LIV Lost. Golf Won.

The Saudi PIF confirmed LIV funding ends after the 2026 season.

Five billion dollars since 2022.

LIV is now seeking outside investors.

They're, they're claiming that sponsorships are up 40% and ticket sales have gone up 100-plus percent or something like that.

And they're saying that the business is actually growing.

The PIF is saying that there's macroeconomic conditions.

Obviously, there's a war going on out there, and that's the reason they pulled out.

First question to you, did you expect this, right? 'Cause, because there was, there was a lot of, like, rumors and everything coming up.

Is this what you expected was going to happen?

Well, they had a, like, a secret meeting in New York a couple weeks ago.

At that point, this is what I expected.

Mm.

But up until that secret meeting, this is not the end that I saw for LIV.

LIV is interesting because LIV was never built to be a profitable sports league.

It was leverage, it was the wedge, it was negotiation vehicle because the PIF wanted to own the PGA Tour, but the Tour said no.

And so they created LIV in order to eventually merge together.

I think, I think that's basically what they wanted.

They wanted to create this sort of disruption, but to get the Tour to come back to the negotiation table.

And there was talks of a merger for the longest time before that died down.

So I think that was their end goal.

PIF's end goal was to own golf through the PGA Tour, not really grow LIV.

But with all that's going on, especially also with, uh, the Tour creating their for-profit arm and taking on outside investors that is not PIF, I think that kinda closed the door for the PIF's av- ability to do that.

And so, yeah, it, it's, uh, it's, it's not what I expected because I felt like the PIF would just continuously pump money until they get what they want.

Right.

But yeah, the war and all the other, you know, geopolitical climate, um, I think was a good excuse for them to say, "We're gonna back out," when I think the writing was kind of on the wall that they lost in terms of-