Four years, five seasons, six billion dollars, at last we can say it for certain: LIV Golf is finished.
One of the very worst brands in the history of professional sport is done, never to return. All that remains is paperwork to complete. Championship rings to sell. Black bomber jackets to discard. Domain names like 'terroristgolfleague.org' to release back into the marketplace.
There was a period, when Jon Rahm was wearing that jacket and Jay Monahan was weaponising bereaved families, that LIV appeared inevitable in a very different sense. For a while, it looked like it would win. Rahm, foolishly we now know, went there only on the proviso that he would be the first domino to fall; that he would enjoy Saudi riches and Ponte Vedra privilege all at once. Briefly, that seemed a shrewd calculation, but then like every player before him, Rahm failed to make enough people care about what he was now doing.
Still it laboured on, but ever since the Public Investment Fund decided its money was better spent elsewhere (this should not have been a difficult conclusion to reach; should not have required war to reach it), LIV Golf was terminally ill, control of its life support machine handed to the predators of venture capitalism. If LIV 1.0 was at heart a political enterprise dressed as a sporting one then LIV 2.0 soon became a form of the same thing only in the world of finance, lawyers looking for loopholes at several grand an hour.
BC Partners, the investment firm whose promise of a few hundred million more LIV supremo Scott O'Neil celebrated as proof of the league's bright future, boasts of its ability to 'opportunistically allocate capital', but there was no opportunity here, despite what budding economist Bryson DeChambeau says about the EBITDA of a faux golf squad named Crushers.
And yet, as recently as the weekend, still DeChambeau insisted that there was a viable product on that death bed, but that corporate mismanagement from the get-go had put LIV there. No word on his role in that; of the reported hundreds of millions of dollars he wanted to sign a contract extension. Meanwhile, in an admirably forthright discussion on The Chipping Forecast, Lee Westwood began by underlining just how much wealthier he'd become at a time when he felt too old for the main tours, then went on to rue the wastefulness of the operation, without connecting those two thoughts.
No, maybe too much money set aside to pay creative agencies (not all of it actually paid, mind) and Chase and Status, but close to $20million to Cameron Tringale, the most unremarkable golfer in history and still to lift a trophy, wasn't the issue. Somewhere between a quarter and half a billion (repeat: billion) to sign a player in Rahm who had said he didn't believe in the product. Perhaps he changed his mind! Or perhaps his agent always believed in it.
What DeChambeau does next will interest some, but not nearly as many people who will sit and watch him attempt to hit a ping-pong ball into a cup, a video which alone dwarfed LIV's entire US TV audience. With any luck, the sport and those who follow it will find it easier to separate these things now we've concrete evidence (insofar as concrete evidence of anything exists anymore) that they are totally separate and stop pretending that the bros who find such things sick are willing to ponder the make percentage of a 12-foot putt while Patrick Cantlay thinks about striking it.
It does at least appear that the PGA Tour, under better leadership, intends to treat DeChambeau in the right way: very good golfer, no more and no less. It really should not matter to the custodians of professional golf how many likes and subscribes he gets for all this mucking about. All that matters is how compelling a performer he is when it counts and, on the evidence of 2026, there is work for him to do there. DeChambeau's talent remains unquestioned, but his stomach for the fight versus the handful of better, more meaningful golfers? Less certain than it ever was.
One thing we can be sure of is that DeChambeau will release a statement, or at least a hype video, explaining his plan and how great his plan is. If it's the DP World Tour, he'll talk about how much he always loved it, right back to when he played in the Middle East as an amateur and later went on to win the Dubai Desert Classic. What he won't do is show contrition, admit to his part in the damage caused. As Eddie Pepperell put it, 'I'm not sure these people have it within them; I don't think they're capable of apologising. And I don't think they feel like they have anything to apologise for.'
On that, opinions will differ. Perhaps there is nothing to say sorry for: a business opportunity arose and 50 or more players decided to take it. Though, at least as many decided not to. It would be naive to think that each of them believed in some greater good – likely most saw the reputational damage their peers were suffering and thought better of it – but the bigger names, the one who could have settled this in LIV's favour had they all departed, ultimately made decisions that benefited them as sportspeople, rather than hoarders of wealth. If LIV taught us anything, it's that the people watching really do not care just how rich the DeChambeaus of this world can get, only how competitive they can be in the tournaments that really matter.
Those tournaments, overwhelmingly, are the majors and the Ryder Cup, but the still-meaningful PGA Tour now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to prove that it too understands more than the bottom line. It has at the helm a leader who has shown, subtly for now, that he might be willing to push players around the world, to those underserved markets LIV flirted with. What it needs is more players to follow Rory McIlroy's lead and sacrifice a few weeks a year in order to do what LIV promised all along and grow the game (we might just need a new phrase for that process).
Supporters and departing players will argue that LIV did grow the game, but at six billion dollars spent the fact that we're left to ponder if the dial moved at all says so much about it. Yes, some people benefited, but nobody more than the golfers and executives made extraordinarily rich. It's hard not to wonder how much the cognitive dissonance of being a student and lover of golf's history who sold out against his own word has affected Rahm, who in departing LIV still tried to paint that decision as a matter of product and vision rather than the absence of a sovereign wealth fund to pay for his fragile allegiance. He's far from the only one made worse as a competitor by playing a meaningless version of a meaningful game. But he is extraordinarily rich.
Most damningly, almost nothing that happened on the course will be remembered. In fact it may be that only Anthony Kim's sensational victory, in Adelaide of all places, stands the test of time. Joaquin Niemann won nine titles in toponym tournaments but even he might not be able to rattle them off under duress. Maybe he could call in a teammate to help, someone like Mito Pereira, an almost-major-champion who LIV made wealthy enough to retire at 30. There are those who celebrated this as if the reason we all invest so much of our precious time in sport is to see how quickly those involved can reach retirement wealth. Talk about missing the point.
How best to move on from this sorry period is hard to say. Perhaps, the answer really is to forgive and forget, to focus on making the sport a more compelling proposition that will survive for generations. But do remember, as one by one players ask us to revise history with them: perspective is easier to find when you're sat on top of a mountain of money built by a regime which would've added this sport to its long list of victims if it stood to benefit. Those who saw the big picture even from the bottom are the ones to really admire.
LIV's legacy meanwhile is hard to define. It was certainly never about any of the fundamental principles of elite competition. It was never even about golf. When all is said and done, every word uttered about its model, those teams, the atmosphere at events, the nature of the schedule... all of it went out of the window as soon as the money stopped. The death of LIV Golf doesn't solve all of the sport's problems, but one will do.
