As LIV flames out, let's not forget those who were eager to sell golf to the Saudis
By the time LIV Golf announced two new board members on Thursday — along with a “strategic evolution” that was necessarily vague as it aims to find chumps willing to assume a $100 million-a-month burn rate - the league’s CEO, Scott O’Neil, might have felt like he’s ushering the unsuspecting into prime window seats on the Hindenburg. After all, at this stage any more fuel is destined only to contribute to a bigger implosion. The death rattles from LIV are deafening, even for its most ardent mouth-to-mouth moochers.
The tournament in New Orleans postponed; players probing to see which exit might be open; their former pied piper, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, beating them to the door by stepping down as chairman; staff warned that jobs are going; vendors concerned that commitments will not be honored; and, most importantly, its sole benefactor, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, formally announcing that the constant bleed of bad news is now someone else’s problem. ”The substantial investment required by LIV Golf over a longer term is no longer consistent with the current phase of PIF’s investment strategy,” said a statement from Riyadh. That the deepest pocket in sports has grown weary of being picked by opportunists and freeloaders will hardly entice other investors to open theirs.
Conservative tallies suggest over $5 billion has been torched on this enterprise, though sources who track the long tail of expenses into the future put the figure closer to $8 billion. This isn’t a situation where any new investor begins with a clear balance sheet because start-up costs were assumed by someone else. The profligate overheads are baked into the business model.
Like the guaranteed fees paid to players — Bryson DeChambeau expects his thirst to be slaked with a new contract soon — and $30 million purses for guys who couldn’t be identified as pro golfers in a two-man line-up if the other option was a corpse. O’Neil’s best case scenario is to emerge with a limited schedule of events, shorn of infrastructure, perks pared to nothing, and prize funds closer to the pittance of weekly European Tour stops. Basically a dollar store version of Greg Norman’s vision.
It has taken four years to reach the moment of truth, when all the bluffing by LIV’s executives, players and bootlickers — about growing the game, about infinite funding, about audience enthusiasm, about investors lining up to buy teams, about meaningful media deals, about an influx of sponsors, about this being only move six in a long chess game that skeptics are too dumb to understand — is exposed for what it was. Undiluted bullshit. The entire sport has been distorted and diminished by LIV’s existence, but an accounting of the rampant charlatanism (actual and unrealized) of recent years extends beyond the league’s players, even those who groomed the next generation of their countrymen to do the same for less and follow them into a dead end.
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