A golf course superintendent sees what the money men missed: the most expensive thing LIV Golf ever paid for was never a player. It was the grass.
The Saudi Public Investment Fund poured roughly five billion dollars into LIV Golf since it launched in 2022, with projections running past six billion — money a sovereign fund never meant to earn back. It bought the loudest arrival golf had ever seen: Greg Norman out front, fifty-four-hole no-cut events, thirteen franchise teams, and signing bonuses that read like typos, a reported 300 million dollars for Jon Rahm, 200 million for Phil Mickelson, 100 million for Brooks Koepka. The pitch underneath the noise was that this was a business. It never was.
By Forbes’s full tally, LIV has paid its players past 3.2 billion dollars, about 1.6 billion in guarantees and bonuses and another 1.36 billion in prize money, while the machine around them never sold. Thirteen franchise teams with no arena, no city, and no buyers. Broadcast money that barely existed: during its run on the CW network, Jon Rahm’s championship round averaged about 89,000 viewers. The Athletic estimated the losses near 1.4 billion dollars in the first three and a half years. A sovereign fund does not spend like a business, because it was never trying to be one.