LIV Golf's Saudi Money Dried Up in April. Five Months Later, the League Is Still Looking for a Buyer.

LIV Golf just closed out its fifth season, and the money that built it is gone.

LIV Golf CEO Scott O'Neil got a call earlier this year from one of Yasir Al-Rumayyan's lieutenants at the Saudi Public Investment Fund, according to reporting by golf writer Alan Shipnuck published this week by Skratch. The message was blunt: "Shut it down. You're not getting another dollar." Shipnuck reported that Al-Rumayyan, the PIF governor who chairs LIV Golf, then went dark on O'Neil for more than two months.

The timing lines up with what PIF had already told the public. According to Yahoo Sports, PIF announced on April 30, 2026, that its backing was ending, and the fallout hit fast. Yahoo Sports reported that contractors went unpaid, lawsuits piled up, and prize purses shrank across the season that followed.

Golf Digest's account of the season adds detail on how that played out. LIV canceled its New Orleans event, officially citing summer heat and a scheduling clash with the World Cup. Golf Digest also reported a lawsuit from the Premier Golf League alleging LIV stole the concept it spent billions building, and said players and agents began quietly calling the PGA Tour about possible returns.

Golf writer Trey Wingo, posting on X, said he had reported similar details back in April: that LIV was given a choice between shutting down immediately or riding out the year while it hunted for outside funding. Wingo characterized his earlier reporting as saying PIF framed it internally not as a funding cutoff but a "transition." Whether that framing softened what was, in practice, a hard stop is something only PIF can answer, and PIF has not addressed it publicly in these accounts.

O'Neil's public face versus the private call

Scott O'Neil never let the crisis show much in public. Yahoo Sports quoted him telling CNBC in June that he trusted PIF "at their word" and calling the league "full steam" ahead, even as the funding cliff approached. Weeks later, according to Yahoo Sports, PIF's support was gone, and O'Neil was touring private equity firms and family offices instead.

At a press conference before LIV's Indianapolis finale, O'Neil told reporters, according to Yahoo Sports: "We don't run and we don't hide. We just do what we can with what we have." That statement came as O'Neil managed a crisis he didn't create and couldn't fully control, since the decision to pull funding sat with PIF, not with O'Neil.

Golf.com's writeup of O'Neil's finale press conference notes he confirmed a signed term sheet with an investor, reportedly BC Capital, but said there's a deadline to finalize it that he wouldn't disclose. Golf.com also noted O'Neil had previously targeted September for a deal and now called the whole timeline "compressed." Two weeks later, no signed, closed deal has been announced.

The season nobody wanted to spray champagne over

LIV's finale in Indianapolis crowned a 22-year-old, Michael La Sasso, as the league's youngest-ever individual champion, edging out a bogey-free final round from Bryson DeChambeau and a nine-birdie charge from Jon Rahm. Skratch's Shipnuck was there and described a tense, paranoid atmosphere. LIV assigned a staffer to shadow his interviews, DeChambeau called him "a PGA Tour shill," and Tyrrell Hatton chose Queen's "I Want To Break Free" as his walkout song.

Golf Digest's take on the same weekend was less celebratory. It pointed out the dissonance of players spraying champagne over new millions while, per the same reporting, blue-collar vendors were still waiting to get paid for work already done. Golf Digest's larger argument is that LIV's death wasn't caused by bad ratings, an inferior product or the human-rights criticism that dogged it from the start. Ordinary market forces never got the chance to kill LIV, according to that piece, because Saudi Arabia's shifting spending priorities and regional pressures did it first.

What happens to the players now

PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp, speaking Tuesday in Atlanta, said there's currently no plan for another "Returning Member Program" like the one that let Brooks Koepka rejoin the PGA Tour earlier this year. Rolapp's standard, as he stated it: any LIV player wanting back has to first be free of contractual and "tail" obligations to LIV. "I would say the same thing here," Rolapp said, declining to commit to anything more specific.

That leaves LIV's roster in limbo. Golf.com reported that DP World Tour player relations director Stuart Cage has been calling LIV players' agents, and that some players have been advised not to plan their 2027 schedules around getting the kind of special-release deals they got in 2026. Whether BC Capital's term sheet turns into real, signed money before that deadline O'Neil won't name, or whether LIV's players start walking before it does, is the open question heading into the offseason.