Now That the Saudis Have Pulled the Plug on LIV Golf, the Final Dollar Figures are Here and They are Staggering

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As Reags mentioned earlier, the death of LIV Golf came as a surprise to no one:

This venture was worse than on life support; it was pretty much stillborn from the first time it teed off. It just took the Saudi Public Investment Fund five seasons to figure that out. They could've kept pretending everything was just fine. Acted like this 5-year-old had a future, bought it school clothes and signed it up for Kindergarten when they should have been contacting Make-a-Wish (holy moly, this metaphor got grim fast, but I can't steer out of this rhetorical skid. I apologize). But keeping it going was getting insanely expensive, with essentially zero return on the investment. 

How expensive, you're wondering? I'm glad you asked. (In fact, I'm glad you're still talking to me after that analogy about the terminally ill preschooler.) For that information, let's go to the business journos:

Source - LIV Golf, backed by Saudi Arabia’s hefty Public Investment Fund, has paid out more than $3 billion to its players in tournament winnings, salaries and bonuses since its first tournament in 2022, according to calculations by Forbes, and that all seems about to come to an abrupt end. 

--LIV has paid out nearly $1.36 billion in prize money and championship bonuses, after netting out the 60% share of team prize money that is retained to cover team operating expenses, and at least $1.6 billion in guarantees and signing bonuses, according to Forbes estimates. 

--By the end of this season, if it is played out as originally scheduled, the total prize money pool will hit $1.59 billion and the total doled out will exceed $3.2 billion. 

--LIV spent lavishly at its inception on signing bonuses to lure several top golfers away from the PGA Tour, including reported estimates of $300 million for Spanish golfer Jon Rahm, $200 million for Phil Mickelson and $100 million for Brooks Koepka.

--It also immediately started offering the largest tournament purses in golf history, setting a new standard with $25 million per event (and one $50 million event in the first year), which grew to $30 million in 2026. 

--Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund is estimated to have poured $5 billion into LIV Golf since its inception.

All for a professional golf league to compete with the PGA that had no real audience, no TV ratings to speak, and no measurable cultural impact whatsoever. If you disagree with that statement, ask anyone hanging out at the 19th hole of your night league what they think was the greatest moment in LIV Golf history and see if anyone can name one. And avid golfers were supposed to be the target demo. 

That part around relevance is of utmost importance to the PIF because it's the whole reason this vanity project was begun in the first place. The Saudis certainly weren't motivated by profits. Otherwise they wouldn't have been bidding against themselves for the services of Rahm, Mickelson and Koepka. Does anyone really think they couldn't have signed them all for half of what they paid Phil alone? 

To put this investment in perspective, consider: 

--They could've bought an NFL team for $5 billion and owned it forever. Granted, it would have to be like Jacksonville or Arizona. But still. 

--They spent roughly as much in signing bonuses and prize money for 52 LIV Tour players under contract as the NHL spends in total salaries for an entire season. 

--For $5 billion, they could've built the Artemis II rocket, flew four humans around the moon and brought them safely back to Earth. And had a billion dollars left over for the next mission. 

--$5 billion is equal to 50 million $100 bills. That's 50 tons of C-notes. And did this with it:

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And the most brain-breaking number of all is how little they'll miss that $5,000,000,000. The PIF has total assets believed to be between $900 billion and a trillion dollars. So this little public relations investment cost them 0.5% of their cash reserves. Essentially a rounding error. They probably made more in interest on those funds in the time it took me to make sense of the scale of these numbers. 

In the long run, I think we'll all look back at this as a wild time in golf. Like a civil war that broke out, raged for a while, but in the end the established order was returned and everyone went back to their lives. 

On the one hand, we'll remember the total hypocrisy of the PGA, trying to demonize players who took the cash as somehow greedy and forever unclean when the Tour itself just agreed to take $1.5 billion in dirty money from the PIF. 

On the other, we'll remember a time when many/most of the top players in the world went into the ether for five full seasons, showing up only for majors and international team competitions. But otherwise became irrelevant for half a decade. 

And all so that an oil-rich nation could try to earn some goodwill in the Western world. And it would've been easier  and more effective to just send everyone in every golf-playing nation our cut of the 5 billion and not bothered with forming a rival league in the first place. You LIV and you learn. (OK, I'm sorrier for that than the dying kid thing. But I've been sitting on that pun for five years. It stays.)