Updated Aug. 22, 2026, 8:14 p.m. ET
- A recent report suggested Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) stopped financing LIV Golf partly due to Sergio Garcia’s behavior at the Masters.
- The author argues that geopolitical issues and shifting financial priorities are more likely reasons for the PIF’s decision to defund the league.
- The PIF’s latest five-year strategic plan notably did not mention sports, a change from its previous investment strategy.
- Despite some LIV players’ beliefs, many on the PGA Tour do not see their participation as essential for the success of tour events.
Even for the most ardent believer in karma, Friday’s report in the Financial Times seems too sweet to be wholesome. The FT — which was among the first to reveal in April that the Saudi Public Investment Fund would cease financing LIV Golf — cited sources saying the decision by PIF’s governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, to defund the league was influenced by Sergio Garcia busting a club during a childish snit fit at the Masters.
“People familiar with the matter say Rumayyan’s embarrassment at the sequence of events helped lead to his decision to pull the plug on PIF’s financing … ,” the newspaper noted.
Like claims of papal infallibility or presidential genius, it’s the kind of report for which there’s no shortage of eager believers, though innate credulousness isn’t a necessity in the case of Garcia. After all, this is the man who screamed, “You’re all f——-d, you should have taken the Saudi money!” at fellow players in a European locker room in 2022. Around the same time, he was caught on a hot mic in the U.S. muttering, “I can’t wait to leave this tour,” the lone example in his near 30-year career of Garcia cheering the hearts of luckless rules officials.
Garcia Lorca couldn’t have authored a more poetic comeuppance than to have this lesser Garcia be, well, f——-d because he took the Saudi money, and to be left wondering if he can wriggle back to the PGA Tour he couldn’t wait to depart. But on the fatalistic logic that never before in human history have so many been so fortunate, we ought to treat the report as wishful thinking. Leave it as fodder for unemployable jock sniffers on the fringe of golf media to castigate LIV Golf’s many critics for trafficking in rumor by sharing the report on social media.
If conduct unbecoming is a red line for Al-Rumayyan — a generous grant since he works for a dictator who had a dissident journalist dismembered — then he already had a book of evidence on Garcia long before the incident at Augusta National. The Spaniard was disqualified from the Saudi’s tournament in 2019 for defacing five greens in a mid-round tantrum. If he was embarrassed that the antics happened at Augusta National, that’s understandable, especially if he still harbors the dream of his own green jacket one day.
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But it seems altogether more probable that Al-Rumayyan’s reasons for getting out of the golf business have little to do with what’s actually happened in golf. It’s been a contributing factor, to be sure — he squandered billions for zero return because he was suckered by washed-up players, greedy agents and assorted grifters — but it’s myopic to assume the lack of commercial and audience traction LIV won was the driver of the decision. The catalog of comedic missteps by the league’s executives and apologists has been but one of the plausible influences on the PIF’s exit.
A $900 billion sovereign wealth fund shifts priorities without a backward glance. PIF’s five-year strategic plan, announced one week before the LIV shiv was delivered in April, didn’t mention sports, a significant departure from the previous investment plan. Add in a multitude of other considerations for the Saudis — a Mideast war, infrastructure being destroyed by Iran and its proxies, the difficulty of getting oil to market, the Noem project fiasco that has torched over $50 billion, Al-Rumayyan serving at the whim of a mercurial dictator who imprisoned his own family — and one might conclude that geopolitics had more to do with LIV’s funding disappearing than Sergio Garcia’s petulance, or anything else specific to the golf space.
But it’s hardly just LIV’s critics who are keen to knit one loose, convenient thread into a comforter.
On Thursday, Lee Westwood clapped back at Rory McIlroy, who had questioned whether LIV players would add value to PGA Tour events since they’ve added scant value to their own business.
“Just typical of Rory, really. It wasn’t well thought out,” said the man who has boasted of never having read a book. Westwood pointed to his upcoming appearance at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship as evidence that “there’s a lot of players on this tour who bring value to tournaments.”
“Lot” does a lot of work in that sentence, but he’s not entirely wrong. There are certainly tournaments that would benefit from having Jon Rahm or Bryson DeChambeau in the field. But it’s obvious that none of the solvent circuits see their presence as a matter of necessity, much less urgency.
Westwood himself is playing the Dunhill not owing to public demand, or because the DP World Tour or its members cried out for him, but solely because his friend, the billionaire tournament promoter Johann Rupert, gifted him one of the personal invitations he’s permitted to extend. And he can accept only because he recently paid the DP World Tour the roughly $1 million in outstanding fines that he’d adamantly insisted would never be settled. His uncompromising stance dissolved around the same time that Al-Rumayyan lost interest in continuing to pay him handsomely for averaging a 29th-place finish.
Westwood isn’t alone among LIV golfers in thinking they enhance any event they enter. McIlroy isn’t alone among PGA Tour golfers in dismissing their presence as wholly optional. But there’s a huge gap between being additive and being essential. A handful of LIV guys constitute the former, but right now none seem to be thought of as the latter, except in their own fever swamp.
Tempting as it may be, there’s no need to revel in the notion that Garcia’s antics at the Masters cost LIV its future. He contributed to the league’s predicament, sure, but no more than any of the other guys whose pencils are now outworking their erasers as they try desperately to rewrite a less damning epitaph for their sorry farce.
Eamon Lynch is a columnist for Golfweek and a frequent contributor to Golf Channel.