Breaking LIV Golf Spent at Least $5 Billion Buying Players. It Died Because $300 Million Could Not Buy Them Back.

Michael La Sasso won what is now shaping up as LIV Golf's final tournament, in Indianapolis in August. Last week, the Associated Press reports, he failed to get through the second stage of European tour qualifying school. It is hard to find a smaller or sadder detail in the collapse of a league that spent more than $5 billion and, by one rival's telling, more than $7 billion.

BC Partners Credit, which had pledged as much as $300 million to keep a smaller version alive in 2027, is walking away because not enough players signed on, the Financial Times reported Wednesday. A hearing is scheduled Thursday in US Bankruptcy Court in New Jersey, and the FT says it will shift toward LIV seeking to liquidate its assets. LIV did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nothing is formal yet.

Here is our read: the rescue did not fail on price. LIV was only ever a list of famous golfers with a payroll attached, so the moment the names stopped signing, there was nothing left for a $300 million check to buy. BC Partners was buying the one asset that could leave.

The timeline of a league running out of reasons

The Saudi Public Investment Fund launched LIV in 2022 and changed its investment strategy this April, saying it would stop funding the league after the 2026 season. AP places that a few months after the start of the Iran war. In July, the Asian Tour, which had taken LIV's money for its International Series, renewed its alliance with the PGA Tour and European tour. LIV filed for Chapter 11 on September 8.

Then came LIV 2.0: at least 10 tournaments, an emphasis on teams, equity for players, and prize money reportedly more than half of the $20 million purses LIV offered at its start. CEO Scott O'Neil called the equity a "second bite of the apple." BC Partners Credit's Ted Goldthorpe sold the logic at a Sportico conference in September: "A lot of the money that was spent created the ecosystem and infrastructure that exists today. We think we can run this in a financially sustainable way because much of that spending went to getting the players, and the players are here."

Weeks later, the players were not there. Rahm, Sergio Garcia, Louis Oosthuizen and Tyrrell Hatton said they would not stay. Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter also turned it down, according to Golf Monthly. Young players David Puig and Tom McKibbin left. Brooks Koepka had already bought his way out at the start of the year with a PGA Tour path that carried financial penalties, and Patrick Reed declined to extend. AP says only four players publicly backed the new league, including Brendan Steele and Cameron Tringale.

The reports do not agree on everyone. Awful Announcing, summarizing the news, says Bryson DeChambeau, Cam Smith, Dustin Johnson and Joaquin Niemann have also opted out. Golf Monthly says DeChambeau's most recent comments suggested he was fully committed to 2.0. We have not seen any of those players' own statements on Wednesday's report, so we do not know where DeChambeau landed or when.

The move that closed the door

The decisive pressure came from a tour that LIV once treated as a target. As LIV tried to leave bankruptcy, the European tour said anyone signing with LIV 2.0 would be ineligible for DP World Tour membership, which would also make European players ineligible for the Ryder Cup. Guy Kinnings, its CEO, told The Scotsman the tour had to protect itself "against an entity who spent, so we are told, over $7 billion, with one of their aims being to 'destroy the DP World Tour.'"

Put yourself in a golfer's position in October. The offer is smaller purses and equity in a business just out of bankruptcy, and the price of accepting is losing a tour card you may need and, if you are European, your Ryder Cup hopes. When Rahm says he is willing to pay what Koepka paid to come back, as AP reports he said on Tuesday, though it was thought unlikely the same terms would be offered, he is pricing that choice out loud.

The FT, as relayed by Golf Monthly, also says talks with another 10 top golfers got complicated by financial demands that could not be immediately met. That sounds right. A league that taught golfers their signature had a nine-figure value, and paid players with a single PGA Tour win $30 million, was never going to find it easy to explain equity.

Thirty players is a league, isn't it?

The strongest objection to our framing is that LIV did not need its superstars to exist. Reports put around 30 golfers willing to stay and 10 more undecided. Thirty players and 10 events at a modest purse is a real tour in any other sport's minor-league sense. BC Partners is a credit investor, not a romantic; it made a judgment in September that the fixed-cost base could shrink to something sustainable. Front Office Sports reported Wednesday, per Awful Announcing, that it remains unclear whether LIV winds down completely and that BC Partners may be interested in a different arrangement. The Athletic's reporters, by contrast, describe a pivot to a wind-down and full shuttering as "imminent." Declaring it dead before Thursday's hearing is premature, and on the facts available, that much is fair.

There is also a broader case that LIV succeeded on its own terms. A lot of players got generationally rich. It rearranged professional golf for five years. For a Koepka or a Rahm, the league did what it was built to do, and by that scoreboard they won.

But notice what each argument concedes. A 30-player tour without the names is exactly what the investor just decided it could not finance, and its deadlines were built around securing those players. As for the riches, they went out as guarantees and purses, and very little of it seems to have stuck to the league as enterprise value. Goldthorpe's own description, that "much of that spending went to getting the players," is the epitaph. A league can build an ecosystem around players who owe it nothing beyond a contract, and when the contract runs out, so does the ecosystem.

Who gets paid now

Thursday's hearing is where the abstractions become creditors. According to the FT, as reported by Field Level Media, PIF owns 99% of LIV and extended $550 million of senior loans with the highest priority for payment. Player claims on contract guarantees and vendor claims run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. So the party that decided to leave stands first in the line, and the people still owed money stand behind it. How much is left for anyone is unknown; we have not read the filings ourselves and cannot give a recovery figure. AP also notes that LIV Golf New Jersey filed a change of address Wednesday, from New York to an office property in Claymont, Delaware, a small and telling item.

The next question for the players is access. Rahm's release was on the Thursday docket, and AP reports the European tour's ban was aimed at those signing with LIV 2.0. Whether that threat means anything once there is no LIV 2.0 to sign with, and what the PGA Tour demands from returnees other than Koepka, nobody has said on the record in what we read. Awful Announcing expects most to land on the DP World Tour in 2027 while serving PGA Tour suspensions; Field Level Media says the DP World Tour has declared LIV players ineligible for 2027. Those cannot both be the final answer, and the gap is the story to watch once the court has finished.

This desk has no dated odds or futures move to report on this news. Any golfer now hunting for tour status will show up in 2027 fields on terms not yet set. That leaves bettors with one narrow conclusion for now: nobody can yet price those players' 2027 schedules.