LIV Golf is officially over. The league filed for bankruptcy in September after the Saudi Public Investment Fund pulled its financial support. This marks the end of a five-year experiment that cost billions and changed professional golf forever. While the league has died, the financial impact on the players involved remains massive. Some men made life-changing sums, while others face an uncertain return to traditional tour life.
Players Who Cashed In
The biggest winners are the veterans who joined early and took the money. After 478 starts, journeyman Richard Bland secured a win on the DP World Tour and earned $20 million while playing into his fifties. He also won senior majors during his time with the breakaway league. Talor Gooch made even more, pulling in over $75 million in total earnings. One player summed up the attitude toward these payouts when speaking to Today’s Golfer a few months back. As one LIV player put it to TG a few months back, “we can’t complain, we’ve had it right off.”
This influx of cash forced the PGA Tour to raise its own purses to keep stars from leaving. In the last four years alone, Scottie Scheffler has accumulated earnings exceeding $100 million. The financial war between the tours created a “false economy” that Rory McIlroy described, yet it filled the bank accounts of many players regardless of the long-term cost to the game’s structure.
DeChambeau’s Path Forward
Bryson DeChambeau stands out as a key figure in this transition. He was among the first wave of recruits in 2022 and has remained a vocal supporter of the team format. With the league winding down, he addressed his future in a social media statement. “I’m not going to rewrite the last four years,” the 33-year-old said. “I made a decision I believed in and I’m grateful for what came with it.”
He remains confident in his original vision. “I believed this game could reach more people, in more places, in a new way,” he added. DeChambeau acknowledged that his immediate future now lies elsewhere. “Beyond that, I’ll go about whatever is next in the right way,” he said.
Collateral Damage and Future Risks
The end of LIV also means job losses for the staff who built the league. Tyrrell Hatton highlighted the human cost of the collapse. “There was a lot of great people that worked on LIV and a lot of people lost their jobs so that’s pretty sad in itself,” Hatton said. While players walk away with millions, the support staff do not share in that wealth.
Reports from GolfMagic suggest the story might not be entirely finished. BC Partners is exploring a $50 million bankruptcy loan from Saudi Arabia to create a successor league. However, the league’s lawyers told a US bankruptcy court that the organization intended to begin winding down its operations. The DP World Tour remains reliant on the PGA Tour, which provided over $77 million in support in 2025 alone. The future of team golf remains unclear as the tours prepare for a new era without the Saudi funding that fueled the LIV experiment.
