The imminent demise of LIV Golf<\/a> has crystalised where greed took the game over the last four years. Because everyone assumed Saudi Arabia had limitless resources and endless patience, the PGA Tour<\/a> felt compelled to enter an arms race on prize money. It was a desperate act of self-preservation.<\/p>\n The marquee players who had turned down LIV\u2019s advances expected the PGA Tour to stump up for their loyalty. In professional sport, loyalty can be couched in loving language, but invariably it has a price.<\/p>\n In this conflict the PGA Tour have haemorrhaged money from the start. When 11 LIV players, led by Phil Mickelson, sued the PGA Tour for antitrust violations in a federal court, the tour countersued. In these disputes only the lawyers are guaranteed to win, and when the case was in full swing the PGA Tour was shelling out $5 million (about \u20ac4.2 million) a month on legal fees.<\/p>\n At the same time, the PGA Tour were trying to finance an enhanced prize fund model to eyeball their new rivals. Almost every tournament on the LIV Tour had a purse of $20 million, so in 2023 the PGA Tour introduced \u201cdesignated\u201d events with prize funds of between $15 million and $25 million.<\/p>\n Since then, they have streamlined that programme into eight no-cut \u201csignature\u201d events, each with a prize fund of $20 million. Perversely, it meant that in 2025, both the Open Championship and the PGA Championship, two of golf\u2019s Majors, had a smaller purse than these made-for-greed events, designed to line the pockets of the \u201cloyal\u201d elite.<\/p>\n The PGA Tour also created what it called a \u201cPlayer Impact Program\u201d, worth a total of $100 million, which was another way of greasing the palms of the most successful players on tour.<\/p>\n Essentially, the game was sitting at a roulette table in Vegas and betting on whatever numbers came into its head.<\/p>\n Alan Shipnuck, author of LIV and Let Die, the definitive account of the upstart tour, wrote a superb piece about its demise on the Skratch Golf platform recently.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the glum realizations in the tour wars was that professional golfers \u2013 who, by definition, play the game for money \u2013 are not romantics like the rest of us,\u201d wrote Shipnuck.<\/p>\n \u201cTurns out … swapping out a [PGA] Tour event in Hartford for a LIV event in Portland wasn\u2019t a big deal \u2013 if the price was right. \u2018What you have to understand about professional golfers is that they are all whores,\u2019 says a long-time agent with clients on both LIV and the PGA Tour. \u2018That is the starting point.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The question is what happens next? Now that the PGA Tour has committed to outlandish prize funds, how can it sustain this model?<\/p>\n \u201cIt has left the game, in my view, in a very difficult and potentially unsustainable place,\u201d said Paul McGinley<\/a> recently<\/a>. \u201cThe overheads and prize funds now are so huge because of LIV that the tours are under pressure. Everybody else loses, except the players.<\/p>\n \u201cThe tours lose \u2013 they\u2019ve got massive overheads. The public lose, because they\u2019re seeing a diluted product on TV, and are having to pay a lot more money to go to events now. The sponsors lose because they\u2019re having to spend a lot more money to sponsor the same events. The media companies lose because TV numbers are not huge. So, tell me anybody who\u2019s winning except the players here.\u201d<\/p>\n The Saudi money was an economic shock that the game simply couldn\u2019t absorb. To stay in the fight with LIV, the PGA Tour looked to the world of private equity and at the beginning of 2024 they announced a partnership with Strategic Sports Group, who pledged up to $1.5 billion in funding. But is that a bottomless well?<\/p>\n In an otherwise self-serving interview with the Daily Telegraph last week, Ian Poulter raised some interesting points about the knock-on effect for the DP World Tour if, or when, LIV leaves the stage.<\/p>\n![\"Phil](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SQUZPTJ5QBH65FTZ2LI5X5IUSM.jpg\")
Phil Mickelson with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, then chairman of LIV Golf, during the Pro-Am before last June’s LIV Golf Invitational at The Centurion Club in St Albans, England. Photograph: Charlie Crowhurst\/LIV Golf\/Getty Images <\/p>\n![\"Ian](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/6CV5YZ7RIPGY2EMFHEOHHT3LRE.jpg\")
Ian Poulter has raised interesting points about the future of the DP World Tour. Photograph: Cliff Hawkins\/Getty Images <\/p>\n