LIV Golf Has Spent Four Years Disrupting Golf. Now It Has to Build a Business.
LIV's new investment deal gives the league a future beyond Saudi funding, but turning players into owners raises as many questions as it answers.
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Written by David Skilling
As you’re all likely aware, LIV Golf recently came under serious financial pressure, and now has to prove it can become a sustainable sports business.
This week, there were meetings between players and executives to discuss the leagues future direction, but they apparently offered little clarity over investment or the future of the league’s team championship, however, twenty-four hours later, LIV announced it had secured a new lead investor, with CEO Scott O’Neil explaining that the league’s next chapter will make players the majority equity holders, which opens the doors for a very different business model.
At first glance, it sounds like a positive outcome for the league and the players, with LIV securing fresh capital after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund decided to end its financial backing, and the revelation that players will now own most of it. In an era where sport is talking about athletes having more control over the businesses they help create, LIV, although not by choice, is now making that idea a reality. That said, I don’t think that’s the whole story.
LIV launched in 2022 with an advantage no new sports league had ever really enjoyed. It didn’t need to convince investors, negotiate every commercial deal from a position of hope or wonder whether it had enough money to survive another season. PIF removed those questions with its deep pockets so the league could focus almost entirely on attracting some of the world’s best golfers because funding wasn’t the obstacle.
Whether you loved LIV or hated it, that financial firepower changed professional golf. Players who would never have considered leaving the PGA Tour suddenly had contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. Prize money increased across the sport, the PGA Tour was forced into strategic changes, and conversations that once seemed impossible became unavoidable. Disrupting golf turned out to be the easy part.
However, building a sports business that survives without unlimited funding is a completely different challenge, and that’s the phase LIV has transitioned into. The new investor provides breathing room and removes the immediate question of whether the league reaches 2027, but it also shifts where the risk sits.
Until now, that risk belonged to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. If LIV lost money while trying to establish itself, PIF absorbed the cost, but under the proposed new structure, players will become the majority owners. Ownership sounds empowering until you remember that equity only has value if the business underneath it becomes valuable. That’s the question I keep coming back to. Owners of what?
A successful LIV, with growing media rights, sponsorship revenue and franchise values, could make those stakes incredibly valuable over time, but a league that struggles commercially creates a very different outcome, because equity certificates don’t automatically replace guaranteed cash.
That’s particularly relevant here because reports have suggested some players are still owed substantial sums under the contracts they originally signed. Jon Rahm’s deal, for example, was worth around $300 million, and multiple reports have suggested around $150 million is still outstanding. An equity stake for future value is very different to a guaranteed payment of $150m.
If players are being offered ownership alongside, or instead of, contractual certainty, then they’re no longer thinking purely as athletes; they’re being asked to think like entrepreneurs, which adds a lot more pressure and splits focus.
There are some benefits to that approach, because business owners have a heightened interest in growing audiences, attracting sponsors, and building something that’ll be worth more in ten years than it is today; those incentives are healthy for LIV if it wants to become a genuine long-term competitive sports competition.
Equally, entrepreneurship comes with risk, and that’s a trade-off athletes don’t usually make after signing their contracts. Startup founders accept equity because they’re building a company from day one; LIV’s golfers joined as talent and risked their reputations due to the attraction of guaranteed contracts, which removed much of the uncertainty professional golfers usually face. Now they’ve found themselves as owners, taking on the risk of business ownership. That’s a huge shift.
Finding a lead investor is an important step, especially when many people assumed the league’s future was in serious doubt. But the harder work starts now, because investors eventually expect returns, owners expect their equity to appreciate, and sports leagues ultimately become valuable by convincing fans, broadcasters and sponsors that they’ll still matter decades from now.
LIV has already proved it can change professional golf, but the real test now is whether it can build something its golfer/owners can be proud of, rather than just something they were once paid to join.
I can imagine this is quite a stressful time for people like Bryson DeChambeau, John Rahm, and Tyrrell Hatton, knowing that their reputations took a hit with the breakaway league, and rather than having the security of guaranteed money, they’re not on very shaky foundations. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.
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