Is LIV Golf going to keep haemorrhaging money for players that simply don’t move the needle?

Greg Norman always used to say that LIV Golf was here to stay, that it was going nowhere.

Out of many memorable things the controversial Aussie said as the rebel league’s CEO, one of them being ‘We’ve all made mistakes’ when referring to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, I actually believed this particular statement.

Some people don’t. There is a school of thought that says once the top players have had enough of LIV Golf and their contracts run out, they will return to the PGA Tour and to Europe, pockets full of money, like nothing ever happened.

I think LIV is here to stay. I think each player’s move is pretty finite, especially with players like Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm, who have stakes in their respective teams. LIV is only three-and-a-half years old, remember, and serious people with serious expertise have spent serious time putting all of this together. The PGA Tour had to start somewhere, didn’t it?

But this isn’t to say the naysayers don’t have a point. They have a good point, and I’ll tell you why. The Public Investment Fund, the Saudi sovereign wealth group, is absolutely haemorrhaging money on this thing.

In May, Money in Sport reported that LIV Golf Investments increased its authorised share capital by $330 million in January and $344.3 million in April. In February, Money in Sport had also reported that LIV pumped over $1 billion into LIV Golf UK by December 2024, a term referring to the circuit’s operations outside of the US.

The PIF were reported to have invested $3.9 billion into LIV by February 2025, having held its first event in June 2022. The $5 billion benchmark is fast approaching. Operating losses of $244 million were reported in 2022, $394 million in 2023 and share issues of $424 million in 2024, which refer to the shares a company makes available for sale.

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Henrik Stenson reportedly received $40 million for joining LIV three years ago. He has now been relegated and isn’t part of the tour anymore. Is that what football fans would describe as a flop?

And ahead of 2026, the fifth season of LIV’s existence, they have just signed Victor Perez, the 124th player in the men’s world rankings. He won’t have signed up for free, either.

Have LIV Golf new signings reached their ceiling?

Perez is a perfectly good player and a three-time winner on the DP World Tour. He has three top-25 finishes in majors, three more than you and me.

However, he hasn’t won since 2023, made one top 10 on the PGA Tour in 2025, and as a result of chasing glory in the US, he was outside the top 150 in the Race to Dubai rankings on the DP World Tour. This move seems very convenient for him.

He has joined the fierce ranks of the Cleeks, headed by two-time major winner Martin Kaymer, Richard Bland and Adrian Meronk. Perez will replace Frederik Kjettrup. Do any of these players light up your phone with leaderboard notifications?

Two spots in the LIV League next year are also reserved for the top two players in the International Series rankings on the Asian Tour. Come on down, Scott Vincent and Yosuke Asaji, you’ve won fastest-finger-first and have a clear path to $1 million.

These are the players for whom the sport has been blown wide open and vastly diluted. We can’t see McIlroy vs Rahm, Bryson vs Scottie etc., but don’t worry, Anthony Kim is back.

A fair whip of cynicism has been struck at LIV since the start, to say the least, and I’ve already admitted I don’t think it will disappear into thin air, like some. But do these recruits really satisfy Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the PIF?

I don’t wish to disrespect any of these players, nor harm their egos. They are successes who have attracted LIV’s attention. But are they worth snapping the sport in half, dragging it through the courts and tarnishing legacies for?

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As much as the Kingdom has endless pots of cash, so endless that I keep seeing mock-ups of football stadiums in skyscrapers and in oceans that I can’t tell are real or A.I., Al-Rumayyan and his colleagues are serious businessmen with ambitions and, I presume, an expectation to get some return on investment.

The LIV events in the UK and Australia do well, but represent the only times when the rebel league can bask in glory. DeChambeau is marketable, they’ve acquired players like Rahm, Cam Smith, Brooks Koepka, and Dustin Johnson, and even a mainstream US television deal. These scalps were significant, for sure.

But since the excitement and shock that came with Rahm’s move to LIV at the end of 2023 and for the start of the 2024 season, there have been no great waves. The PGA Tour, still LIV’s rival now that talks have died down, is somewhat sat pretty, at far less risk of losing top players than it once was.

A peace deal and or a financial relationship with the PGA Tour is seemingly off, so what is left for Al-Rumayyan and the PIF to do? Find investors to turn the Iron Heads into a profitable franchise?

How long can this last? How many times can LIV’s recruitment team leave the house with a cow and come back with beans, with the only thing resembling magic being the 4Aces?

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What do you make of this LIV Golf signings piece? Do you expect LIV Golf new signings to shock people in 2026? Tell us on X!