline kept moving, a sign that it stopped mattering. From Oct. 13 to Oct. 25 to TBD. Somewhere in there a bankruptcy filing quietly erased the numbers LIV Golf needed to keep going. The league was running a limbo contest in reverse, raising the bar so high Victor Wembanyama wouldn’t need to dip his head, and still nobody bothered to walk through.
That’s the gist of Wednesday’s reports, first the Financial Times then The Athletic, that LIV’s potential investor, BC Partners, has dropped its bid to launch “LIV 2.0.” No $300 million, no more lifeline, no more future. The obituaries will focus on the money—because money was one of the few things that made LIV relevant—or that this was sportswashing gone wrong, although that’s not quite true. What matters is the very thing LIV claimed to be about is what ultimately did it in.
LIV 2.0 was pitched as players owning roughly 53 percent of the league, with BC Partners, management and other investors splitting the rest. Go back to 2021 and 2022, when Greg Norman and Phil Mickelson and other recruits insisted that, no, this wasn’t a Saudi soft-power exercise. Professional golfers, they argued, were not getting a fair shake, that they were contractors stuck on tours that profited off their performance and celebrity and gave them little autonomy for what they provided. That’s why they spoke of franchise values and team equity as if that was the entire point, and that the tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions they were receiving were just down payments to the liberation of their profession.
More From Golf Digest
To be fair, on its deathbed LIV made good on that sermon, offering the keys to the league to anyone who was interested. They would be free from a sovereign wealth fund and all the entanglements that come from being associated with a problematic government. They would be their own bosses. By various accounts, somewhere in the range of 15 to 30 players expressed varying levels of interest.
But there’s a gap between curiosity and commitment, between wanting and having. Ownership, true ownership, brings clarity. When the money was big and endless and guaranteed and, more importantly, provided by someone else, “equity” is an abstraction people can throw around to sound smart. Yet the players were just employees, concerned only about if that money went into their accounts. Ownership? Well, that brings risk, especially of an entity limping into Chapter 11. Owners care about now and the immediate future and way down the road. They have to care about all the small things that they have no idea exist.
After it LIV prematurely ended its season in Indianapolis, I wrote that the nascent league created an artificial market, then pointed to its own extravagance as proof that the old system was broken. LIV players have solidified the argument. Given a true market test without a kingdom to inflate it, LIVers looked at the league they spent five years trying to sell and decided they didn’t want to buy it.
LIV backers, if any remain, will argue the players had no choice but to pass on LIV 2.0. The problem with that logic is that the PGA Tour has no appetite to let them back and the DP World Tour issued an ultimatum that the Jon Rahms, Sergio Garcias and Tyrrell Hattons could no longer double-dip. As such, players with nowhere to go should have been the ones most eager to own the league that wanted them.
There is also an irony in this, as LIV’s attempted poaching of DP World Tour events and sponsors helped spur the European circuit’s hardline response. LIV built its identity as alternatives to the establishment only to discover it needed the establishment’s help to survive. The players, to their credit, stayed consistent. They sued the PGA Tour in 2022 over antitrust issues, arguing they should be able to play wherever they want. Asked to give up that freedom to sign with LIV 2.0, they passed.
This does not make the players villains or hypocrites, at least on this matter, because they have a right to protect their career. It does strip LIV of its ideology. Labor movements do not dissolve when the boss tosses over the factory.
What goes down with LIV is the argument that justified it. Because revisionist history will come, and it will contend that LIV was actually a hero that corrected what was wrong in professional golf. But heroes have believers. LIV just had beneficiaries and when the goods ran dry so did the players faith in it.
In a New Jersey court on Thursday, LIV Golf is expected to move towards liquidating its remaining assets. It was built for $6 billion. The guys who once played there just told us what it was worth.