The 2026 LIV Golf season will end this weekend at LIV Golf Indianapolis. The 4 Aces GC fellows have a narrow lead over Ripper GC in the team championship, which I guess they will uhh look to maintain or whatever. Don't worry about it. That team title was supposed to be decided the final weekend of August in Plymouth, Mich., but that event has now been officially cancelled, as was long anticipated. The stupid, broke league simply lacks the money to run it.
The payouts for the finale will be significantly reduced. Without the outrageous support of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, LIV Golf cannot continue to dump huge prize money into its noisy, broadly three-quarter-assed events. The bonus pool for the player championship, per Golf Magazine, will be $10 million, down from $30 million in 2025. The bonus pool for the team championship—an utterly inconsequential competition to every living creature on Earth except for the handful of people in line to win a share of the prize—will be $30 million, down from $50 million in 2025. The bonus pool for the LIV Indianapolis event, separate from the championships it will decide, has also been cut in half.
That's still a lot of cash to hand out for 54 holes of golf. It's mighty expensive to run a golf promotion designed to compete directly with the PGA Tour. It made sense to pour grotesque sums into this mess when it was hoping to meaningfully disrupt men's professional golf; now that the PGA Tour has shrugged off the incursion and LIV Golf has settled in as nothing more than its own stupid tagline, $80 million in year-end bonuses starts to look more precisely like what it is, which is an enormous waste of money.
LIV Golf CEO Scott O'Neil found someone who says they are willing to take over the PIF's role of financially backing his promotion, albeit at a much lower level of commitment. That investor, who has gone unidentified despite having reached agreement with O'Neil nearly two weeks ago, met with the tour's players Tuesday, at Chatham Hills in Westfield, Indiana, the site of LIV's improvised finale. ESPN's Paolo Uggetti spoke to players after the meeting, and reported what he described as "mixed feelings," ranging from the plucky, deranged-seeming optimism of Brendan Steele—"He's just got a great vision for what we want to do and how to move this thing forward, and it's just, like, new life has kind of been breathed into it"—to the more guarded, somewhat skeptical position expressed by Martin Kaymer.
"The investor is excited, but obviously, there's a few things that need to be figured out," Kaymer told Uggetti. "It's still early to tell what next year will look like, but they're working very hard to get more specifics." What has so far been proposed, according to various reports, sounds sort of adorably unserious: O'Neil and his shadow investor are proposing a 2027 schedule featuring just 10 events, distributed between a handful of U.S. venues and a modest slate of international destinations. But who would want this? Without prestige, without any real tradition to lean on, without even a 72-hole format, without World Golf Ranking points, without the eye-popping bonus pools, with confused shotgun starts, and with the silly team flags all over the place, LIV Golf seems headed for a future as a part-time minor-league exhibition series, spread too thinly over both the map and the calendar for anyone to take it very seriously, or to expect much seriousness from its roster of players. At that point, even the more modest payouts of the Indianapolis event seem insane.
That assumes, of course, that the bonuses are paid. Sports Business Journal reported Tuesday from sources saying that some players are still waiting for payments from the LIV Golf event held at Donald Trump's Bedminster country club earlier this month. According to the report, it is common for LIV Golf to issue tournament winnings the Tuesday or Wednesday after the conclusion of an event, which would've been Aug. 11 or 12, making the payments about a week late as of publication. This is an especially flagrant insult: In attendance that weekend was Trump, the big repulsive fatso himself, and grinning beside him behind panes of bulletproof shielding was none other than Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Saudi PIF and the man responsible for summarily yoinking the rug out from under from the promotion his sovereign wealth fund all but birthed.
It would not be very surprising to learn that LIV Golf presently cannot afford to pay its players. Things have gotten that desperate over there. Two different vendors have now filed complaints accusing the promotion of stiffing them on payments for contracted services. A Canadian company called Mobii Systems Group sued LIV Golf in July, alleging that the promotion stopped paying invoices for broadcast technology and gave them a drearily familiar runaround as they sought commitments and answers. Then on July 21, another company, Fresh Tape Media, filed a complaint in New York accusing LIV Golf of failing to pay for services rendered way back in January, before the start of the 2026 season. The complaint, per a report from Front Office Sports, says that Fresh Tape Media employed 115 workers to photograph and tape and otherwise staff LIV Golf's preseason media days, delivered a bunch of material, and then was paid only half of the agreed amount, with LIV Golf failing to pay eight invoices worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and then offering a settlement payment. The lawsuit is seeking $1.2 million in damages.
Reports along the way have said that O'Neil was seeking something like $250 million in investment cash to prop up the future of LIV Golf. I'm no mathematician—it took me four tries to successfully spell "mathematician"—and even less a financial planner, but the $50 million or so paid out in reduced rations this weekend in Indianapolis would represent a whopping fifth of that survival fund, which seems entirely unreasonable and unsustainable. Whatever comes next, LIV Golf is going to have to look very different from how it has looked so far. It won't even be able to maintain its standards of loudness: The company announced in a press release that its Indianapolis event will go on without one of its big live music concerts. Thomas Rhett and Disco Lines will not be performing at Westfield this weekend, "due to unavoidable changes in the entertainment program," i.e., the promotion lacking a pot to piss in. Next thing you know, repo goons will be snatching those green-side amplifiers. It's golf, but louder, but quieter.
