Saudi Arabia Decides LIV Golf Is Ready To Be Supported By Its Passionate Fan Base, Unbeatable Product

When LIV Golf launched in 2022, many were skeptical that there was a viable commercial lane for a new professional golf tour, even if it was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's seemingly bottomless Public Investment Fund and driven by the definitely bottomless cynicism of contemporary global power politics. With the news on Wednesday that the Saudi PIF would no longer be funding LIV Golf after this season, we can probably go ahead and hand it to the skeptics. As a soft-power gambit channeled through the universal language of sports, LIV was a flop, but it wasn't a total failure. As a way to get some cheesy bribes into various pockets, it worked out fine.

The PGA Tour, which was stodgy and exploitative and had alienated some of its most prominent players, really was ripe for competition. But what LIV offered was instantly recognizable as something else: This was disruption , the already antique-feeling pejorative for what happens when an unconscionable amount of venture capital is blasted in the direction of something that already exists, to see if the pressure of all that money might somehow fracture it in a profitable way. The results of this particular gambit were inessential at best and stupendously wack at worst. LIV Golf's signature innovations on the form were that events were three days and 54 holes instead of four and 72, and that they would have the sort of corporate-event party vibe that ensured a Chainsmokers song would be audible during every one of those holes. It was always going to suck; the question, from the beginning, was whether that still mattered.

From its inception, LIV was a rich-guy nuisance lawsuit in the shape of a pro sports league. The vibes were appallingly wretched, even by the low expectations you might have for a collaboration between Phil Mickelson and Saudi Arabia. But the people pushing LIV—the most aggrieved current and former pro golfers; Donald Trump and his greasy inner circle of Bribe Guys; various sheikhs—were making a bigger bet. They proceeded as if all that money and influence would make the low quality of the actual product irrelevant. As with so many other things in the culture that could be described as Trumpy—lavishly gilded, obviously corrupt, all done on the fly and in the open and with a bunch of visibly rotting celebrities sucking around—it felt both obviously doomed and somehow inexorable.