LIV Golf has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which means much of its business operations — both in the past and in the future — have been forced into the public eye ahead of its various court hearings. In total, LIV’s representation filed hundreds of pages of documents Tuesday evening and Wednesday in advance of a Wednesday afternoon hearing in front of Judge Michael B. Kaplan in New Jersey.
We pored through those documents and picked out several findings that help tell the story of where LIV has been and where it hopes to go. Check them out below.
Advertisement
1. The ticking clock reads: 34 days
For LIV Golf to come back in a different form, it has secured an agreement with BC Partners’ credit division to fund its court-monitored bankruptcy interim as well as exit financing to support the league moving forward … so long as players commit by early October.
The trove of documents included a term sheet between LIV and BC Partners, which states that the transaction requires a specific number of players to join the agreement within 35 days of the filing (which took place Tuesday, Sept. 8). Thirty-five days from Sept. 8 is Oct. 13.
According to the term sheet, 50% of players with “claims” are needed for the agreement to go through, and the collective value of the claims associated with committing players must equal or exceed two-thirds of the total player claims. In other words, LIV needs sign-on from some of its biggest fish.
LIV 2.0 will need specific player commitments, and soon.
2. The investment is significant (but pending)
If LIV 2.0 comes to fruition, it will happen via $300 million in total financing, much of which will come from BC Partners, and possibly from minority investors. As evidenced above, the term sheet is considered a “Restructuring Support Agreement” with various clauses that must be met, and met by a certain deadline.
Advertisement
While plenty needed to be straightened out in the last month since BC Partners was first reported as LIV’s “lead investor,” it all followed a flurry of pitches that Ducera Partners — an investment bank working on behalf of the PIF — was making to potential financiers.
Roughly 100 of those potential investors signed NDAs, and about 30 “engaged in detailed diligence,” documents say. Of those 30, two submitted bids by LIV’s July 22 deadline, after which BC Partners was declared the leading bid. All in, that’s about 80 days from May 3, when the search officially began, to the bid deadline. It’s a tight window, all while LIV itself visited four different countries for events.
And what did LIV bonus BC Partners, at least hypothetically? The right to own a LIV expansion team in the future, at virtually no initial cost.
A long-term future for LIV Golf would likely offer an expansion team to its main investor, BC Partnes.
3. April 13 really was D-Day
Bring yourself back to the 2026 Masters, where Rory McIlroy defended his title on Sunday, April 11. Just a few days later, on Wednesday evening, April 14, Ryan French of Monday Q Info posted about a forthcoming “bombshell announcement,” and alluded to a winding down of events.
Advertisement
As stated in various documents, the Saudi PIF already was down the path of restructuring LIV’s future, so much that investment bankers Gene Davis and Jon Zinman were added to the boards of various LIV entities as early as Tuesday, April 13.
To bring in advisors like Davis and Zinman, who specialize in restructuring, bankruptcy filings, etc., and officially add them as Independent Directors to LIV’s board, it’s increasingly likely that the PIF was considering these moves before the Masters even took place.
In the end, it led to an early-September reduction of staff, wherein LIV laid off 289 employees across its U.S. and U.K. companies, or roughly 90% of its total staff count.
4. Shockingly small TV revenue
Any number of explanations could explain why LIV Golf, in its five years of existence, couldn’t find sustainable business operations. But if there is one basic and glaring one: LIV struggled to create enough eyeballs to secure a significant TV deal.
Advertisement
According to filings, LIV’s annual revenue from broadcast rights came out to just 5% of its total revenue, a stunningly small amount. Little had been reported about LIV’s TV deals, which was with Fox in the United States and with other, localized broadcasters in international markets, but it pales in comparison to the money the PGA Tour pulls in for its broadcast rights. As GOLF reported earlier this year, the Tour’s broadcasting deals were aggregating to upward of 67% of core business revenues. That Tour number is much closer to the standard in modern, top-end pro sports.
As you can see in the chart below, sponsorship dollars had become roughly half of LIV’s revenue, and as of 2025, amounted to $102 million. That suggests LIV’s annual total revenue was in the range of $208 million, which means its broadcast rights revenue was about $10-$11 million.
5. PIF has been lending to LIV for months
Plenty has happened in the background for both LIV Golf and the Saudi PIF since the latter announced it would cease funding LIV beyond the 2026 season. As a means to do so, the PIF decided to become a lender in early June, offering LIV a $495 million secured loan to proceed with the rest of its season “largely as planned.”
