After four years, £4bn and a pointless civil war, LIV Golf achieved only one thing

Farewell, LIV Golf , we hardly knew ye. After four years, £4bn spent and a prolonged and ultimately pointless civil war, LIV is dead, or at least in its dying days. Key figures behind the project were scrambled to an emergency meeting in New York this week amid reports that Saudi Arabia ’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is ready to end its lavish spending on the rebel golf league .

LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil sent a memo to staff insisting they will finish the current season at “full throttle”, continuing this weekend in Mexico City. But without PIF’s deep wells of money, there is no future beyond 2026. There had been signs of creaking, with big contracts nearing an end and some star names jumping ship.

Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed departed, and more would surely have followed, given time. The irony is that LIV had only recently secured Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) points for its players, finally adding the layer of credibility it desperately sought. Instead, this looks like the end, and what a colossal waste of everyone’s time that was.

It got off to an inauspicious start when tickets remained on sale as the first tournament teed off at the Centurion Club near St Albans in June 2022. There was no leaderboard on the website and there was no UK broadcast deal in place to show the action. Then there was the format, played out over three rounds, with the entire field teeing off together in a shotgun start that made any narrative impossible to follow.