For four years, LIV Golf seemed to have solved one of professional sport’s most pressing problems: money. And to be clear, not revenue, not profitability. Money.
The distinction may seem unimportant, because Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — PIF, for short — was willing to overlook it. LIV could therefore offer enormous contracts, sign champions and build teams nobody had asked for. It could enter markets without waiting for them to mature and generally behave as though the normal rules of economics were an inconvenience reserved for everyone else.
Well, at some point the owner changed its mind.
On September 8, LIV Golf filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New Jersey. The filings list liabilities of between $500 million and $1 billion, against assets of between $100 million and $500 million. Jon Rahm is listed among the largest unsecured creditors, with roughly $7.5 million owed to him; Bryson DeChambeau is owed about $5.8 million. PIF, which had invested more than $5 billion in LIV since its creation, had already decided to end its normal financial support at the end of 2026.
That does not mean Saudi Arabia has simply abandoned the project. PIF remains involved in the restructuring and is still financing LIV’s passage through Chapter 11 with a $49.6 million loan. But that is very different from continuing to support LIV as it has until now. LIV intends to return in 2027 under a different structure, with BC Partners involved and the players potentially becoming majority shareholders.
The lesson from LIV is not that “Saudi money disappears overnight.” It is that Saudi money comes with an “emergency brake”: first you pull it, and then, once the train has stopped, you calmly get off.
Tennis would do well to start asking what that means.
The wrong question
Since Saudi Arabia began moving into tennis, almost the entire debate has revolved around one question: should the sport accept that money?
Human rights, sportswashing, women’s tennis, LGBTQ+ rights, reputation — and we too have devoted plenty of attention to these issues. Quite rightly.
But there is another small problem, one that, to be fair, we have also discussed. What happens when a sport reorganises itself around capital that does not need that sport? And what, exactly, is the price?
The price looks something like this: the relationship between the ATP and PIF is no longer simply a sponsorship deal. PIF is the title partner of the ATP Rankings and is involved in major tournaments and development programmes. Saudi Arabia hosts the Next Gen Finals — not exactly doing them any favours — and from 2028 a new Saudi Masters 1000 will become the tenth tournament in the category. That would not necessarily be a problem if it did not transform — or, more accurately, obliterate — the South American clay-court season.
Most importantly, Saudi capital has acquired a stake in the operation that sells the tour’s television rights: ATP Media. Saudi capital therefore owns part of the commercial infrastructure that generates the very visibility it has secured for itself.
At every step, that capital moves closer to the structure that determines how professional tennis generates and distributes money.
This is not to say that PIF intends to leave tennis. There is no evidence that it does.
But when you look at what has happened with LIV, one thing becomes clear: intentions and future facts are not the same thing.
The subsidy problem
There is something distinctive about an organisation whose owner is willing to absorb losses for strategic reasons.
Normal businesses have limits. If television audiences disappoint, the rights lose value. If tickets do not sell, budgets are cut. If a tournament pays players more than its economics can support, sooner or later somebody has to reduce costs — see the WTA…
A sovereign wealth fund does not operate in the same way, and that changes the market.
By paying golfers enormous sums, LIV changed what golfers believed they were worth. It forced the PGA Tour to respond by increasing prize money. Player compensation became the centre of the political battle, and the entire professional golf system began negotiating on the basis of figures set by an organisation whose spending did not have to be justified by operating revenues.
That is what subsidies do: they change the price of everything around them.
The ATP has openly celebrated record commercial growth. Sponsorship revenues rose by 50 per cent in 2024, with PIF among its most important new partners, while OneVision is built around the biggest premium events, aggregated rights and higher player compensation.
A tenth Masters 1000 financed by Saudi capital creates a new benchmark. And that comes on top of the other damage: disrupting historic events, lengthening the season or making it even more congested.
The other Masters tournaments have to compete with that event. Players have to factor new money into their expectations. The tour has to include it in its projections. And, inevitably, commercial plans begin to assume a certain level of growth.
This financial doping becomes the market.
For as long as it lasts.
LIV’s important number is not five billion
The headline number is the more than $5 billion that PIF put into LIV. But the important number is zero.
That is what a subsidy is worth the moment its owner decides it is no longer strategically useful.
LIV is not the usual story of a failed sports league. PIF changed its capital allocation.
That is a completely different kind of risk.
When a conventional investor can no longer finance an asset, the problem is financial capacity. But when a sovereign investor decides not to continue, the problem is strategic priority.
And strategic priorities can change for reasons that have very little to do with the sport itself, while the sport receiving that money has almost no control over any of it.
Does Nike need sport? Yes.
Has Rolex spent decades building part of its identity around sport? Yes.
Do television companies need sports content? Of course.
Does a sovereign wealth fund need tennis? No.
Saudi Arabia and tennis have very little to do with one another.
Treating sovereign capital as though it were an ordinary sponsorship means missing the bigger picture.
Who bears the risk?
There is some irony in LIV’s relaunch plan. Its first incarnation was financed by sovereign capital willing to absorb extraordinary costs. Its second is now being presented as a more “sustainable”, more player-centred model, in which the golfers could become majority shareholders.
In other words, somebody else now has to start worrying about the real economics again.
That is the part tennis should study.
LIV Golf was described as a Saudi attempt to buy golf. Its failure — LIV’s failure, not Saudi Arabia’s, to be clear — suggests another possible interpretation: Saudi Arabia effectively rented the disruption of an existing system.
For a few years, $5 billion was enough to destabilise an established ecosystem, change players’ expectations, force competitors to react and alter the economics of the sport.
Then it stopped being interesting, the strategic calculation changed, and the consequences, of course, remained.
Professional tennis should pay attention because its Saudi experiment is, in many respects, more intertwined with the existing system than LIV ever was.
There is practically no rival tour to defeat. If anything, the lack of competition is at the heart of the PTPA lawsuit; there is little point in creating a new governing body.
Saudi capital is therefore moving directly into the existing system. That is a good thing, because integration costs less than revolution. But it could also be much harder to manage.
The question is no longer so much whether tennis can afford to say no to Saudi money.
It is whether tennis is building a system capable of functioning normally even if Saudi money decides to pull the emergency brake.
Assuming there is no “Penalty for improper use: ten pounds”, that is the question.
Follow Us