LIV Golf Given A Few More Days To Climb Out Of The Grave

It is getting harder to find header photos for these LIV Golf updates. The LIV Golf 2026 season wrapped, prematurely, back in August, when the broke promotion hastily jammed its individual and team championships into one final, somewhat quieter tournament in Indianapolis, and then folded up the tents and laid off basically everyone who is not a lawyer or CEO Scott O’Neil. Everything that’s happened since then has taken place in conference rooms and bankruptcy courts. There are only so many interesting images featuring that damn logo up there, and we have already used or considered all of them. Finding another photo is stressful and tedious.

It’s delightful to think that soon there might be a final LIV Golf blog. O’Neil has yet to formally secure investment for what he has dubbed LIV 2.0. He has an investor, an “alternative investment management” firm called BC Partners, but there are still balls in the air and nothing is final. BC Partners set a deadline of Oct. 25 for the promotion to secure commitments from enough players for the reshaped tour to remain viable. If you check your calendar this morning you will note that Oct. 25 was yesterday. Financial Times reported Sunday that “around 15 players have expressed interest” in remaining with LIV Golf, which is short of the “30 to 40 players” sought by BC Partners.

This is one of those glass-half-empty situations: You will note that 15 is a lot less than 40, and is thus not ideal, and is in fact less than half of ideal. But 15 is also not nothing, and not nothing was evidently enough for O’Neil and BC Partners to extend the deadline to the end of this week. Financial Times calls the tentative commitments of these players “enough interest for the start-up league to seek a final deal in the coming days.”

More is known, at present, about the group of players who have opted out of LIV 2.0 than about those 15 or so who have maintained at least one cocked eyebrow. Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton, Ian Poulter, Louis Oosthuizen, David Puig, and several others have all publicly announced their departures. Of greater immediate concern to O’Neil than either of those groups is a third one, made up of some big-name professionals, who The Athletic reports are holding out for a greater share of the money they were promised back when LIV Golf was being financed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Some number of these guys—including Dustin Johnson, one of the three or four biggest stars to have joined the tour—have not formally closed the book on LIV 2.0, but refuse to join without first extracting cash from LIV’s ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. The Athletic reported that more than 10 players, led by Johnson, have banded together in a group effort to negotiate what they consider “severance deals,” not from O’Neil and BC Partners, but from Yasir Al-Rumayyan and the PIF.

These players know the leverage they have, and applying this pressure is part of their campaign. A lawyer representing the group told The Athletic that these players joined the upstart tour in the first place because the PIF pitched them enormous paydays, windfalls that obviously would’ve been impossible without the sovereign wealth fund’s extraordinary largesse. “Given their reliance on these promises, our group seeks a sensible severance payment as part of the wind-up of LIV,” the lawyer, David Cornwall, told The Athletic. “The decision to release potential claims against the PIF and join LIV 2.0 will be influenced largely by how the PIF manages the wind-up of LIV 1.0.”

Mapping out who is responsible for what in this mess is confusing. The PIF told The Athletic that they consider themselves “an equity investor in LIV Golf that has ceased investing,” and said that they are not engaged in discussions with the group of holdout players. Financial Times says there is at least one other group, represented by the law firm Reed Smith, that is negotiating separately but along the same lines, for a cash settlement in exchange for abandoning their contractual disputes in bankruptcy proceedings. What would this resolution look like? Earlier reporting said that LIV 1.0 owes its players something like $400 million, and initially offered settlements equal to about two cents per dollar. Would Johnson drop his claim and join up for this dumb 10-event sideshow league if O’Neil can come up with another nickel per dollar? Would equity in this mess be enough for Bryson DeChambeau to supplement his YouTube riches and walk away from the nine figures he is owed?

In any case, there is another looming deadline: The PIF, hilariously, is now LIV Golf’s “senior lender” during its bankruptcy, which means that it enjoys the prerogative to begin winding down the business as a going concern if O’Neil and BC Partners have not inked a deal for LIV 2.0 by Oct. 30. No problem! All they have to do between now and Friday is settle hundreds of millions of dollars of contract claims with as many as 23 different disgruntled players divided into at least two groups, resolving promises made by a foreign financier that considers its hands entirely washed of the whole affair, and convince approximately all 23 of those players to then sign up for the new league, which will have fewer events, less money, and zero prestige, the joining of which will foreclose on all other professional opportunities for the foreseeable future.