Spare us the excuses: LIV Golf was always about the money

LIV Golf is nearly, nearly dead. Golfers have been fleeing on a daily basis over the past two weeks, and it seems almost certain that the briefly vaunted LIV 2.0 will never see the light of day. The league has announced that it intends to “transition to an orderly wind-down of its operations” and will not return in 2027.

If you’ve successfully excluded all things LIV from your life over the past few years, let me bring you up to speed. After blitzing more than £4bn on the venture, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) withdrew its funding earlier this year due to “macro dynamics”, it said in a statement, those dynamics presumably being the huge waste of time, money and aggressive energy put in.

The league filed for bankruptcy protection in September, before securing a fresh £300m in loans and investment from a London-based firm called BC Partners. The BC Partners executive in charge of LIV 2.0, Ted Goldthorpe, held a meeting at the final LIV event in Indianapolis last month where he pitched a new-look tour to the players. Evidently they weren’t convinced. One by one they have quit the tour, leaving BC Partners with little option but to pull out too.

It’s a strange one. Why don’t they want to play LIV Golf any more? Jon Rahm said he didn’t like that “it was going a bit away from team golf”. Lucas Herbert wasn’t convinced by the proposed schedule. Ian Poulter said he wanted to take time away from the game. Tyrrell Hatton simply said he wouldn’t be any part of it.

Just a shot in the dark here, but could it be a money thing? Because – and hear me out on this – one small but notable difference from LIV 1.0 is that the financial bloodletting would have to stop, that LIV 2.0 would need to become a self-sustaining business which pays players from the money it earns. Is that a part of the pitch which perhaps didn’t chime?

It certainly seems to be a source of discontent. While LIV burns to the ground, around a dozen of its former players, including Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson, are pursuing the Saudi PIF for severance payouts worth more than $100m.

“The PIF was an honourable business partner until what we regard as its abandonment of LIV golfers,” David Cornwell, Johnson’s lawyer, told The Athletic. Multimillionaires go into business with a brutal autocracy in a bid to become multibillionaires, only for the multimillionaires to be cut off by the brutal autocracy? It is a heartbreaking tale as old as time.

At least Johnson was one of the few LIV golfers to be transparent about his reasons for joining in the first place, saying he simply couldn’t refuse the chance to earn more money while playing fewer golf tournaments, an activity he has never seemed to be enthralled by.

But spare us talk about growing the game. Yes, some decent LIV crowds turned up in Australia and South Africa, and clearly there are markets left untapped by golf’s traditional tours. But let us not pretend anyone signed their contract to benefit the wider game. The vast majority of LIV money went not to grassroots projects but into the pockets of already wealthy golfers, and the overall effect on the professional game was deliberately destructive.

And don’t try to tell us it was all about team golf, which is fantastic, of course, when it’s done well. The Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup are proof of that, but they are immersed in people and place, in history and legacy, sporting fabric that cannot be replicated with only money and a marketing strategy. LIV’s teams were random word jumbles and it was impossible to muster the energy to care whether the Majesticks beat the Rangegoats.

Ultimately, part of what made LIV so appealing to players was the same element that stripped the competition of any authenticity as a sporting product. This was a league built not on meritocracy but layered with golden handshakes and safety nets. The message was, don’t worry, you’ll get your money.

Let us label LIV what it was: naked promotion for the Saudi regime, sportswashing in its purest form. Players were the actors and golf was the stage to present Saudi Arabia as a serious actor in the global sporting landscape. It was entirely transactional, and when that transaction stopped benefitting the benefactor, there was little of worth left behind.

The PGA Tour and DP World Tour should take firm stances against LIV players, although it appears many players will be able to step straight back on to the European version next year. That is despite DP World Tour boss Guy Kinnings and Rory McIlroy concurring this week that LIV had designs to “destroy” the DP World Tour as recently as eight months ago.

Amid LIV’s whimpering departure it is easy to forget the ferocity with which it arrived. The PGA Tour would have been on its knees had McIlroy and Tiger Woods not resisted. Rival players will argue they were two of the very few players with the financial clout to say no to contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which is true. They would argue they were among the few players prepared to protect the traditions of the game.

Those same sporting traditions are under threat wherever you look. Expensive sell-offs are happening across rugby and cricket as long-standing institutions take short-term investment in exchange for giving up slices of the game. Fifa’s attempt to sell off the World Cup was the most worrying of the genre, and yet the repercussions of that PR disaster are that the favourite to win the next Fifa presidential election is, after everything, Gianni Infantino.

I recently spoke to a member of the International Olympic Committee who insisted something similar could never happen to the Olympic Games. Yet only this week it was revealed that the US Olympic Committee, founded 1895, is seeking to sell off a stake in Team USA ahead of the 2028 LA Games.

Sport requires meaning to be commercially interesting, and much of that meaning is wrapped up in its lore. It is why McIlroy wept on Augusta National’s 18th green last year, finally grasping history that he had tried and so often failed to reach. There was an intense jeopardy that accompanied each fateful shot that afternoon and it made for absorbing sporting drama.

LIV failed to understand this, but its demise should be a warning, because rarely has sport been more open to outside influences trying to profit from its cultural power, either financially or, in the case of nation states, through the benefits of association. LIV was “half a good idea, poorly executed”, as McIlroy put it. But it came very close to ripping up the entire fabric of golf, and it is a pattern playing out in big and small ways across the sporting world.

So perhaps the players can spare us the obfuscation. LIV lived because of eye-watering quantities of Saudi money, the fossil fuel that powered its existence. And ultimately it is dying because the money dried up.