LIV Was Always About Greed More Than Golf

The most remarkable thing about the era of LIV Golf, a five-year run characterized by near-parodic blunders and missteps, is that leadership and its public-facing talent don’t appear to have learned any lessons from their many failures.From the beginning, the upstart league, established in 2021 as a rival to the dominant PGA Tour, was plagued by its own ineptitude. It’s only fitting—after LIV’s newfound lifeline, private investment firm BC Partners, reneged on a $300 million investment—that the brand’s figureheads are now celebrating the end by taking a victory lap. Tone-deaf doesn’t begin to describe it.LIV CEO Scott O’Neil—who took over for original boss and Major winner Greg Norman in January of 2025 and was faced with finding new cash flow after Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund announced in April that it would no longer finance the operation—clearly exists in a different reality than our own. “Together, our team delivered world-class individual and team competitions across five continents, built a global business, secured pathways to The Open and U.S. Open… and built a league capable of attracting both elite and rising talent from around the world,” he said in a statement late last week. It’s unclear if the farewell tour will continue, though, an even newer report suggests that BC is looking to purchase a bankruptcy loan from LIV’s current owners. If this Hail Mary works, LIV’s future would look much different than the one O’Neil has promised.Another way to look at it? One of LIV’s biggest accomplishments was that the league, despite its intentions to diversify the game and bring fun back into a sport that had come to personify privilege and exclusivity, inadvertently consolidated the PGA Tour’s power as a monopolistic behemoth now primed to solidify its status as the only league in town. They helped usher in a new era of leadership and investment for the Tour, including the introduction of CEO Brian Rolapp, who is by all accounts the most well-liked and accomplished boss it’s had in quite some time.Erick W. Rasco/Getty ImagesLIV also managed to tarnish the reputations of its biggest stars. Jon Rahm, who was vehemently opposed to the dog and pony show when it was announced, only to sheepishly take a bag of blood money so big his great grandchildren will never have to work a day in their lives, is now one of the game’s great “What If?” stories. Prior to the US Open at Brookline Country Club in June 2022, the defending champion was asked about his thoughts on the upstart league. “Money is great,” he said. But Rahm and his wife thought about it further. “Will our lifestyle change if I got $400 million? No, it will not change one bit.” Just over a year later, he defected to LIV.Then there’s Phil Mickelson, who was poised to become a fixture of the American Ryder Cup team and widely considered a shoo-in to hold a cushy job as an analyst for golf’s biggest broadcasting events. Upon joining the league, he admitted in a conversation with Alan Shipnuck that Saudi Arabia was a terrible bedfellow. (Shipnuck and Mickelson have disagreed over whether the comments were on or off the record.) “They killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay,” he explained. But there was a caveat: LIV was simply a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.” Miraculously, he got that part right.Prize money on the PGA Tour is greater than ever, the Tour’s main events have recalibrated, and its season-ending championship series has been completely reimagined. Mickelson won’t be allowed within 100 miles of it.The league’s biggest attraction, Bryson DeChambeau, is theoretically the worst-situated of the game’s many turncoats, though he’s probably more excited about growing his YouTube channel than he is about playing golf anyway. No one’s put their reputation on the line for this gaggle of buffoons quite like DeChambeau, who spoke proudly about how LIV was “growing the game” and “bringing team golf to the world.” This past weekend, he shared a statement on the dissolution of LIV. “I still believe in team golf,” he wrote. “It may look different in the future, but I still believe it’s essential to growing the game.” A loyal foot soldier, even from the grave.It was always about the money. Nothing more, nothing less. This was a cash grab of epic proportions, and golfers not good enough to earn their keep on the PGA Tour took a life raft and briefly found themselves in possession of luxury superyachts. Then, low tide left them holding bags of cash and not much else. Was it worth it? For most of these golfers, probably. They were past their primes when LIV began; they’re still past the primes now, and just a helluva lot richer.Jamie SquireThe league positioned itself as a disruptor, and disrupted so poorly that they’ve turned the PGA Tour into the strongest version of itself we’ve seen since Tiger Woods was at his peak. All that bloviating about the good of LIV Golf from its loudest talking heads is a bunch of nonsense.It’s hard to tell if these statements are one last line of defense or more genuine delusion from LIV’s last advocates. They came in with the idea of sticking it to the PGA Tour, which at the time was facing bleak circumstances, bogged down in nonsense before redirecting its energy towards batting this gnat into extinction. Ultimately, LIV helped the PGA Tour save itself.Now it’s gone for good, and five billion dollars later, we’re not gonna remember a damn thing about it. Not the players, not the leadership, and surely not all the ways they supposedly grew the game while merely growing their own bank accounts.