LIV Golf is ending. The league’s lawyers confirm plans to end operations at a bankruptcy hearing on Thursday.
LIV lost the financial backing of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in April. A European private equity firm initially planned a $300 million investment to launch LIV 2.0 before canceling the initiative.
“The debtors were ultimately unable to bring the key parties to a fully consensual arrangement that would have supported a financially viable LIV 2.0 league,” Gibson Dunn partner Matthew Williams, one of LIV’s attorneys, said Thursday at a hearing in New Jersey. “As a result, the debtors are not currently proceeding with the LIV 2.0 plan. Instead, the debtors are toggling to a value-maximizing wind-down of their business.”
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The writing was already on the wall for the league, which launched in 2022 to rival the PGA Tour. Five-time major champion Brooks Koepka bailed on LIV at the start of 2026 despite having a year left on his contract.
The PGA Tour responded by opening a path to welcome back LIV players who were once treated as traitors by golfers who stayed with the original tour. The path features financial penalties, though.
Patrick Reed opted against returning to LIV as well, instead planning to rejoin the PGA Tour in 2027.
Other golfers also abandoned ship between LIV’s final event in August and Thursday’s announcement.
Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton, Sergio Garcia and Louis Oosthuizen said they wouldn’t return for LIV 2.0.
The revamped league couldn’t withstand a heavy blow that arrived when Guy Kinnings, CEO of the DP World Tour, announced that LIV 2.0 players would not be eligible to participate in the European tour. That would prevent them from playing in the popular Ryder Cup.
Saudi Arabia invested more than $5 billion in LIV before announcing in April that it would no longer finance the tour after the 2026 season. The upstarts at LIV didn’t accumulate much goodwill from the rest of the golfing world.
Kinning noted that his tour would “have to protect the tour against an entity who spent, so we are told, over $7 billion, with one of their aims being to ‘destroy the DP World Tour.’”
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
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