Saudis to end LIV golf funding after pouring in $5 billion

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund plans to stop financial support for LIV Golf after this season, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The upstart golf league has a tentative announcement scheduled for Thursday, said the person who wasn’t authorised to speak publicly on the matter. The news follows Bloomberg reporting earlier this month that the Saudis were considering to pull funding for LIV.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that LIV plans to tell players and staff in the next 24 hours that Saudi Arabia is pulling the funding for the breakaway league.

The move would bring a jarring end to the breakaway league that fractured professional golf and fundamentally altered the sport’s economics by luring stars away from the PGA Tour with giant contracts. LIV cost the Saudi Public Investment Fund an estimated $5 billion in just four years, and despite this substantial investment, it struggled with low attendance and poor television viewership.

LIV declined to comment, and the PIF couldn’t immediately be reached for one. The LIV season is scheduled to run through August.

The PIF had recently signalled its priorities had changed, saying its strategy for the next four years would have a major domestic focus. The importance of funding a golf league dropped even further in importance following the war between the US and Iran that saw Gulf nations bear the brunt of the Islamic Republic’s attacks.

Over the past year, the PIF, which has about $1 trillion in assets under management, has had financial struggles and switched to treating its sports holdings as investments that need to make a return like other sectors within the fund, Bloomberg previously reported citing people familiar with the matter.

That had the PIF prepared to cut LIV’s funding, but it was seeking alternatives, Bloomberg reported earlier, according to people familiar with the situation.

The demise of LIV would leave the players who left the PGA Tour, including Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau, in a state of professional limbo. A few have returned, such as Brooks Koepka, but with large financial penalties.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on the funding.

Bloomberg

More to come