Advertisement
Ultimately, that was a target of which the league still fell short, considering its New Orleans event was canceled and its year-end Team Championship folded into the season-ending individual championship in Indiana.
While this lender relationship has been clear since it was established in June, it suggests that LIV finishing its 2026 season meant it was taking on a significant amount of debt in the form of $495 million plus interest.
6. LIV is down to $15 million in cash
When the Saudis decided to stop funding LIV, the end of the road started to take shape. Without a theoretical blank check and annual installments of hundreds of millions of dollars from the Middle East, LIV was forced to operate differently immediately. That’s how (very quietly) a golf league widely known as a music festival-adjacent sporting event only hosted one concert from May through August. That took place in Korea, and was the surest sign that, despite not acknowledging this trend, LIV’s late cancellation of its concerts in Indiana was a virtual certainty weeks if not months prior.
Advertisement
According to the filing, as of this week, LIV had just $15 million in spending cash remaining, further proof of how it was unable to pay vendors for services rendered throughout 2026. Despite that shortfall, the filing included this fascinating line from David Orlofsky, chief restructuring officer:
“LIV Golf firmly believes that, with appropriate funding and a level playing field with its competitors, its existing operating model would have reached profitability within five to seven years, primarily through continued revenue growth across both the League and teams, which had increased significantly in 2025 and 2026.”
This aligns, at least loosely, with Scott O’Neil’s now infamous quote to The Financial Times in February, that LIV would not break even for five to 10 years.
7. Curious, single-player clauses
Among the many clauses and statements in the filing were multiple items that show individual players had struck personal deals with the league. First among them was a tiny slice of league equity (0.23%) granted to a current player, along with the same amount for Greg Norman. The player’s identity is unclear, but one can surmise it would be among the league’s biggest signings.
It is unclear which current player owns 0.23% in LIV Golf, but it’s clear they are the only one.
A different clause buried in the filing suggests that one player reached an “indemnification agreement” with LIV that would see the league provide up to $3 million in aggregate legal support pertaining to a specific claim from that player’s pre-existing sponsor agreement. In simpler terms, a LIV player reached a deal to have the league back him if an disgruntled sponsor took legal action against him.
Advertisement
Finally, Financial Times reporter Sujeet Indap found a clause that clarified how one player’s CIGNA health insurance plan was covered in full by the league.
8. Player NIL, ownership a significant factor moving forward
How does LIV 2.0 hope to make players whole for unpaid debts it owes them? That much is made clear by the BC Partners agreement, which clarifies that players will own a 52.5% majority of the league — a fact LIV’s new representatives were keen to state in court Wednesday.
It states that “in exchange for agreeing to play in LIV 2.0” players will receive amended contract with signing bonuses, aggregate ownership of roughly 30% in the teams they play for and, most important for some, a “return of certain NIL Rights.” What rights, exactly, have not yet been made clear, but for a widely marketable player like Bryson DeChambeau, this element could prove particularly enticing.
Advertisement
9. Player contracts rejected
As part of its filing, LIV requested the bankruptcy court to allow it to reject various contracts and leases into which the league had entered. That includes things like the leases it had struck for offices in West Palm Beach, Fla., and Scottsdale, Ariz.; arrangements for team-specific trainers; but also player contracts.
Some of those “contracts” were “player participation agreements” — aka contracts that formally lock players into specific LIV events/seasons — as well as dated “Letter Agreements” that suggest the initial timelines on which various LIV commits took the league seriously.
For example, Henrik Stenson, Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter are all listed to have established “Letter Agreements” on May 10, 2022. While Poulter and Westwood played in LIV’s first event a month later, Stenson took an extra month and a half to commit to LIV, ultimately losing the European Ryder Cup captaincy in the process.
Advertisement
To show just how direct these Letter Agreements could represent player interest at a certain date, Joaquin Niemann’s Letter Agreement is listed as August 28, 2022, the same day James Corrigan reported in The Telegraph that Niemann had signed with the league. That same week, Niemann attended the Tiger Woods-led meeting of top Tour players that birthed the Tour’s Signature Events model.
Curiously, PGA Tour star Cameron Young’s name also is listed along with a Letter Agreement dated July 24, 2022, one week following his solo second place finish at the 2022 Open. It serves as a reminder that Young took LIV seriously before ultimately committing to the PGA Tour, which he admitted a month later at the 2022 Tour Championship.
Cameron Young’s original interest in LIV Golf in the summer of 2022 was among the contracts LIV has requested a bankruptcy court reject.
The post 9 revealing findings inside LIV’s bankruptcy filings appeared first on Golf.
Read the full article here