The Saudis used LIV Golf to try and win over Trump. The players were just rich pawns

The rumours turned out to be true and LIV Golf has lost its Saudi overdraft. If you care about a reunited professional golf world, you’ll say good riddance.

LIV was a political act. Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, decided to pump billions into football, tennis, motor racing, golf and other sports to achieve several ends, among them the reputational repair for human rights violations including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Sports were to be multi-purposed to signal Saudi modernity and diversification. Golfers, receiving billions of dirty petrodollars, were wilfully naive tools in this political play.

Those same political factors have caused the withdrawal of Saudi’s Public Investment Fund, not because LIV isn’t working, but because the Crown Prince (MBS) has fallen out with US President, Donald Trump, and is realigning Saudi-US relations and its spending.

MBS’s hopes to use this sport to ingratiate himself with the golf-loving Trump have failed. So he’s taking his sticks and balls and going home. LIV is losing its backing because two autarchs have fallen out of love. Boohoo.

LIV has not folded yet, it just has no money beyond 2026. Its chief executive, Scott O’Neil, is working on a business plan. The pro-LIV chief of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, betrayed by his boss, has quit in embarrassment.

Assuming it dies, we can draft LIV’s obituary. It did not attract big US audiences, though this was never one of its KPIs. Like all breakaway leagues going back to Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket and Jack Kramer’s professional tennis tour, LIV’s object was not to make money but to cause its adversary to come begging for a compromise on the rebels’ terms.

The PGA Tour, when it saw its television ratings plummet, rallied American billionaires and corporations. Looking at what the PGA has done to itself in reaction to the LIV threat, it’s hard to see a simple victory for good over evil.

The PGA has, to a degree, LIVified itself. When LIV started no-cut events, the PGA followed, keeping its stars happy but alienating hundreds of mid-tier players who can’t get a start in “signature” events.

This weekend, the PGA Tour returns to Trump’s Doral course in Florida for the first time in a decade. The schism has been, in business and political terms, a brawl between two wings of MAGA.

What of the golf? LIV’s principal appeal to players was more money for a lighter schedule, and a global tour to break the PGA’s America-first grip. While it never rose out of obscurity in the US market, LIV brought the best players to Australia, South Africa, Asia, Mexico and the Middle East, and was successful in attracting non-American audiences.

LIV’s demise will take the Australian tour back to where it was, betting the house on getting one single Rory McIlroy or Bryson DeChambeau here for a week. Its failure will be good for domestic American golf. Rather than break the PGA’s stranglehold, LIV’s legacy will be to have narrowed and tightened it.

LIV sold itself as an attempt to reinvent the game. But its 54-hole format was abandoned in hopes of removing an obstacle to its players gaining official world golf rankings points. LIV’s shotgun starts never seemed to have much purpose, other than to maintain suspense for the team contests. The potential of team play in pro golf remains untapped, and once LIV is dead, men’s pro golf is back to the Ryder and President’s Cups.

LIV’s television package, hectic and confusing, was hard to take. The “party hole” is a PGA Tour idea that started at the Phoenix Open. By trying to expand it, with music and festivities around the course, LIV was willing to alienate old audiences to find new ones. Maybe some of this will last, maybe none, but judging by the embarrassingly parochial behaviour from PGA Tour crowds in the last 12 months, golf’s demographic was heading that way whether LIV encouraged them or not.

Did LIV harm the playing standards of the golfers who took the money? While morally appealing, the argument isn’t supported by the evidence. All of those who played and watched LIV can attest to the seriousness of the competition and its high quality.

Cameron Smith’s performances in the majors have declined since he went to LIV, but PGA stalwarts like Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler have fallen from higher highs to lower lows over the same period. Patrick Cantlay, Viktor Hovland and Tommy Fleetwood, all PGA players, have had Smith-like surges where they were unbeatable, before tailing off. It’s golf. LIV hasn’t ruined careers.

LIV’s David Puig ran away with the Australian PGA and another rebel, Joaquin Niemann won a previous Australian Open. Since joining LIV, Tyrrell Hatton has emerged as a genuine major contender and Ryder Cup star. DeChambeau and Jon Rahm have remained at the elite level throughout their time in LIV. Since leaving LIV, Brooks Koepka has struggled, while Patrick Reed won three straight tournaments. There’s no rhyme or reason to why golfers go through such extreme peaks and troughs, but the evidence shows it has nothing to do with what tour they are on. The lows are as inexplicable as the highs, and the uniqueness of the game makes it hard enough to understand from the inside, let alone the outside.

More worrying for the LIV players will be their future. If it folds, will they be allowed back on the PGA Tour? Special allowances, with big penalties, were created for Koepka, and many PGA loyalists are angry that he was received at all. Reed is making his way back via the DP World Tour, which is the route for many LIV players, but the backlash is strong and the schadenfreude will be stronger.

Most non-LIV players will look at their counterparts and say you took the money, you can go and fill your plunge pool with your tears. A potential reunification, and an influx of ex-LIV players, will require careful stewardship from the top. Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia and other LIV veterans will drift off into the sunset, but it also has a group of young talents like Puig, Niemann, Tom McKibbin, Australia’s Elvis Smylie and Talor Gooch who have a future worth negotiating over.

Ultimately, the players were being used, they knowingly sold out, and they are now dying by the sword they lived by. A political play ended with another political play, and the golfers were pawns.

Rich pawns, sure, but as for their ambitions to remake pro golf, it’s hard to see LIV leaving any long-term positive legacy. With the withdrawal of funds because the Saudi regime is in a snit, all of the dressing-up that this was about reinventing golf will end up as invisible as Norman’s new clothes.